Fact-Checking

Since the previous president of the United States had an arms-length relationship with the truth, self-described fact-checkers have kept very busy over the last five years. I concede that politicians often play fast and loose with the truth, exaggerating information that is beneficial to them and downplaying what goes against their agenda. Did I say "politicians", I should have said "people". Some things that a politician says are just a matter of opinion. An elected official could be pressing for a course of action where we won't know the results until we actually commit to it. Military involvement overseas is a good example of that. When we send our military into another country we don't really know what will happen. We don't know how the citizens of the other country will react, how neighboring countries will act or even how effective our military strategy will be. For other things, like economics, we have experts who have opinions based on the past, but not all the experts agree and unforeseen consequences often occur. Then there are statements that can easily be checked for veracity. If the president makes a statement about our trade imbalance, there are government statistics that can be referenced to verify the truth of that statement. If someone accuses a candidate of saying something, a video of the event at which it allegedly occurred can probably be found. Statements of fact are rather easily checked. Most of us, however, have days that are taken up by work, home life, family, community, etc and don't have the time or the resources to confirm everything a politician says. So we have people who specialize in fact-checking. 

One of the first dedicated fact-checking sites that I became aware of was Snopes.com. It started out as a site that looked into the so-called urban legends, but eventually started fact-checking other things, including statements by and accusations against, politicians. Other sites, such as Politifact, specialized in politics. Daniel Dale, now with CNN, dedicated the last four years to fact-checking virtually every statement made by the previous president. Unsurprisingly, a president who usurped the phrase "fake news", soon began to undermine his supporters' faith in independent fact-checkers, including them under his "fake news" umbrella. I'll say that it is important to consider the bias of a news organization and of a fact-checker, but just because a fact-checker debunks your pet conspiracy theory doesn't mean that it's unreliable. 

A reliable fact checker doesn't merely deny the in-dispute information, he cites sources, written, as well as audio and video records. These sources can then be verified by anyone who is interested in the truth of the matter. An example is the Electoral College margin of victory by the previous president in 2016. He repeatedly claimed that it was "historic", "a landslide", the "greatest margin of victory" and other superlatives. The New York Times ran a story showing that of 50 elections it was the 45th most decisive, (I may not have the exact numbers) not the "greatest". The New York Times cited their sources, which verified their conclusions. I decided to go one step further and found other sources, all of which confirmed the Times' fact-checking. A simple assertion is not fact-checking. An unsupported statement is not a debunking. Good fact-checkers will provide enough information for you to see how they arrived at their conclusions.