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Comment by drewrv | Hacker News Reader

The reason "fact-checked" seems political is because there is a movement among the American right to discredit any job that involves seeking or explaining the truth. I may come across as hyperbolic but I'm serious: name a job where you try to sort out what's true and what isn't, and American right-wing trolls will accuse it of bias.

Scientist? Journalist? Professor? Librarian? Doctor? It was only a matter of time before "fact-checker" got the same treatment as these other people. None of these people or careers are beyond reproach, but there is a difference between good-faith attempts at finding the truth and bad-faith accusations of bias.

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I don't get it, are you insinuating that "the American right" don't like scientists, journalists, professors, librarians, and doctors? You may want to evaluate your echo chamber if you believe this personification of 150M people. I say that as a Canadian living in the US and is perpetually confused by what each side says about the other.

Exactly as stated, verbatim: there is a movement within it.

That’s not the same as describing them as a monolithic group who all act that way.

Journalists: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/media/trump-medi...

Scientists: https://www.breitbart.com/environment/2023/01/23/woke-lancet...

Professors: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/just-how-liberal-are-c...

Librarians: https://nypost.com/2022/09/10/librarians-go-radical-as-new-w...

Doctors: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/boston-childrens-hospit...

> are you insinuating that "the American right" don't like scientists, journalists, professors, librarians, and doctors?

I actually don't think this. I know conservatives, they will generally believe scientists who are studying black holes but when climate change gets brought up they accuse them of bias. Similarly they will seek out doctors for their condition but when a doctor treats a trans patient they will accuse them of bias. It's not a dislike, and not of individuals, it's more of a distrust of institutions.

You're generalizing the loudest of the fringe to those 140M people followed by generalizing personal anecdotes to the same 140M. This is the same as trying to say that all Democrats support antifa.

The what you call "loudest of the fringe" has significant sway over the republican party one of their loonies was just appointed to the homeland security committee. A significant portion of the republican party still believes or at least gives statements that the 2020 election was stolen and even more republican refuse to denaunce them. If you continue voting for these guys you are part of the problem, some of them have openly supported literal Nazis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

As a general rule if anyone ever tells you that the other side is ultimate evil (jumping to "voting for these people means you're supporting Nazi supporters" is exactly that) then it's an automatic red flag that they've become completely blinded by partisanship.

As to who I'd personally vote for next election, I'm currently undecided as these things are highly nuanced. I have issues with both major parties in the US and time will still tell in which direction each develops before the next election. I don't take kindly to you trying to literally paint every single politician on the Republican side with a massive brush of "Nazi supporter". It's exactly for reasons like this that I feel it's important to continue to support them in some fashion to prevent the absolute nonsense that you're perpetuating here.

A couple of decades ago we had people wearing literal swastika arm bands goose stepping through jewish neighborhoods. We survived that perfectly fine. A lot of people seem to want to massively inflate how bad things actually are right now compared to history. Driving division in this country is one of the primary aims of foreign Russian and Chinese propaganda and one of those ways is through rabid partisanship.

I'm not generalizing across 140M people, I said there is a "movement among the American right". Saying "there is a movement among the left that believes ACAB" is probably true too, but we're talking about fact-checkers here not the criminal justice system.

There has been a dramatic decline in trust of institutions, regardless of political affiliation [1]. The medical system is at 38%, public schools at 28%, newspapers at 14%. These levels are so abysmally low that it's literally impossible for it to be partisan - it's global. The levels are lower than they've ever been, by far.

[1] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-...

Not the whole of the American right, but certainly Trump's core support and then some. They are very anti-all of those things and vocally so.

I've been a supporter of Wikileaks for many years, and I think that the idea that attacking journalists for publishing evidence is a uniquely Republican thing is disproved by what I've seen.

Most of which you won't have seen, of course.

One of the fact checkers given a prominent position on the front page of Google News is polygraph.info. Polygraph.info is run by Voice of America, official propaganda organ of the US, which was until a few years forbidden by law from targeting US citizens.

Now I ask you: do you think it was for reasons of popular pressure, or maybe market forces, that Voice of America became a featured fact-checker for Google News?

Also, do you think I could get them to fact check claims like, "The CIA considered concrete plans to assassinate Julian Assange"? You think that would ever happen, that they honestly promoted a little known fact which was deeply embarrassing to the US government?

I find no good faith there.

Maybe they have the luxury of less actual lying, because as a hegemonic propagandists, they can just stonewall when someone asks them an awkward question. Pretend they didn't hear it, because no one will report it.

Underdog propagandists like RT don't have that luxury, so it's more efficient to conjure up a shitstorm of mutually incompatible lies for them. But their role is the same.

Seems like a both sides sort of thing to me, especially with Twitter stuff coming out

Sure, I'll take you on one of the crown jewels that "the Right-wing Trolls" use to discredit Fact Checkers.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-clinton-smash-phon...

Read it.

The point of the claim is that Hillary Clinton had her phones destroyed. This is true, but the Fact Checkers cannot allow this to be true, so what is an honest Democrat-leaning Fact Checker to do?

Easy, you muddy the claim and add to it: the Right-wing Trolls aren't claiming Hillary had her phones destroyed. No, I've decided that they're claiming that she personally destroyed them with a hammer! AHA! Got you Right-wring Trolls! That's definitely not entirely true.

Verdict: MIXTURE. Clinton did not personally, with her own hands, use a hammer to destroy phones.

So you see, this is what Fact Checking is. When the truth needs to be denied, you muddy the waters, you add irrelevant details to the claim that no one really cares about, and then use those details to claim that the original statement is not true.

And look, the issue isn't that this is being done, it's that it's being presented as fact checking, which is why I distinguish between fact checking and Fact Checking.

Did you actually read the article you posted in question? Because it does accurately lay out the facts, disputes the claim Trump made specifically and does not exonerate her. It sounds like you're letting your world view warp what the article actually says.

That snopes article is much more reasonable than you're making it out to be.

Here’s another example:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-terrorist-rosenberg/

> In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."

It should go without saying that there’s no single, universally agreed upon definition of anything, thus giving a convenient way to dismiss any inconvenient claims.

Out of curiosity what do you think they should do differently? They confirmed the subject's criminal activity immediately at the top of the article. Only after that do they talk about the definition problem, which you appear to agree with to some degree.

Well she bombed federal buildings, that’s pretty clearly terrorism. They just don’t care because she’s on their side.

Maybe the problem here is the boiled down ternary, true, not true, mixture. That gets further aggregated until they can same big stats like “Party X made 80% false claims” while the other party only made 20% false claims, because their false claims have been conveniently softened to “mixture.”

I’m not sure what you’re getting at. Is there a profession who seeks to learn or explain the truth that the American right hasn’t accused of bias?

I don’t think I’ll find the answer in an article about Hillary’s cell phone.

I can't imagine there is. Many on the right will literally accuse Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN of policial bias if a single story doesn't lean the way they feel it should.

Trump's tweet literally said that Hillary smashed the phones with a hammer. He already got the benefit of more engagement on a exaggerated tweet. Why shouldn't he deserve some mild pushback?

> Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, 'bleached' emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?

that’s the tweet. I don’t think there’s a significant difference between “hillary smashed her phones with a hammer” and “hillary had someone smash her phone with a hammer”, especially when a 128 character limit is a factor.

I could say “I fixed my iPhone’s screen last weekend” when I really just got it replaced at an Apple store. The fact that I personally didn’t replace the screen doesn’t matter.

If the debate was “is hillary clinton strong enough to smash things with hammers” and this was used as evidence, it’d be misleading. The debate was “is hillary clinton suspicious”, and having her phones smashed with hammers is suspicious regardless of whether she did it herself or had someone else do it for her.

The American right don't have the monopoly on discrediting facts or fact checkers. The left are absolutely up to their necks in it too, both in America and abroad.

A perfect demonstration of bias in action

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