What's wrong with the fact-checkers?
The DNC put the bankruptcy of the genre on full, painful display.
🚨 This special, five-edition week of PN is made possible by paid subscribers 🚨 If you aren’t one already, please sign up to support our independent journalism.
The mainstream media’s “fact-checking” of the Democratic National Convention was rightly ridiculed for an obsession with semantics and pedantic nitpicking, but the result was more than just annoying.
Many of the purported “fact-checks” go beyond verifying Democrats’ statements and instead serve as political spin for Trump, giving him an unearned benefit of the doubt that almost ignores he actually was president and has an established record of deceit and malicious incompetence.
The error that fact-checkers consistently make is taking Trump’s assertions and denials at face value. They still treat the convicted felon like someone who operates in good faith, which often results in wish-casting and the “sane-washing” of Trump’s blather. Democrats, meanwhile, are held to an impossibly literal standard where routine exaggerations and rhetorical flourishes are treated like whoppers.
Trump’s statements are decontextualized, while those from Democrats are relentlessly scrutinized. The impact is a proliferation of false equivalencies that normalize Republican liars.
Cleaning up after Trump isn’t fact-checking
Trump, who was indicted for attempting to overturn the 2020 election, has made it clear that he’ll try it again if he loses to Kamala Harris. During his DNC speech, President Biden pointed out that "Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.”
This isn’t Biden’s opinion. Trump has said that he’ll accept the election results if they are “fair and legal“ and if “everything’s honest,” but he also insists that the only way he can lose is if Democrats cheat. And of course, it’s well-documented that Trump rejected (and still rejects) any evidence showing he lost in 2020.
All of that is very straightforward. But Washington Post reporter Amy Gardner stated that Biden’s DNC statement about Trump refusing to accept defeat was “not true.” She wrote, “Trump just hasn't said that he would accept [the election result]. And he has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”
This is absurd, especially considering that Gardner was a member of the Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on January 6. Her “fact check” reads as if the events leading up to the Capitol attack never happened. And yet Gardner’s hyper-literalism isn’t an aberration. Her approach the norm.
DNC speakers painted a clear picture of Trump, his history as president, and his frightening agenda if he wins a second term. But fact-checkers clouded that image to Trump’s benefit.
For example, the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler challenged Hillary Clinton’s statement that Kamala Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators.” Trump himself said in 2018 about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un: “We fell in love, okay? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” Still, Kessler insists the truth of Clinton’s statement about love letters “is in the eye of the beholder.”
Clinton’s actual point is that Trump openly admires and cozies up to dictators and autocrats — not a great trait for the leader of the free world. Kessler insists “there is no evidence” Trump personally sent love letters to Kim Jong Un, and while that’s true — he might have just received them and responded by praising Kim publicly — it’s beside the point. Whether Trump literally writes steamy notes to dictators isn’t relevant. The issue is that Trump’s a wannabe despot.
It’s also a serious problem that so many of these fact-checks serve as a convenient distraction from the harsh reality of Trump’s past statements and policies.
A note from Aaron: Working with brilliant contributors like Stephen takes resources. To support our work, please hit the subscribe button and become a paid subscriber.
This is the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, which only happened because Trump was president and nominated the justices who provided the decisive votes. Speakers at the DNC sought to hold Trump accountable for the Dobbs fallout and the convention featured a video that included his infamous 2016 quote about abortion: “There has to be some form of punishment for the woman. Yeah, there has to be some form.”
Trump’s statement was brutally clear. And yet Kessler wrote, “Trump quickly walked back this statement.”
That wasn’t the only abortion-related DNC fact-check that went to painstaking lengths to do the orange menace a solid. Kamala Harris noted during her speech that “[Trump] and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress. And get this … he plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator and force states to report on women's miscarriages and abortions.”
That remark prompted PolitiFact to spring into action spinning for Trump. Their laughable “fact-check” states that “Project 2025 doesn't call for a ‘national anti-abortion coordinator’ but rather a “pro-life politically appointed Senior Coordinator of the Office of Women, Children, and Families.”
This is ridiculous: Abortion opponents have used the term “pro-life” for decades but that doesn’t make them any less “anti-abortion.”
Harris’s warnings aren’t hyperbole. Trump’s actual record is overtly hostile to abortion rights, despite his ludicrous claim on Truth Social this week that his “administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” His campaign might try to pass him off again as the imaginary 2016 “dealmaker” candidate, but when he was president, Trump never defied the GOP’s social conservative base. His abortion position is ever-changing but not because he legitimately responds to public outcry for the better. He just puts out political fires before setting another one.
Healthcare is another area of weakness for Trump, who tried and failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act — legislation now so popular that, as Barack Obama pointed out at the DNC, Republicans “don’t call it Obamacare no more.” Highlighting Trump’s history of working to make healthcare less accessible, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham told the DNC audience, “Donald Trump and JD Vance want to dismantle our health care system, repeal the Affordable Care Act and eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions.”
But New York Times fact-checker Linda Qiu, seemingly rushing to Trump’s defense, claimed of Lujan Grisham’s comment, “This is exaggerated.”
“Mr. Trump campaigned in 2016 on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act, but Republicans in Congress never succeeded,” Qiu wrote.
The reality is that Trump still wants to end the ACA. He threatened another repeal attempt last year before saying, without specifics, that he’ll make it “much, much, much better for far less money.” That’s the same gobbledegook he promised in 2016 and the eventual health care bill he championed the next year that was just narrowly blocked would’ve cost 22 million Americans their coverage by 2026, according to the CBO.
Another oft-invoked refrain at the DNC was linking Trump to Project 2025, which is an easy thing to do given that the document’s authors are former Trump administration officials who reasonably expect to work for him again. USA Today, however, rated the claim that Project 2025 is a plan from Trump mostly false, stating, “Project 2025 is a political playbook created by the Heritage Foundation and dozens of other conservative groups, not Trump, who said he disagrees with elements of the effort.”
Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025 because it’s incredibly unpopular, but there’s no reason to believe him when he suggests he won’t implement the plans. As Lisa Needham explained in this newsletter last month, Trump’s distancing attempts are “a farcical plot” because “Project 2025 wouldn’t exist without Trump. In fact, the GOP platform is Project 2025 in the form of sanitized soundbites meant to “mask the full horror they’re planning on unleashing under a Trump presidency.”
Democrats also spent some time at the convention reminding voters that Trump’s shambolic covid response was a disaster. During his DNC speech, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzer invoked a specific low point: “Donald told us to inject bleach.” But Qiu claimed this, too, was “exaggerated.”
“He did not literally instruct people to inject bleach, but raised the suggestion as an ‘interesting’ concept to test out,” she wrote.
Rep. Robert Garcia, who lost his parents to covid, said at the convention that Trump "told us to inject bleach into our bodies.” But Kessler declared this claim to be “exaggerated” since Trump merely “spoke confusingly of an ‘injection inside’ of lungs with a disinfectant. He made the remarks after an aide presented a study showing how bleach could kill the virus when it remained on surfaces.”
In his “fact-check,” Kessler also includes Trump’s insulting suggestion that he was speaking “sarcastically” during a press briefing about a global health emergency.
Watch the video for yourself. Trump was clearly not speaking sarcastically, and there’s no good reason to include his lies in an article purportedly aimed at setting the record straight.
Spin masquerading as something else
Throughout the DNC, prominent “fact-checkers” filtered Trump’s remarks through a MAGA spin cycle. To be blunt, it’s shockingly poor journalism.
The media’s “both sides” approach to fact-checking creates the false impression that Harris and Trump stretch the truth in equal measure, but Harris’s supposed rounding errors on Social Security or slight embellishments about job numbers are nowhere in the same universe as Trump’s pathological distortions and contempt for the truth. Nitpick Harris to death if you must, but stop treating convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and indicted coup plotter Trump like a traditional candidate rather than an existential threat to democracy. (Fact check: no exaggeration)
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate this post, please support Public Notice by signing up. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible.
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
Shared on FB for my republican friends. FB deleted it. That tells me all I need to know which I already knew.
Thank you for fact checking the fact checkers. We tend to believe them without thinking or knowing. This is as deceptive and harmful as as the original lying and deception. Trump changes like a chameleon and is not to be believed or trusted in anything he says. Period. But the fact checkers should be loudly criticized.