Following the New York TimesIn print, page A-20 reads that Hunter Biden emails from his laptop were genuine. This is a sign of the fact that “fact checking”/censorship needs to be examined. Jacob Siegel of Tablet Magazine wrote up a tart piece titled “Invasion of the Fact-Checkers” that explored how private media power and the Democrats engage in shutting down narratives they don’t like.
Soon after receiving the initial reports about the laptop’s performance, The New York Times‘s Kevin Roose modestly acknowledged the role that misinformation journalists like him had played in pressuring tech companies to take “more and faster action to prevent false or misleading information from spreading … in order to prevent a repeat of 2016’s debacle.”
This worked. It turned out that it worked! The New York Times Now, the truth-checkers acknowledge that the initial reporting was correct.
Siegel described with accuracy just how flexible Accuracy Police could be:
If the political winds change, a matter can be settled with one link and some hand-picked quotations in favor Truthful Federal BureaucratX or Noble Ruling Party Flesh puppet Y. This allows for the revision of the records of the past while never acknowledging any errors or facts.
The exact same scenario has occurred dozens times in just two years, since the pandemic began. Remember back in May 2020, when Donald Trump said he was “confident” vaccines would be available by the end of the year? NBC fact-checked that claim and determined that “experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right.” That October, when Trump said a vaccine was imminent, an organization called Science Feedback, one of Facebook’s official fact-checking partners, declared that “widespread Covid-19 vaccination is not expected before mid-2021.”
The vaccine rollout actually began in December 2020, two months after Trump’s election. Since then, the U.S. fact-checking complex has spent inordinate amounts of time and energy linking “Trump,” “Trump supporters,” “regions of the country that supported Donald Trump,” and, of course, the beloved “anti-vaxxers” as the cause of lower-than-hoped-for vaccine uptake, as the vaccine migrated from being a symbol of Trump’s clownish grandiosity and fibs to symbolizing the wisdom of his opponents, defenders of The Science.
We hate “fact-checkers,” who make snide remarks about future events (like the availability of a vaccine) and treat them as “facts” that can be checked.
Siegel accuses the fact-checkers of being an adjunct of the Democrats and an enforcer of unpopular notions of Wokeness: “Another driving force behind the growth of the fact-checking complex is the necessity of enforcing loyalty to progressive ideas that can’t survive on their own.” Exhibit One was the Washington Free Beacon being raided by Fact Cops for disclosing that the government planned to finance “safe” cracked pipes.
Siegel concluded:
The convergence of fact-checking with government power isn’t a coincidence. An 2018 report by The Columbia Journalism Review offered “lessons for platform-publisher collaborations as Facebook and news outlets team to fight misinformation.” It also offered a warning:
“If Facebook creates entirely new, immensely powerful, and utterly private fact-checking partnerships with ostensibly public-spirited news organizations, it becomes virtually impossible to know in whose interests and according to which dynamics our public communication systems are operating.”
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