https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/biden-fact-checker-100-days/
Fact-checkers check statements made by presidents and other prominent politicians and offer their highly subjective ratings as to the truth or falseness of the statements made. Then they add up the number of those statements they judge to be false and present the total number to their readers, as if all lies are created equal.
They are not.
If a president lies about his golf score, that’s a lie. But if he lies about how many COVID vaccine doses are available to the American public, that is a consequential lie. Adding up all the supposed lies lumps together that which we should be concerned about and that which makes no difference. And counting the same lie multiple times, for every time the lie is retold, as WaPo does, inflates the total number.
Here’s an example of how Washington Post fact-checkers rationalize their subjective judgements:
“More typical for Biden, when he uttered a false statement, was some subtle truth-stretching. He spun that if Congress passed his infrastructure plan, ‘the economy’ would create 19 million additional jobs; only 2.7 million of those jobs could be attributed to the proposal itself. He asserted that as vice president he helped craft an $800 billion strategy to help Central America; it was $750 million.”
What is “subtle” about claiming that 2.7 million jobs are really 19 million jobs? How is it merely “truth-stretching” to multiply by over a thousand to turn $750 million into $800 billion?
And how important is it to compare the total number of falsehoods told by one president to those told by another, e.g., comparing Biden to Trump? As the WaPo fact-checkers acknowledge, Biden is largely kept under wraps by his team – so as to avoid gaffes, I imagine, but perhaps also to avoid telling more whoppers:
“Biden’s relatively limited number of falsehoods is a function, at least in part, of the fact that his public appearances consist mostly of prepared texts vetted by his staff. He devotes little time to social media, in contrast to his Twitter-obsessed predecessor, and rarely faces reporters or speaks off the cuff.”
