Remember last post I reminded readers that a "False" or "Pants on Fire" rating on the "Truth-O-Meter" serves as a red flag for incompetent fact-checking?
Here we go again:
What does "Biden trial" mean? If it was our fact check (Zebra Fact Check), we'd spend time carefully figuring that out.
For the liberal bloggers who produce PolitiFact fact checks, the answer's so easy it requires no discussion:
"This trial that I have now, that’s a Biden trial," Trump said April 16 in front of a New York City bodega on the second day of jury selection.
...
"As you witness this Biden trial, I ask all Americans to remember that this is not just about me, this is about our country and this is about you," Trump said in an April 15 video.
These statements are wrong. There is no evidence that Biden orchestrated the charges against Trump.
See? Easy-peasy.
We should note that just before the section we quoted, PolitiFact said "Trump has made the claim many times in many places." No, PolitiFact's claim includes no hotlink.
On TwiX (X formerly known as Twitter) we asked the author, Amy Sherman, what led her to conclude Trump was saying Biden orchestrated the trial and not merely that the trial was intended to serve Biden's electoral interests. We'll update this post should Sherman offer a reply.
Fact-Checking Without Evidence
Unfortunately it's nothing new for PolitiFact to arbitrarily decide what words and phrases mean.
The meanings left-leaning fact checkers use likely come from the Bubble. People on left understand these things intuitively, therefore they require no explanation. Conservatives and moderates who cannot understand these simple truths are biased or something.
PolitiFact's source list did have a bubbly source, in fact. Daniel Dale, a CNN fact checker, wrote up a fact check: "Fact Check: Trump repeats baseless claims about Biden orchestrating his trials."
Is it fair for us to call Dale's fact check Bubble information? We say yes. Dale took Trump's comments out of context.
Dale/CNN:
Trump claimed that “this is all Biden-run things” and that “these are all Biden trials.” He also claimed that Matthew Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official who now works for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, had been “put into” the district attorney’s office by Biden.
Readers, when you see short quotation snippets put together like that, suspect funny business. Such cases plead for fact-checking.
And here's what we found (at the Never Trump Bulwark, of all places):
“Colangelo is a radical left [prosecutor] from the DOJ who was put into the state working for Letitia James and was then put into the District Attorney’s office to run the trial against Trump,” Trump said at a press conference Monday, in the third person. “This is all Biden-run things [sic], meaning Biden and his thugs.”
Trump defined "Biden-run" to refer to "Biden and his thugs." Dale omitted that context, as did PolitiFact. Note also Dale, uh, illuminated the context of Trump's "put into" comment.
It's what one does in the Bubble. It works because those in the Bubble aren't likely to challenge it, and who cares what people think outside the Bubble?
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