Last week, USA Today decided to fact check reality. Presented with a photo of President Biden checking his watch during the return of dead US service members to American soil, reporter Daniel Funke said that was “wrong.” Don’t believe your lying eyes.
No, Funke insisted, Biden only checked his watch after the ceremony was over. No matter that military family members were already quoted saying the president did it multiple times.
Then, calamity. Pictures revealed that Biden checked his watch at least three times. Funke was forced to fact check his fact check, which he did grudgingly as a “clarification.” USA Today couldn’t even bring itself to say the fact was “true.” It was changed to “missing context.”
What context? The only one we can think of is “the context that this makes Biden look bad and we can’t have that.”
It’s tempting to dismiss these fact checkers as navel-gazing propaganda, but the problem is they are increasingly used by social media companies to censor information.
In the summer of 2020, USA Today ran a fact check that claimed that “the 1994 crime bill, strongly promoted by then-Sen. Joe Biden, did not bring mass incarceration to Black Americans.” Funny, lots of people on the left don’t think this is a lie, and USA Today’s reasoning is based on an analysis by The Brennan Center for Justice that called the bill’s legacy “complicated” — not exactly a debunking.
Yet Facebook-owned Instagram, citing USA Today, banned people from expressing that opinion as “false information.” Coming just months before the 2020 election, this was a blatant example of USA Today and Facebook stifling criticism of Biden.
When you can’t fact check, meanwhile, just ignore. The New York Times and CNN didn’t cover Biden’s impatience at all. It sounds like a broken record these days, but can you imagine what would have happened if President Trump had checked his watch at a military funeral? The Times newsroom would have gone to Defcon 1. Paul Krugman would have had a stroke.
Actually, one doesn’t need to imagine this at all — since the Times just showed exactly how differently it treats the presidents of two different parties. We all remember the “help me out here Ukraine” phone call that led to Trump’s first impeachment, and The Times covered wall-to-wall. Well, Reuters reveals that Biden had an “Afghanistan help me out here” phone call to President Ashraf Ghani, asking him to say the Taliban weren’t winning, “whether it’s true or not.” Biden was desperate to keep to his timetable to pull out of the country before 9/11, and, yes, to benefit himself politically.
But you won’t read about that second phone call in The Times. Joseph A. Wulfsohn of Fox News notes that not only is the Times willfully ignoring the call, so are CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC and CBS. It’s not a scandal, these outlets plainly hope, if they don’t cover it.
One more since we’re on a roll. Rolling Stone (yes, they are still publishing, who knew) ran a story saying that rural hospitals were flooded with people who overdosed on ivermectin, a horse dewormer being promoted as a COVID cure, to the point that gunshot victims were being turned away. Other outlets rushed to pick this up, because hey, look at these hicks! Turns out it wasn’t true, and the one person Rolling Stone quoted didn’t actually work at the hospital. But why let the facts get in the way of a good story — which we believe is Rolling Stone’s motto following its Duke gang-rape fantasy.
Now, pundits will say this isn’t a big deal because using ivermectin isn’t a good idea. But by printing outrageous lies, Rolling Stone undermines its own cause. It makes it harder for medical professionals to build trust.
The Post has a weekly column called Whoppers where we collect examples of craven partisan misinformation. We thought it would last just a month or two, but we find ourselves so overrun with examples that the problem is having enough room to cover it all.
We’ve listened to media writers bemoan that they cannot control the flow of information anymore. Why are people turning to those dark corners of the interwebs? Well, when you ignore a major presidential scandal broken by a well-respected wire service, exaggerate and obfuscate, then use “fact checks” to try to dismiss the truth, what credibility do you think you’re due? Chew on that missing context.