Do you have some examples of where you don't agree with the fact-checking services of any of the sources you've shared?
This WP title and article:
It proclaims, without a hint of a doubt: "A ‘mass invasion’ of polar bears is terrorizing an island town. Climate change is to blame."
The article is about a single episode of a population of polar bears feeding off a garbage dump in a remote Russian village. It's hard (or just simply wrong) to attribute a single episode to a global climate shift. And experts have pointed out that the bears appear well fed and that garbage can be attractive to them [1].
The article ends by linking the "heartbreaking video" of a sick, emaciated polar bear wandering somewhere in Canada. The video was widely spread as a proof of climate change harm to polar bears, but experts said it was probably just a sick individual. National Geographic itself had to publish a correction a year later [2].
Now imagine a conservative media making such quick connections between, say, a bump in immigration rates and a crime. Or even saying: "that crime spree? Immigration is to blame". That's obvious fake news, right?
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/12/18222072/polar-bear-invas... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/08/explore-...
> Now imagine a conservative media making such quick connections between, say, a bump in immigration rates and a crime. Or even saying: "that crime spree? Immigration is to blame". That's obvious fake news, right?
Both illegal and legal immigrant groups have lower incarceration rates than native born Americans. So, whenever a right-wing pundit says that immigration is to blame for crime rising, there likely is statistical fuckery or outright lies.
However, it is hilarious how, even while being treated with kid gloves, you are still whinging about there being a bias against the right wing.
I needed an example and honestly made up one- I had no idea of the situation in the US and I find these statistics very interesting, thanks!
The reason I chose this particular example is because in Italy- where I'm from- the statistics are the total opposite: more than 1/3 of all inmates are foreigners, with some ethnicities wildly over-represented in proportion to their share in the population. The connection between immigration and crime rates is one of the most used right-wing arguments and topic of contention between left and right in Italy.
https://openmigration.org/en/op-ed/foreign-detainees-in-euro....
https://www.istat.it/it/immigrati/prodotti-editoriali/crimin...
According to this article that aims to prove that "immigrants committing more crimes than natives" is fake news,
"On the total of the extra-EU immigrants that are trialed for any crime, the illegal ones are 70% of the total for voluntary causing harm, 75% for homicides, and 85% for burglaries and robberies".
And illegal immigrants are just about 10% of the legal ones.
https://www.fanpage.it/politica/la-grande-bufala-degli-stran...
I believe that is the figure for prisoners, which includes people in pre-trial detention. The page is very unclear, because the text talks about 'condannati' (which google translate renders, maybe wrongly, as 'prisoners' rather than 'convicts'), but the graph is labelled with 'detenuti', which I think unambiguously includes people who are detained but not convicted.
The text says very clearly: "32.6% of people convicted, 36.7% of prisoners in jails".
The graph is about prisoners, with a break down by area. In my area, foreigners are almost 60% of the jails population!
Of course, at the same time I have a rather stubborn view on integration (that it's almost non-existent, just as a real social safety net is very thin), and until that gets sorted out I understand people's not so well funded, but still technically rational fears of migrants.
If you think about immigration that is a subset of the population that have high levels of poverty, low levels of access to welfare and so if things go wrong they get desperate quickly. And they also have more problems than locals at getting work due to discrimination and a host of other reasons.
Cutting poverty is a more effective measure.
Actually I'll go further if you were serious on cutting crime you would be advocating to cut poverty!!
The first mentions Politico contending that "one in third" is only 'partly true'. Yet the closest I can find to Politico fact checking that line,[0] is merely a reference to the Doctors Without Borders report, without any mention of how true it is (besides, Politico doesn't really do fact checking either, nor claim to be impartial).
Edit: Looks like it happened on Twitter (see reply), so I stand corrected.
That being said, I am confident there are biases in fact checking, all humans are subjective. And even if every fact check a site did was impartial, their choice in which things they choose to fact check would surely be not, or at least be open for questioning. What makes one statement more worthy of a fact check than another?
[0] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/trump-state-of-th... and search for "one in three"
https://twitter.com/politico/status/1093001428900237312?lang...
There's an entire website dedicated to their bias. [2]
Another obvious point of bias was Politifact labeling a statement by Trump that "CNN did a poll where Obama and I are tied" as "pants on fire" because it was "one poll" (he never stated otherwise). [3]
[1] https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2020/07/10/p...
[2] https://www.politifactbias.com/
[3] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/apr/27/donald-tru...
(Fwiw, I agree it's not a pants on fire situation. (Mostly) false, sure.)
https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/27/trump-cites...
« “CNN did a poll recently where President Obama and I are statistically tied,” Trump told reporters Wednesday morning upon arriving in New Hampshire. “If you would like, I can send it to you. Call up CNN.”
CNN didn’t conduct such a survey.»