A self-anointed coterie of journalists that has forfeited the public’s trust with repeated, egregious displays of personal bias is astounded that it can’t skate by on credentialism any longer. Where have we seen that before? The gravy train for fact-checkers appears to be grinding to a halt, and all the muttering in the world about “codes of principles” and “identifying truth” won’t be able to save another crumbling annex of the big-box media edifice from fading into irrelevance on a CNN or MSNBC scale.
On Jan. 7, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to end the “fact-checking” programs at his company’s major social media sites, which include Facebook and Instagram. The reaction of the fact-checkers to this unexpected move reveals the full extent of their disconnect from the vast majority of Americans who do not share the basic assumptions of their urbanite progressive mindset.
Fact-Checkers Not Biased But ‘Why Does Trump Lie So Much?’
Writing about itself in a “why I’m important” manner, the woefully compromised Poynter Institute conveyed the deep distress felt by staffers at its International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which has partnered with Meta.
“The fact-checkers used by Meta follow a Code of Principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency,” IFCN Director Angie Drobnic Holan is quoted by her employer as saying. “It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work – that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”
She doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. Drobnic Holan, former editor-in-chief of Poynter’s flagship PolitiFact fact-checking site, couldn’t resist taking a loaded shot at President-elect Donald Trump while earnestly stressing her professional evenhandedness.
It’s a question often asked of the Ivory Tower leftists: Do they not realize that the plebes have access to the Internet now? We can fact-check the fact-checkers. It’s quick, it’s easy, and the results speak louder than the canned jargon of dominant media journalists. Attempting to control online platforms only makes Americans more determined to dig beyond the duplicitous surface.
“It’s astounding even now, two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, how many things he says on a daily basis that just aren’t true.” That’s the lead sentence of Drobnic Holan’s 2019 essay in progressive establishment magazine The Atlantic titled “Why Trump Is the Most Fact-Checked President.”
“Why does Trump lie so much? Only he can answer that question, but it’s certainly a long-standing behavior that dates back to his time in luxury real estate and reality television,” the self-proclaimed transparently nonpartisan Drobnic Holan continues.
She’s not an exception.
‘There’s a Lot More to Fact-Check on the Right’
“We heard the news [of being dropped by Facebook] just like everyone else,” Alan Duke, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Lead Stories, mournfully related to Wired.com. “No advance notice.” Lead Stories began fact-checking for Meta in 2019.
Locked into his pre-conceived biases, Duke never saw the ax coming.
“We don’t have anything against anybody. We don’t have an agenda. We are looking for facts and we fact-check the right and the left,” Duke, a former CNN employee, told the network in an article published Oct. 29, 2020, less than a week before the presidential election. “It just so happens that there’s a lot more to fact check on the right. It’s just mathematical.”
See how he assumes everyone would readily understand such faulty logic?
Science Feedback is another Meta fact-check partner about to lose its sweet gig. It, too, was featured in multiple big-box media accounts of Zuckerberg’s surprising move. “Science Feedback is a left-of-center publishing organization that operates the blogs Climate Feedback and Health Feedback,” watchdog website Influence Watch states. “Both websites publish opinion articles claiming to assess the scientific merit of popular media articles and scientific claims.”
Want a sample of their work? “Tire fires in Kuwait have a much smaller climate influence than methane emissions from cows, contrary to claims,” a Jan. 6 post on the group’s site proclaims.
Here’s another: “No, marine emissions study didn’t find that climate change is ‘greatly overestimated,’ contrary to recent claims,” a Dec. 20 post reads.
This is what Facebook users will be missing out on now that Zuckerberg has pulled the rug from under the fact-checkers.
And what a cozy carpet it was.
“Meta has provided millions of dollars to fact checkers all over the world that has enabled fact checkers not just to provide fact checking for Facebook and Instagram, but also to raise the visibility of fact checking and to enable fact checkers to hold public officials accountable for what they say. That's huge,” PolitiFact founder Bill Adair sighed to a sympathetic NPR on Jan. 10.
Poynter will manage to survive for some time. It receives funding from several well-heeled sources, “including corporate partners, philanthropic foundations, government agencies and individual donors.”
NPR is listed among those entities, “[p]artnering through the shared values of truth and public accountability for a unique, multi-year contract in which Poynter senior vice president Kelly McBride serves as the NPR Public Editor,” as Poynter put it.
Fact-check: This relationship is not disclosed in the NPR article lamenting the demise of the Facebook fact-checkers.
“Fact checkers worry about the viability of their industry without Meta's support,” the NPR piece lamented. But are they worrying about the right thing? Sugar daddies can be extremely valuable, but a tottering big-box media is learning the hard way that integrity in the public eye, once destroyed, is usually irretrievable.
