The Washington Post Claims Republicans Are Waging War on Fact-Checkers!

Tim Graham on Oct 16, 2024

Liberal journalists love to paint the Republicans as opposed to facts -- which implies that liberal journalists own the facts and determine who is actually using them properly.

The Washington Post put this aggressive headline on the front of the Oct. 15 edition: "Campaign takes stand against fact checks: In live settings, Trump aims to let his falsehoods go unchallenged."

Reporters Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey began by noting the Trump campaign has "waged an aggressive campaign against fact-checking in recent months," pushing the media to "abandon the practice if they hope to interact with Trump."

They described former President Donald Trump's resentment over PolitiFact joining the anti-Trump brigade at the National Association of Black Journalists beatdown and the "fact-checking" that occurred during the ABC debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as Trump skipping "60 Minutes" over the CBS "fact-checking."

One crucial fact emerged very late out of this Republicans-hate-facts story -- the dramatic imbalance of who is tagged as false. ABC's debate moderators singled out Trump for five combative "fact checks." CBS debate moderators said they wouldn't fact-check, and then pushed around J.D. Vance on Haitian migrants in Ohio. The word "moderator" is a bad joke.

Parker and Dawsey returned to the old saw that "The Washington Post Fact Checker team tallied that by the end of Trump's presidency, he had made 30,573 false or misleading claims -- an average of about 21 false, erroneous or misleading claims a day."

They did not mention that Glenn Kessler, the Post's "Fact Checker," proclaimed in 2021 there would be no systematic counting of President Joe Biden's false or misleading statements. Doesn't that suggest that "fact-checking" is a weapon used against Republicans? And it betrays a partisan tilt, that Democrats are remarkably more honest politicians?

A look at their "Fact Checker" homepage on Oct. 15 demonstrates that this dramatic imbalance is still in effect. Just counting the cartoon Pinocchios on the first page shows Trump and his team have drawn 39 Pinocchios. Team Harris has ... zero. There is one article where they daintily note "Harris flubs manufacturing jobs claim in MSNBC interview." Seven articles on the Trump side get the maximum "Four Pinocchios" (pants-on-fire) judgment.

A new Media Research Center count of fact checks at PolitiFact shows a similar aggression. There are 24 "Pants on Fire" rulings for Republicans from January through September (20 of them Trump) to just one for Democrats (Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois). Overall, Republican politicians were judged as "Mostly False" or worse 79% of the time, while Democrats were only in that penalty box 36% of the time.

The Post reporters found a liberal expert to back up their theme. University of Wisconsin professor Lucas Graves gained the big, bold and italic pull quote inside the paper: "Within the political establishment on the right, it is now considered quite legitimate -- and quite legitimate to say publicly and openly -- that you disapprove of fact-checking."

It's "tribalism" to oppose liberal fact-checking. But you can't say it's "tribalism" for the liberal fact-checkers to trash the Republicans much more often and much more harshly. They should be charged with ad police brutality.

Naturally, the Post concluded this partisan piece by citing how the liberal bias was followed by liberal mockery on NBC's "Saturday Night Live," where Bowen Yang, the Asian comedian playing Vance, said, "don't fact check that" multiple times in one sentence.

This is the pose liberal journalists love to strike: We cannot be criticized. Object to us and you hate facts, journalism, safety, sanity and democracy. They have a monopoly on truth -- whatever they decide it is.

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Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.