“Just as journalism is supposed to hold the powerful to account, yet largely serves as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, the fact checkers, which were born out of the journalism industry, do the same.” – Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers
Google’s recent entry into the AI market has imploded with the algorithm’s changing history in real time. Search for a Viking or a Nazi and you will be rewarded with a photo of a black-skinned version that was adapted to the woke culture, i.e., no whites allowed. But this isn’t the first time that Google has been caught manipulating its search engines. In a pay-to-play scheme, the higher the fee, the closer to the top of the search results your entry will appear. If you are anyone other than a Democrat, however, expect to have the worst possible articles arrive at the top of the page, with any positive stories impossible to find.
The manipulation of information is just the latest entrant into the field of misinformation. While there is little consensus as to what qualifies, misinformation typically includes propaganda, pseudoscience, conspiracies, misleading stories, and outright falsehoods. With an increase in misreported stories and shady social media posts, came a new entry into the field of journalism, the arrival of the professional fact-checker.
In Matt Palumbo’s 2023 book, “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers”, Palumbo looks to expose the farce of the fact-checking industry that does little to cover their bias against the right. Birthed largely from media and news platforms, most fact-checkers are not only tied to left-leaning sources, from the Washington Post, Huffington Post, USA Today, and the broadcast networks, but are largely funded by Democrats as well. After providing a history of the fact-checking business, Palumbo presents a series of fact-checking fails. In fact, two-thirds of the book is an exhaustive list of some of the media’s worst bloopers.
In George Orwell’s blockbuster book, “1984”, the protagonist, Winston Smith, works to alter and update the past to align with party ideology. Modern-day misinformation specialists do much the same in their roles as fact-checkers under the guise of verifying the accuracy of statements, reports, social media posts, and more. Since fact-checkers come primarily from known partisan sources, polls show that most people don’t believe fact-checkers any more than the media companies themselves.
Once consumers became aware of the news media’s obvious political biases, and after catching them in the manipulation of facts and stories, many no longer trusted them as viable sources for news. This led to an industry bloodbath of lost jobs, as companies struggled financially. In fact, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm in Chicago, reveals that nearly 75,000 print, broadcast, and digital media jobs have ended since 2010. It was in this atmosphere that fact-checking re-emerged as an industry, reaching new heights after the election of Donald Trump. As corporate newsrooms failed to keep up with competition from alternative media, they began shifting to a new business model that could bring in additional sources of revenue. Unfortunately, the same partisan employees simply changed seats and continued with their partisan talking points.
As revealed in the July 2023 Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review of 150 academic experts, fact-checkers are largely liberal and progressive, with less than 5 percent identifying as slightly right of center. This should be unsurprising since fact-checking organizations are already known partisans, funded and managed by people on the left. The most prominent fact-checking sources include PolitiFact from the Washington Post, FactCheck.org, a product of the University of Pennsylvania, and Snopes whose owners are tied to progressive liberal site, Salon.com.
Since Big Tech and social media sites rely heavily on partisan fact-checking, their desire to silence political opposition has led to advocacy, censorship, and narrative-saving fact-checking. Even the government has gotten into the game, with several federal departments working with tech companies to remove dissident voices from numerous platforms, all in the name of battling misinformation. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is now using AI to fact-check using politicized algorithms.
Second-century satirical poet, Juvenal, was the first to ask, “Who will watch the watchers”. That is, how do we hold those in positions of power accountable, and how do we know if they can be trusted? Palumbo asks the same question, who will fact-check the fact-checkers? One new entrant is X’s community notes, which through crowdsourcing adds context below any questionable post. Although it may not be a perfect system, it is already producing great bipartisan success. The rest is up to us. Individuals can fact-check on their own, by using sources that have a record of truthfulness, comparing multiple sites, and requiring proof to back up questionable stories.
Unfortunately, until news sites, whether working as journalists or fact-checkers, learn from their lessons from the past, it’s only a matter of time before their fact-checking advocacy goes down in flames, too.
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