Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Thought-Checkers: Protecting against Fakethink

Everything you can imagine is real
                                 -Pablo Picasso*


Not so fast, Pablo! 

We stumbled across this silly piece by Lauren Carroll (of fact-checking flat earth claims fame) where Carroll somehow determines as objective fact the limits of Betsy DeVos' ability to imagine things: 




DeVos was asked a question, she didn't know the answer, so she offered a guess, and explicitly stated she was offering a guess.

The difference between making a statement of fact and offering your best guess seems far too complicated for either Carroll or her editors that let this editorial opportunity escape their liberal grasp.

This isn't a fact check, it's a hit piece by a journalish that was apparently more eager to smear a Trump pick than they were in acknowledging what DeVos actually said. Oddly, Carroll doesn't list any attempts to contact either DeVos or anyone in the Trump camp to get a clarification, a courtesy they've extended in the past.

PolitiFact is pushing Fake News by accusing DeVos of making a claim when she was stating a theoretical possibility that she could imagine. The real crime here is garbage ratings like this will end up in DeVos' unscientific "report card" on those bogus charts PolitiFact dishonestly pimps out to readers as objective data.

PolitiFact's disdain for all things Trump is clear and it's only going to get worse. The administration hasn't even begun yet and they're already fact-checking what someone can or cannot imagine. 

Happy thoughts!




*attributed




No comments:

Post a Comment

Thanks to commenters who refuse to honor various requests from the blog administrators, all comments are now moderated. Pseudonymous commenters who do not choose distinctive pseudonyms will not be published, period. No "Anonymous." No "Unknown." Etc.