You’ve got to give the leftist reporters in our mainstream media credit. They never tire of trying to reassure the public that their biased stories are without bias. The latest, and arguably most effective, innovation lets the MSM set the terms of acceptable debate by defining what is true and what is false in political discussions.
This is accomplished through the use of “fact checkers” that are marketed to the public as totally unbiased, scientific data crunchers that are only interested in truth, justice, and The American Way. The reality is these “fact checkers” have their thumb on the scale of truth and actively tilt the discussion toward the left by disparaging conservative issues and elected officials.
PolitiFact is owned by the Tampa Bay Times and modestly describes its mission as “fact-checking U.S. politics” and boasts that it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize — a giant pat-on-the-back the MSM gives itself.
Bryan White, who operates the blog PolitiFactBias, did an analysis and according to Human Events found “PolitiFact is not that honest fact-checker. Once widely regarded as a unique, rigorous, and reasonably independent investigator of political claims, PolitiFact now declares conservatives wrong three times more often than liberals. More pointedly, the journalism organization concludes that conservatives have flat-out lied nine times more often than liberals.
In the three years since the end of the partnership with CQ, PolitiFact has found a total of 323 conservative claims to be untrue, with 119 of those getting Pants on Fire.
In the same time, it’s found 105 liberal claims to be untrue, with just 13 deemed Pants on Fire, according to White’s tally.”
PolitiFact tips the scales leftward in two important ways: first by what the fact twisters choose to study and two, by how it interprets what the individual said, up to and including putting words in their mouths.
Nothing escapes the gimlet eye of these fact twisters, including humor.
Breitbart News provides the latest example of fact abuse: Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, recently told a joke that went “Here, we have Thanksgiving, we have Christmas, we have the 4th of July. Every year in Iran, they celebrate death to America day, which is the anniversary of Iran in the 1970s taking Americans hostage.”
If not exactly humor this Cruz statement certainly qualifies as hyperbole in the service of making a larger point. But PolitiFact ignored the larger point, i.e., it’s foolish to trust an enemy in negotiations, and instead concentrated on the holiday festivities.
According to Breitbart, “In order to come to the conclusion that Cruz’s morally clarifying piece of humor was a lie, PolitiFact scoured news archives and hassled no less than five “academic authorities” to see if there is an official “Death to America” holiday in Iran.” And in fact a search discovered, “that not a single use of humor by any Democrat has ever been fact-checked by PolitiFact, much less rated as “mostly false.”
So what PolitiFact chose to analyze and how they analyzed it shows obvious bias. The lesson from this for conservatives is during the 2016 presidential campaign it pays not to trust the MSM or the MSM’s pet fact checkers.
Michael Reagan is the son of President Ronald Reagan. He is president of The Reagan Legacy Foundation and chairman of the League of American Voters. Mike is an in-demand speaker with Premiere. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.