Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LegitShady | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Sadly I have not found any trustworthy 'fact checkers' that are not in and of themselves also inherently biased.

But once you realize that every major news org seems perfectly willing to gaslight you fundamentally, you start to doubt basically everything you read.

If this one 'fact' about trump condemning nazis is so obviously a false story, how many other false stories are there?

The problem with this understanding is that it doesn't help you learn the truth, it just lets you understand that everyone is lying to you, and if you don't put in the exhausting work to find more information (assuming any is available) about every story you will be lied to with impunity.

When you offload the process of interpreting events to someone else, you lose the ability to tell truth from lies. When those people are so confident in their lying to do it on things like this, how many other things have they lied about?

It's a sad realization about the world.

It's important, I think, to not toss out the baby with the bathwater. Are fact checkers inherently biased? Probably. Should we ignore them? No. CNN's fact checkers called out the distortion on the 'both sides' discussion, as did PolitiFact and others.

When it comes to fact checker bias, PolitiFact is a good example to look at because they publish numbers on all the politicians. If you look at both left and right wing politicians, you'll see that they say plenty of inaccurate things. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Hillary Clinton, Biden, all say inaccurate or untrue things to the order of 20 - 45% of checked statements.

Trump is in a category all his own. 72% of his checked statements are inaccurate.

Of course you should subject those numbers to scrutiny. Certainly there is sample bias in what statements get checked. But it is easy to find many, many Trump statements in which he makes statements that are so verifiably untrue that it becomes easy to conclude that he has little interest in providing evidence for his opinions. This graduates him from garden variety bias into active malfeasance.

I think it's important to recognize bias and fight it, but in the end, the mainstream media at least holds itself to a factual standard, as do mainstream politicians on both sides. Trump is very, very different. He himself represents nothing more than a war on factuality itself and a disdain for consensus or evidence of any kind.

As a reply to your previous comment explains, this "fact" is not a false story.

Clever of you to only link to the second interview, although it does come across as a touch disingenuous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com