Press Fact Checkers: Lemmings To Their Own Death

By Erick Erickson | 11:10 AM on August 30, 2012

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The press really is beclowning itself this election year. Like lemmings off a cliff, the press is running to its own ignoble death at the hands of an American public tired of spin and lies.The last forty-eight hours clearly demonstrate the American press corp and Team Obama are working hand in hand to drive a narrative designed to advance Barack Obama’s re-election. From claims of racism related to the GOP to Paul Ryan’s supposed lies, the media is really self-destructing.David Harsanyi has the one must read of the day on this subject and he gladly calls out a few of the bullcrappy fact checkers too.

Democrats are energetically attempting to create the perception that Republicans — specifically, Paul Ryan — are running around Tampa making stuff up about Barack Obama (as if that’s necessary). And when I say Democrats, as regrettably cliché as it may sound, I also mean the mainstream media.The following assertions, for instance, are true:

Obama did cut over $700 billion from Medicare to fund Obamacare.

The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism.

The Janesville, General Motors plant was closed down under Obama (though Ryan made a more nuanced assertion that we’ll cover below)

Obama did blow off the bipartisan debt commission.

Obama’s waivers do allow for the relaxing of work requirements in welfare reform.

Go read the whole thing and note that my reference to lemmings is very intentional.In the 1950’s and 60’s some very bad reporting on the behavior of lemmings got picked up by the press, expanded by Walt Disney, and the fact checkers of the press treated the idea of lemmings running off cliffs as truthful for a very long time.The damnedest thing to it all though is that the media does not get it. They really do believe that press fact checkers are really checking facts and conservatives who complain have trouble with the truth. As David notes though that’s not true. Consider Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s in-house fact checker and apologist for Margaret Sanger and the eugenics movement. Kessler “gave Republican groups knocking Obama for not visiting Israel Two Pinocchios…. You realize, I’m sure, that it is an indisputable fact that the president has not visited Israel, but Kessler was unimpressed by the ads.”The fact checkers are not checking facts, they are spinning. And the media, which is no longer respected by the American people, has abdicated the fact checking role it consistently refused to do to a group it created. The media’s fact checkers are propped up as arbiters of truth when they just still promote the media’s own bullcrap, just this time with a “truth” label stuck to it.