Slicing The Baloney With A Dull Knife

This is quite the indictment of our press. Just completely embarrassing and ill equipped to handle the moment we are in. https://t.co/9hbHdD1G21

— Brett Meiselas 🇺🇸🦅 (@BMeiselas) August 20, 2024

Wow.

The Washington Post “fact check”
of night 1 of the DNC is embarrassing. pic.twitter.com/MOSxN8aXpP

— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) August 20, 2024

This kind of "fact-checking" is an artifact of the collision between Trump's politics of lying and elite media's business-model-driven bothsidesism. The two things are obviously categorically different. But the need to jam them into one model creates nonsense like this. https://t.co/ORT4BdTXr3

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 20, 2024

This is so comically bad it's really hard to know where to start. https://t.co/CE8fFT2WGk

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 20, 2024

This WaPo factcheck says flatly there is "no evidence that Trump sent" "love letters to dictators," and that "we do not know what Trump wrote to Kim."

Bob Woodward accessed the 27 Trump-Kim letters for his 2020 book; CNN pubbed full transcripts of two. https://t.co/GNkRrqnac4 pic.twitter.com/BP8fnKVfsH

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) August 20, 2024

Amy Gardner was on the team that won a Pulitzer for their reporting on January 6th, so there is really no excuse for this. https://t.co/dJWdEpKNWU

— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) August 20, 2024

Alternatively, it tells you what a Pulitzer is really worth.

Too much of "Fact checking" is not checking facts, but checking interpretations.  This is the classic "case in point":

In a news conference after the rally protesting the planned removal of a Confederate statue, Trump did say there were "very fine people on both sides," referring to the protesters and the counterprotesters. He said in the same statement he wasn't talking about neo-Nazis and white nationalists, who he said should be "condemned totally."

Snopes went on to defend itself, poorly:

Editors' Note: Some readers have raised the objection that this fact check appears to assume Trump was correct in stating that there were "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville incident. That is not the case. This fact check aimed to confirm what Trump actually said, not whether what he said was true or false. For the record, virtually every source that covered the Unite the Right debacle concluded that it was conceived of, led by and attended by white supremacists, and that therefore Trump's characterization was wrong. 

What, according to Snopes, did Trump NOT say?

On Aug. 15, 2017, then-President Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, "very fine people."

This "fact check" is called trying to slice the baloney so thin it only has one side.  What Trump said is open to interpretation, especially since Trump tried to explain what he meant (meaning he was ambiguous, and even he knew it).  So the issue is an interpretation of what Trump said.  What Trump "actually" said is not the words he used, but how those words were understood.  And he, nor Snopes, has any control over that.

If Trump had said the march occured in Pennsylvania, instead of Virginia, that statement could be "fact-checked."  But who he meant by "very fine people on both sides" is subject to interpretation, but not verification. 

WaPo: Hillary said Trump sent love letters. But what is "love"?

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 20, 2024