Americans Aren't Buying What Fact Checkers Are Selling

[rangerrebew]

Americans Aren't Buying What Fact Checkers Are Selling
[1]
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It’s not easy convincing people to accept uncomfortable things as true.
Christopher A. Preble [2]

Fact checking must be counted among the many victims of this election season (others include political prognosticators and professional campaign advisers/fundraisers). PolitiFact judged 15 percent [3] of Donald Trump’s statements as True or Mostly True, while 51 percent of his pronouncements were False or “Pants on Fire” False. Trump earned fifty-nine “four Pinocchio” ratings [4] from the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, compared with seven for Hillary Clinton. Trump won the election anyway.

Last month, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin offered up a solution [5]: think tanks. “In an era of ‘fake news,’ with a president-elect who regularly lies and partisan hacks who dispute that there are such things as ‘facts,’” she wrote, “think tanks seem more important than ever.” She called on think tanks to author more joint studies, for example “a joint project confirming Russian attempts to interfere with our and our allies’ elections” and to convene more panels featuring a broad spectrum of views, including by inviting colleagues from other institutions to speak. She even called out the Cato Institute, my intellectual home for the last fourteen years. (As it happens, we’ll be hosting our first foreign-policy event of 2017 [6] on January 17, featuring, among others, Kathleen Hicks from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and moderated by the Post’s own Karen DeYoung. Rubin is welcome to join us.)

 
Source URL (retrieved on January 9, 2017): http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/americans-arent-buying-what-fact-checkers-are-selling-18955

[Doug Loss]

Perhaps they'd have more success if the "fact checkers" weren't so obviously creations of the same MSM fake news sources that were already clearly lying to us about, oh, everything.  No one trusts the "fact checkers" because they're untrustworthy.

[Maj. Bill Martin]

Gee, and here I thought that part of my role as a citizen is to "fact-check" things on my own before accepting them as true.

Generally, I've found that if you follow a few simple rules, it's not that tough:

1) If it sounds too good or too bad to be true, it probably isn't.

2) If it doesn't seem consistent with common sense, and the way people normally act, it probably isn't.

3)  If it is only being reported by sources whose bias it seems to favor, double down on your own fact checking before accepting it as true.


Two recent examples are Sarah Palin going off on "Obama awarding himself a medal" and some on the left going off on Trump firing all the political Ambassadors on day one.  A little bit of fact checking confirmed that the same medal had been awarded by prior outgoing SecDef's to Clinton and Bush, and that Obama also had fired political ambassadors from day one.  but because the narrative fit some folks biases, they ran with "Look at what he's did!" stories before getting the facts.

It's on us, not professional "fact checkers".

[HonestJohn]

Gee, and here I thought that part of my role as a citizen is to "fact-check" things on my own before accepting them as true.

Generally, I've found that if you follow a few simple rules, it's not that tough:

1) If it sounds too good or too bad to be true, it probably isn't.

2) If it doesn't seem consistent with common sense, and the way people normally act, it probably isn't.

3)  If it is only being reported by sources whose bias it seems to favor, double down on your own fact checking before accepting it as true.


Two recent examples are Sarah Palin going off on "Obama awarding himself a medal" and some on the left going off on Trump firing all the political Ambassadors on day one.  A little bit of fact checking confirmed that the same medal had been awarded by prior outgoing SecDef's to Clinton and Bush, and that Obama also had fired political ambassadors from day one.  but because the narrative fit some folks biases, they ran with "Look at what he's did!" stories before getting the facts.

It's on us, not professional "fact checkers".

People don't want to do it.

Which is why we get things like the 'anti-vaxxer' movement and how NASA's moon landing was a fake.  For people don't check... and end up believing any and everything they hear.

And it's also why these fact-checker organizations will probably thrive.  (Outsourcing the unwanted task)

[Doug Loss]

Gee, and here I thought that part of my role as a citizen is to "fact-check" things on my own before accepting them as true.

Generally, I've found that if you follow a few simple rules, it's not that tough:

1) If it sounds too good or too bad to be true, it probably isn't.

2) If it doesn't seem consistent with common sense, and the way people normally act, it probably isn't.

3)  If it is only being reported by sources whose bias it seems to favor, double down on your own fact checking before accepting it as true.


Two recent examples are Sarah Palin going off on "Obama awarding himself a medal" and some on the left going off on Trump firing all the political Ambassadors on day one.  A little bit of fact checking confirmed that the same medal had been awarded by prior outgoing SecDef's to Clinton and Bush, and that Obama also had fired political ambassadors from day one.  but because the narrative fit some folks biases, they ran with "Look at what he's did!" stories before getting the facts.

It's on us, not professional "fact checkers".

You forgot one.  If it requires the silence of more than 3 government employees for a period of more than 6 months, it isn't true.