Fact-checkers are great, but the media business
keeps trying to solve its credibility problem by
misrepresenting what they do
By Matt Taibbi
May 30, 2021 "Information
Clearing House" - The news business just
can’t stop clowning itself. The latest indignity is
an international fact-checking debacle originating,
of all places, at a “festival of fact-checking.”
The three-day event featured special guests
Christiane Amanpour, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Brian
Stelter, and Senator Mark Warner — a lineup of fact
“stars” whose ironic energy recalled the USO’s
telethon-execution of Terrance and Phillip before
the invasion of Canada in South Park: Bigger,
Longer, and Uncut. Tickets were $50, but if you
wanted a “private virtual happy hour” with Stelter,
you needed to pay $100 for the “VIP Experience.”
During the confab, PolitiFact’s Katie
Sanders asked Fauci, “Are you still confident that
[Covid-19] developed naturally?” To which the
convivial doctor answered, “No, I’m not convinced of
that,” going on to say “we” should continue to
investigate all hypotheses about how the pandemic
began:
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Conservatives in particular were quick to point
out that Fauci last year said, “Everything about the
stepwise evolution over time strongly indicates that
[this virus] evolved in nature and then jumped
species.” At that time last May, of course, the
issue of the pandemic’s origin had already long
since been politicized, with Donald Trump’s
administration anxious to point a finger at China
for causing the disaster. Mike Pompeo went so far as
to say there was “enormous
evidence” the disease had been created at the
Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci was touted as a
hero for pushing back on this and many other things.
Fauci’s new quote about not being “convinced”
that Covid-19 has natural origins, however, is part
of what’s becoming a rather ostentatious change of
heart within officialdom about the viability of the
so-called “lab origin” hypothesis. Through 2020,
officials and mainstream press shut down most every
discussion on that score. Reporters were heavily
influenced by a group letter signed by 27 eminent
virologists
in the
Lancet
last February in which the authors said they
“strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting
that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” and
also by a Nature Medicine
letter last March saying, “Our analyses clearly
show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct.”
The consensus was so strong that some well-known
voices saw social media
accounts
suspended or closed for speculating about
Covid-19 having a “lab origin.” One of those was
University of Hong Kong virologist Dr. Li-Meng Yan,
who went on Tucker Carlson’s show last September
15th to say “[Covid-19] is a man-made virus created
in the lab.” After that appearance, PolitiFact —
Poynter’s PolitiFact — gave the statement its
dreaded “Pants
on Fire” rating.
About a half-year later, in February, 2021, the
WHO made a visit to China. Apparently some of the
delegation left with a few doubts about the natural
origin of the virus, even though the WHO’s report
declared a lab-origin theory “extremely unlikely.”
From there came a procession of scientists demanding
that the lab origin possibility be taken seriously,
including a
letter signed by 18 experts in
Science. When the
Wall Street Journal
came out with a story that a previously
undisclosed U.S. intelligence report detailed how
three Wuhan researchers became sick enough to be
hospitalized in November of 2019, the toothpaste was
fully out of the tube: there was no longer any way
to say the “lab origin” hypothesis was too silly to
be reported upon.
That’s not to say the “lab origin” theory is
correct, at all. However, that’s irrelevant to issue
at hand. Despite what you might have been led to
believe, fact-checkers don’t exist to get things
right 100% of the time. They’re there as a
threadbare, last-ditch safety mechanism, which news
organizations employ as a means of preventing public
face-plants.
In any case, by May 17, just days after its
“Festival of Fact-Checking,” Poynter/PolitiFact had
to issue a correction to its September, 2020 “Pants
on Fire” ruling on the “lab origin” story, writing:
When this fact-check was first published in
September 2020, PolitiFact’s sources included
researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus
could not have been manipulated. That assertion
is now more widely disputed. For that reason, we
are removing this fact-check from our database
pending a more thorough review.
Fact-checkers probably saved my career on at
least a dozen occasions. When I was just starting to
report on Wall Street, Rolling Stone often
had to assign multiple people to to go through every
line of my articles to make sure I didn’t make a
complete ass of myself. I joked once that an RS
fact-checker nearly flunked the infamous line
about Goldman, Sachs being “a great vampire squid
wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly
jamming its blood-funnel into anything that smells
like money” by correctly pointing out that squids
don’t have blood-funnels. That happened, but the
bulk of the work those poor checkers did for me was
a lot less humorous and more thankless. The person
who had to review my pathetic explanation of a
Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) in
this article probably deserved hardship pay and
a lifetime supply of Thorazine. Like all writers I
complain about fact-checkers, but I’d be the last
one to say their jobs aren’t important.
However, the public is regularly misinformed
about what fact-checkers do. In most settings —
especially at daily newspapers — fact-checking, if
used at all, is the equivalent of the bare-minimum
collision insurance your average penny-pinching car
renter buys. There’s usually just enough time to
flag a few potential dangers for litigation and/or
major, obvious mistakes about things like dates,
spellings of names, wording of quotes, whether a
certain event a reporter describes even happened,
etc.
For anything more involved than that, which is
most things, fact-checkers have to scramble to make
tough judgment calls. The best ones tend to vote for
killing anything that might blow up in the face of
the organization later on. Good checkers are there
to help perpetuate the illusion of competence.
They’re professional ass-coverers, whose job is to
keep it from being obvious that Wolf Blitzer or Matt
Taibbi or whoever else you’re following on the
critical story of the day only just learned the term
hanging chad or spike protein or
herd immunity. In my experience they’re
usually pretty great at it, but their jobs are less
about determining fact than about preventing the
vast seas of ignorance underlying most professional
news operations from seeping into public view.
Unfortunately, over the course of the last five
years in particular, as the commercial media has
experienced a precipitous drop in the public trust
levels, many organizations have chosen to trumpet
fact-checking programs as a way of advertising a
dedication to “truth.” Fact-checking has furthermore
become part of the “moral clarity” argument, which
claims a phony objectivity standard once forced news
companies to always include gestures to a
perpetually wrong other side, making “truth” a
casualty to false “fairness.”
Here’s how Amanpour
put it at the Poynter Festival:
[Objectivity] is not about taking any issue,
whether it be about genocide, or the climate, or
U.S. elections, or anything else happening
around the globe — Covid, for instance — and
saying, ‘Well, on the one hand, and on the other
hand,’ and pretending there is an equal amount
of fact and truth in each basket…
Amanpour went on to note her career took off
reporting in Bosnia, where one side was being
“aggressed” and another side was not, and it would
have been an offense against decency to say
otherwise. This is a nod to the “objectivity doesn’t
mean giving equal time to Republicans” bit that has
become so popular in the industry of late (Fox
institutionalized the same argument in reverse three
decades ago).
But objectivity was never about giving equal time
and weight to “both sides.” It’s just an admission
that the news business is a high-speed operation
whose top decision-makers are working from a
knowledge level of near-zero about most things, at
best just making an honest effort at hitting the
moving target of truth.
Like fact-checking itself, the “on the one hand
and on the other hand” format is just a defense
mechanism. These people say X, these people say Y,
and because the jabbering mannequins we have reading
off our teleprompters actually know jack, we’ll let
the passage of time sort out the difficult bits.
The public used to appreciate the humility of
that approach, but what they get from us more often
now are sanctimonious speeches about how reporters
are intrepid seekers of truth who sit next to God
and gobble amphetamines so they can stay awake all
night defending democracy from “misinformation.” But
once you get past names, dates, and whether the sky
that day was blue or cloudy, the worst kind of
misinformation in journalism is to be too sure about
anything. That’s especially when dealing with
complex technical issues, and even more especially
when official sources seem invested in eliminating
discussion of alternative scenarios of those issues.
From the start, the press mostly mishandled
Covid-19 reporting. Part of this was because nearly
all of the critical issues — mask use, lockdowns,
viability of vaccine programs, and so on — were
marketed by news companies as culture-war
narratives. A related problem had to do with news
companies using the misguided notion that the news
is an exact science to promote the worse
misconception that science is an exact science. This
led to absurd spectacles like news agencies trying
to cover up or denounce as falsehood the natural
reality that officials had evolving views on things
like the efficacy of ventilators or mask use.
When CNN did a fact-check on the question, “Did
Fauci change his mind on the effectiveness of masks?”
they seemed worried about the glee Trump followers
would feel if they simply wrote yes, so the answer
instead became, “Yes, but Trump is also an asshole”
(because he implied the need to wear masks is still
up for debate). By labeling whatever the current
scientific consensus happened to be an immutable
“fact,” media outlets made the normal evolution of
scientific debates look dishonest, and pointlessly
heightened mistrust of both scientists and media.
Fact-checking was a huge boon when it was an
out-of-sight process quietly polishing the turd of
industrial reportage. When companies dragged it out
in public and made it a beast of burden for use in
impressing audiences, they defamed the tradition.
We know only a few things absolutely for sure,
like the spelling of “femur” or Blaine Gabbert’s
career interception total. The public knows pretty
much everything else is up for argument, so we only
look like jerks pretending we can fact-check the
universe. We’d do better admitting what we don’t
know.
Matt Taibbi is an American
author, journalist, and podcaster. He has reported
on finance, media, politics, and sports. He is a
contributing editor for Rolling Stone, author of
several books, co-host of Useful Idiots, and
publisher of a newsletter on Substack
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