Shortly after the Media Research Center announced its Fact Checking the Fact Checkers project, Real Clear Politics has introduced its own "Fact Check Review." Now that social-media giants like Facebook now employ "independent" fact-checking groups to flag "fake" articles -- which can experience an 80 percent drop in traffic -- RCP is asking if the fact-checkers are truly free of bias.
The expert in charge is Georgetown professor Kalev Leetaru. RCP has constructed a database to measure fact-checking sites. They will measure six sites by several metrics: PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Weekly Standard.
They will measure, for example, how many times the media uses itself or its media colleagues as fact sources rather than interviewing or reviewing original sources. They will also note how often a site does "fact checks" that really check facts, versus articles that are based more on difference of opinion rather than facts. Number of claims considered factual over the total number of claims from verdict sources.
Leetaru pledged to note when "fact checkers" acknowledge an article as technically true, but flag it anyway because they find it lacking context that they want included [HT on image: The Proud Liberal]:
For example, the Washington Post assigned four “Pinocchios” to a series of claims by Trump regarding “sanctuary cities” on that grounds that the president “neglects to provide crucial context.”
This example arose from the president’s March 10 radio address, in which he made numerous statements about Democratic officials, most of them in California, who have erected barriers to local law enforcement cooperating with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The Post focused on two statements by the president, including this one: “Last week, the mayor of Oakland warned criminal aliens of a coming ICE enforcement action -- giving them time to scatter and hide from authorities. The mayor’s conduct directly threatened the safety of federal immigration officers and the law-abiding Americans in her community.”
The Post acknowledged that the mayor had issued such a warning. So why the four Pinocchios, a category the paper defines as “whoppers”? The fact checker asserted that Trump had omitted mitigating information, such as the detail that crime fell 1 percent in Oakland in 2017 over the previous year. But if the point of a fact check is to confirm or refute the factual details of a claim, assigning a claim of four Pinocchios while affirming it to be factually correct would seem to reinforce concerns about subjectivity.
Leetaru also suggested it is worth asking about a bias against Trump and against conservatives?
Among the six fact-checking organizations examined by the RealClearPolitics Fact Check Review, over one-third of the claims reviewed during the last five months mentioned “Trump” in the title or argument. The numbers varied significantly by organization. A full 65 percent of Washington Post fact checks -- and 62 percent of the New York Times’ – dealt with Trump, compared to 23 percent of Politifact’s and 22 percent of those done by Snopes. It’s clear that some sites are more fixated on the president than others.
Part of that disparity comes from methodology. Many fact-checks by Snopes aren't political at all, such as "Did a Sunbather Catch a Cobra With Her Bare Hands?" PolitiFact often judges online "Pants on Fire" claims that adults that read news should recognize as obviously false, such as "Robert Redford Says: Michelle And Barack Obama Should Get Five Years In Prison."
MRC welcomes new entrants into the field of evaluating liberal-tilted fact checkers who have been empowered by Big Tech to be the Truth Police of the Internet.
