Media 'factchecking' has devolved into a contrived, Trump-backing farce

If you've been watching the Democratic National Convention, the story of the week has been the almost unnerving positivity, unity, and competence of the Democratic Party as they make the formal handoff ending President Joe Biden's reelection and nominating Vice President Kamala Harris to be the new torchbearer.

If you've been reading about the Democratic National Convention, however, your most likely takeaway from this week's events is that it has somehow managed to break our big-league media "fact checkers" completely.

Because much of the "fact checking" that the press has scrambled to do, even as they ignore the ridiculous lie-a-paloozas that take place whenever Donald Trump opens his mouth, or surrogates of Donald Trump open their mouths, or partisan ultra hacks in Congress pipe up with new theories of "okay okay, our Joe Biden investigations were all duds but what if Governor Tim Walz something something communist spy," has been ... dishonest. Just straight-up dishonest.

That's probably the single worst one, because again: It's just brazenly dishonest. It's not a fact check of the statement provided, and it's not pushing back on something "misleading." Presented with a straightforwardly accurate statement, the "fact check" instead offered up a misleading defense positing that oh well if you change the words the speaker used then it wouldn't be true anymore. Yes, congratulations. Truly a Nobel-worthy discovery.

When we're not being peppered with supposed factchecks that are themselves pointedly dishonest, we get ones that have been taken cookie-cutter style from Republican campaign talking points. For some reason, and we can all debate what that reason might be, media outlets that remain indifferent to the Republican Party tossing up a felonious coup-attempting compulsive liar have their undies in the Tightest Possible Bunch when it comes to "factchecking" the speeches of his detractors.

Look, there is sincerely nothing to be gained by pretending to be that gullible. Does anyone here, in either party, anyone at all who is not either a cave-dweller or a political pundit, think Trump will not try to cut Medicare, after he tried repeatedly to cut Medicare, because on the campaign trail he now says he wouldn't. Anyone here that stupid? No? Didn't think so.

Then there's Glenn Kessler, who is in a fact-checking league of his own. Not in a good way, mind you.

You'll have to click through to see those in full, but at least two of the three are brazenly dishonest statements. Trump did in fact say what he was videotaped saying, that there has to be "some form of punishment for the women" who have abortions—there's nothing to dispute. So, instead, the "fact check" consists of him allegedly "walking back" the statement afterwards, after his handlers likely reminded him that his stated opinion was about as popular with the general public as puppy murder.

This is a habit that's omnipresent in all media coverage of Trump everywhere; "journalists" simply dismiss the words that come out of Donald Trump's mouth, instead writing in their pieces whatever less crackpot, more socially acceptable thing they personally think Trump might have meant instead. They lie, in other words; they have no evidence that their watered-down interpretation is what Trump did or didn't mean, but they write it anyway because, apparently, they can't conceive of him meaning the stuff he actually does say. (But when they do like what he says, as in PolitiFact's assertion that well by golly Trump said he isn't going to try to cut Medicare after an entire damn political career of doing exactly that, then all of a sudden he means what he says and how dare you claim otherwise.)

I mean, really? We're really doing this?

The second Kessler complaint up there is of a similarly dishonest vein. Hillary Clinton stood onstage and assured Americans that Kamala Harris wouldn't be "sending love letters to dictators." Kessler pouts that Trump's infamous claim that he and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "fell in love," and that "he wrote me beautiful letters, and their great letters, we fell in love" technically doesn't prove Trump wrote "love letters" back. So Clinton was being too mean, in implying it.

But again, that ain't factchecking. That's pedantry, and pedantry is what journalists stoop to when they're trying to fill a word count and have nothing else to run with. If we're going to be pedantic, it's Kessler who's being willfully and nastily dishonest here: Clinton did not claim Trump wrote love letters to Kim. She only asserted that if Harris became president, she certainly wouldn't.

So you can either fact check that statement or get off your high horse, right? But again, we see this over and over in "fact checks." When it comes to Trump saying transparently dishonest things, journalists scribble out his words and put in more favorable, less addled-sounding versions. When it comes to Trump's critics saying technically accurate but Trump-damaging things, the media either abandons what they actually say to instead gripe about something they didn't or, just as often, bicker about commonplace word usage.

One particularly egregious bit of Times clickbait accused Tim Walz of lying about his family using IVF. You have to read to the very bottom of the article to find out that Walz's use "IVF" to mean a group of related fertility treatments is in fact common usage and that all of the Times story up until that admission was premised on pretending to not know that.

Donald Trump stood in front of a table littered with raw meat and other groceries and took the press through a wonderland of delusions and rambling, but there were no frontpage stories the next day wondering if the 78-year-old was too mentally addled to hold office. But if you attack Trump, you had better be prepared for a legion of reporters demanding you diagram out each sentence.

In the not-so-recent past, the nearly comical desperation to balance out wholesale Republican propaganda campaigns with fair-and-balanced nitpicks of individual Democratic statements was something we all attributed to the American media's obsession with finding "balance" between the two parties no matter how far one of those two parties slid into dishonesty and extremism. It's just the Washington, D.C. press corps trying to stay on everybody's good sides so that their opportunities to fetch new quotes won't dry up, or so went the argument.

We can't say that anymore. It's not that. And the reason we know that is because the daily coverage from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and nearly every other major media outlet is no longer content with balancing egregious lies with petty nitpicks. They've been rewriting what Trump says in ways that plainly advantage Trump and his team. Joe Biden makes a verbal gaffe that names one person when he meant another and the Times fills its frontpage with stories speculating whether he's secretly and rapidly sliding into supposed dementia; Trump fills 45 minutes with the most confused stream-of-consciousness rants modern politics has ever seen, conspiracy claims, false "facts," assertions of things that never were—and the same journalists cross out all those words and write Trump proposes new economic plan as if any of it (1) made any sense or (2) was even an achievable "plan" if he meant what they now claim he meant.

We can speculate all we want about how we got here, but we've got one party that came very, very close to overthrowing the government by claiming myriad false things about our elections and government workers, and we've got another party that's humdrum status quo, and the nation's newspapers cannot for the life of them pick between the two sides because in their version of journalism, reporting what politicians say is considered infinitely more important than reporting on what they do.

Now we've reached a dangerous new low, one in which journalists are no longer reporting what one of the two parties says, but instead rewriting their statements into stuff that's less extreme and more palatable in polite company. Why are they doing it?

I wonder.

Update: And it just keeps on goin'.

Was the speaker correct? Yes, overtime pay would be cut. But maybe other people's overtime pay wouldn't be cut, so if "cut" means "eliminate" and not "cut," which was the actual word used, then—you know what, it's still indecipherable. But once again PolitiFact manages to be more misleading than the original statement they're claiming to factcheck.

This is just performative buffoonery at this point.