Democrats decry double standard

On Friday, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column attributed three Pinocchios to President Donald Trump, who boasted that he had already built large swathes of a border-wall, which the newspaper calls "the false claim." Trump most often ". The Post counted nearly 200 Trump cases making it.

The Fact Checker also recently awarded three Pinocchios to Democrat Bernie Sanders for stating that "500,000 Americans will go bankrupt this year with health care bills" – while the study on which the claim was based only mentioned Medical costs as a contributing factor in 500,000 bankruptcies per year, and other studies had a slightly lower figure.

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A false equivalence? Sanders' team seems to think so – and they are not the only ones among the democratic presidential campaigns to dull themselves from the fact-checkers who seem to give their esoteric political disputes and erroneous recollections the same weight as the daily rumors of Trump and the spread of selfish myths like that of millions of fraudulent voters.

The question is not an easy task, say the Democratic strategists.

Trump's bold lies and the spread of misinformation – which have been regularly cited by almost every mainstream news agency – is a central element in their arguments against him. But when these same outlets begin to analyze the Democrats for using dubious and exaggerated data, they give the impression that everyone is a bundle. Democrats say that when it comes to lying, Donald Trump once again broke the boundaries of politics, as usual, and the media only help him by applying the old rules.

The question appeared again last week when Senator Kamala Harris told a public meeting at CNN that she had already sued Exxon Mobil. An investigator of the network rightly pointed out that she had only investigated Exxon while suing other oil companies. Harris's campaign reacted not by challenging the fact, but by verifying himself at the time of Trump.

"Trump has spent the morning potentially illegally churning out job numbers and lying about the trajectory of a massive hurricane, but of course, let's spend our time figuring out whether, as Attorney General, Kamala has "continued" Exxon, "said his press. wrote. "When analyzing the word, the choice of the word is treated in the same way as the intentional lie. . . it blurs the very lines "fact checkers" are supposed to help keep you pulled.

In interviews with POLITICO, several notorious fact-takers said they did not think their work had changed to hold politicians accountable for their lyrics about the stump and TV studios, despite Trump's persistent lies.

"Two wrongs are not a right," said Angie Drobnic Holan, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact.

But this traditional part of the main control process was criticized in 2020, critics questioning the utility of highlighting technical errors or challenging policy arguments, given the unprecedented volume and frequency of false claims of Trump. They range from dangerous propaganda, ranging from the spread of conspiracy theories not based on Clinton involvement to the death of Jeffrey Epstein, to bizarre ones, for example by claiming he was named "the man of the 'year' in Michigan.

"At the time of Trump, most of the factual verifications pronounced by words other than those of Trump are tantamount to criticizing the captain of the Titanic for not having made a sign before sinking into an iceberg", said recently Nathan Barankin, senior advisor at Harris. tweeted.

In addition to criticism from the Harris team, the media attention to the factual errors or blunders of former vice president Joe Biden has made comparisons with the fervent coverage of emails. Hillary Clinton at the 2016 election, while the Sanders campaign was aimed at the Post to publish "Factually Fact-Based Articles on Fact Verification". This criticism has been echoed in progressive publications such as The Nation and The Intercept.

"When fact checkers rightly call Trump a liar for saying" the noise (caused by the windmills) cause cancer, "then feel compelled to be" balanced "by calling Bernie a liar for having correctly stated that Wall Street had received a "one trillion dollar bailout," Democracy Dies in Darkness, "Warren Gunnels, Senior Advisor at Sanders tweeted Saturday, appropriating the slogan of the post while sharing the story of The Intercept.

The Post Fact Checker team, headed by editor and editor Glenn Kessler, has listed more than 12,000 false or misleading statements made by Trump in his job. The president's tendency to continue to make false statements despite the evidence has even encouraged them to add the "Bottomless Pinocchio" label to its standard one to four Pinnochios scale.

But their decision to grant Pinocchios Sanders' claim for about 500,000 bankruptcies each year due to medical bills provoked a strong reaction. The Sanders campaign challenged this designation in a letter to the editor of the Post Office, which also included a withdrawal request.

"The general premise of the play is absurd", Gunnels wrote on August 31 to Post's editor, Marty Baron. "The Post fact checker has released three" pinocchios "from Senator Sanders for specifically citing a peer-reviewed editorial published in the American Journal of Public Health."

"In what world does this deserve a so-called" pinocchio "and even less so?", Said Gunnels, adding that the Post's assessment had falsely attacked Sanders, tarnished the reputation of the company. author of the editorial and misled public the most serious problems that the American people faces. "

Cameron Barr, editor of the Post, said the study in question did not determine the cause of the bankruptcies, as Sanders said, but "only the factors that contribute to it". Barr also rejected the campaign charge that she "would tend to be biased".

Jeet Heer of The Nation, however, suggested that the newspaper had "routinely accused Bernie Sanders of misleading the public, even in cases where the evidence is strongly supportive. to Senator Vermont ".

For example, Heer noted that the fact-finder had blamed Sanders for accurately stating in the first democratic debate that three billionaires – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos – have more wealth than the bottom half of America.

Kessler and his team acknowledged in their June 28 survey that Sanders "was based on numbers that added up", but suggested that it was "a question of comparing apples to oranges". Because "the lower half people basically have wealth, as debts, cancels out all the assets they could have," the comparison with Gates, Buffett and Bezos "is not particularly meaningful. "

In an interview with POLITICO, Kessler said he felt that putting apples back to an orange was a "non-controversial observation" in their recap of the Democrats' claims during the first debate. Following the pushback on Twitter, Kessler updated the message with a response from Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, who, he wrote, was "in agreement with our assessment ". (PolitiFact, for its part, did not evaluate whether the Sanders comparison was meaningful, or not, but concluded that it was true).

Kessler stated that his fact-checking team was trying to provide context and decide whether an assertion was true or partially true. He acknowledges that Pinocchio's scale is "not scientific" but stated that he wished to be internally consistent in providing this "final evaluation".

Kessler described the fact-finder's mission by writing "on important political issues" and "to enable people to demystify or explain policy issues".

Trump's lies, considered more trivial, may not reach the level of an independent verification of the facts, he said, even if they are included in the postal database. For example, Trump's false assertion that Hurricane Dorian was heading for Alabama did not merit separate analysis by the fact-finder.

Given that the fact-finder insists on correcting data underlying serious political problems, rather than on cowardly lies, Democrats who run for president may be at the center of their concerns along the countryside. Kessler noted that they "are now getting a lot of questions about what the Democrats are saying".

Democratic candidates are particularly visible right now. Ten candidates took part in the debate on Thursday night in Houston. A week later, the same group explained how they would tackle the climate crisis during CNN's seven-hour marathon. Daniel Dale from CNN and his colleagues checked the facts candidates at this event, including Harris on Exxon.

Dale, who began verifying the facts stubbornly three years ago while he was a reporter at the Toronto Star, has continued this momentum since joining CNN in June. He recently explored sites where Trump made more than 328 false statements in six weeks. Dale and his CNN colleagues found that Trump made at least 22 false statements at Monday's rally in North Carolina.

"We need to be clear and direct about the fact that there is no equivalence between the frequency of dishonesty of the president and anyone in the democratic field," Dale told POLITICO.

But even if Trump has launched an "unprecedented barrage" of misrepresentations against historical norms, that does not mean that we give up the verification of the facts, that we let the bar sink so low that it disappeared. "The facts still matter, even if the Democrats are not make phone calls scouts or incorrect descriptions of altered maps when they are wrong. "

PolitiFact's Holan said the Democrats are currently fighting each other and that it would be "a very bad service to the Electoral Public, to the primary electors, so that the fact-checkers will be silenced." in any way.

Holan suggested that primaries were a less partisan time to verify the facts than general elections. "The voters are apparently all on the same team," she said. "They look at the field of candidates. They are trying to decide who is best positioned to represent their interests. "

But the verification of facts in the 2020 Democratic primaries, particularly with regard to Biden's failures, has rekindled media criticism in previous general elections. Bianna Golodryga, a CNN contributor, said on the network Sunday that the cover "brings back memories of the cover Hillary Clinton has been covered with and some treatment received."

Jonathan Rauch, principal investigator at the Brookings Institution, recently suggested that the media, in an effort to find a balance, "help Trump and normalize his behavior by promoting fake equivalents such as Hillary's e-mails and Biden's gaffes."

Biden recently faced a flood of negative headlines after several misrepresentations, that it was false claims when he began to publicly oppose the Iraq war or distorted details of an anecdote about the heroism of a soldier in Afghanistan.

Rauch tweeted that the Post's article on Biden, which had incorporated three stories in the soldier's story, was "rather innocuous". He however noted that it appeared on page one, while an article on the trajectory of Hurricane Dorian Trump had landed on page 10. (The post article on Biden actually mentioned more than 12,000 false or misleading statements by Trump, but not before the 17th paragraph.)

James Fallows of the Atlantic D & # 39; agreement with Rauch's criticism and suggested that the media must "avoid" to create a false equivalence with Trump.

"I think you can see the effects in 2016, where a significant number of people outside the base thought: damn it, they are two scammers (DJT HRC), why bother to vote and go out", he wrote.

In an interview last week with CBS moderator Stephen Colbert, Biden said, "It's just right to pick on a political figure for anything." Nevertheless, he suggested that his gaffes do not concern "substantive issues" and that they are very pale compared to those of Trump. acts. "I am not mistaken, for example, we should lock children in cages at the border," he said.

The Biden campaign, however, admitted mistakes such as telling The Fact Checker on Monday that the candidate "misrepresented himself as saying he was opposed to [Iraq] the war immediately. "

Kessler wrote that Biden was "on his way to Four Pinocchios until his staff acknowledged that he was poorly expressed."