{"id":4988,"date":"2024-10-04T14:13:19","date_gmt":"2024-10-04T21:13:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=4988"},"modified":"2024-10-04T14:24:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T21:24:06","slug":"checking-the-fact-checker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2024\/10\/04\/checking-the-fact-checker\/","title":{"rendered":"Checking the Fact Checker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a shame when those who claim to be &#8220;Fact Checking&#8221; resort to willful misinterpretations, distortions, and exaggerations of their own.<\/p>\n<p>For example this <em><a href=\"https:\/\/s2.washingtonpost.com\/camp-rw\/?trackId=5e77d26dade4e21f590dd906&amp;s=670002f28c67324ad4a34b9f&amp;utm_campaign=wp_fact_checker&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;wpisrc=nl_fact&amp;linknum=5&amp;linktot=49\">Fact Checker from The Washington Post<\/a><\/em> starts with<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i><strong>\u201cWe\u2019re the cleanest economy in the entire world.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>\u2014\u00a0<strong>Vance\u00a0<\/strong>(False, the United States ranked 17th.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But while Vance&#8217;s claim might be based on an unidentified and inappropriate measure of cleanness, it is certainly not appropriate to judge it as &#8220;False&#8221; without identifying what it actually claims to be saying, and it is even more ridiculous to assign a particular rank from some unidentified study as if it were gospel. In particular, the claim could be interpreted in terms of total emissions, emissions per capita, or emissions per $ of GDP (which might actually rank the US as cleanest &#8211; even if only since a huge proportion of the US GDP comes from clean financial and administrative work managing the exploitation of remote dirty work in other countries).<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i><strong>\u201cWe have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost.\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>\u2014\u00a0<strong>Vance\u00a0<\/strong>(False, this is a ginned-up number that includes the Trump years.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But the quote identified here as &#8220;False&#8221; is in fact a true statement about the current situation, and it would only be a claim that this was due to Biden\/Harris that should be identified as false.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i><strong>\u201cLess than 2 percent of that wall [on the border] got built.\u201d \u2014<\/strong><\/i><strong>Walz<\/strong><i><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>(False, even counting only new barriers, as opposed to replacement barriers, adds up to 8.5 percent.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Unfortunately it seems that the judgement here is correct &#8211; as is also the case for the one below.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i><strong>\u201cTheir Project 2025 is going to have a registry of pregnancies\u201d \u2014\u00a0<\/strong><\/i><strong>Walz<\/strong><i><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>(False, it does not.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The next is a value judgement that I agree with (about intent and what is &#8220;bipartisan&#8221;) but not to the extent of declaring Vance&#8217;s claim objectively false.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i><strong>\u201cDonald Trump could have destroyed [Obamacare]. Instead, he worked in a bipartisan way to ensure that Americans had access to affordable care.\u201d \u2014<\/strong><\/i><strong>Vance<\/strong><i><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/i>(False, Trump acted to kill it repeatedly in a partisan way.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And finally, the teaser subset concludes with<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><i><strong>\u201cRemember he [Trump] said that on January the 6th, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on January the 20th, what happened? Joe Biden became the president.\u201d \u2014\u00a0<\/strong><\/i><strong>Vance\u00a0<\/strong>(False, this is a whitewash of what happened.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>But both of the claims here are objectively true. The urge to protest peacefully may have been made with a wink and a nudge, but it was in fact made at least once; and of course the attempt to prevent the transition actually did fail.<\/p>\n<p>Source: <em><a href=\"https:\/\/s2.washingtonpost.com\/camp-rw\/?trackId=5e77d26dade4e21f590dd906&amp;s=670002f28c67324ad4a34b9f&amp;utm_campaign=wp_fact_checker&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=newsletter&amp;wpisrc=nl_fact&amp;linknum=5&amp;linktot=49\">Fact Checker from The Washington Post<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s a shame when those who claim to be &#8220;Fact Checking&#8221; resort to willful misinterpretations, distortions, and exaggerations of their own. For example this Fact Checker from The Washington Post starts with \u201cWe\u2019re the cleanest economy in the entire world.\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Vance\u00a0(False, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2024\/10\/04\/checking-the-fact-checker\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4988"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4995,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4988\/revisions\/4995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}