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I’ve been spending a lot of my time thinking about things that deserve to be preserved. This form of stewardship is, admittedly, subjective, but since everyone has their own ideas of what to protect, it balances out, for the most part.
One thing that doesn’t need to be preserved is the modern fact-checker.
Why?
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Because they don’t check facts. They used to, back in the beginning of the internet, when hoaxes were common and people didn’t know how to look for themselves, especially because a fantastic search engine named Google wasn’t a thing yet—then it started sucking, but that’s a different story…sort of—and so websites and news organizations tried to help.
But as T. Beckett Adams notes over at his Substack, that profession is dead . I rule it a suicide.
“Did Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library donate books to children in Israel?” asked a Snopes headline . The subhead reassured readers: “PJ Library, which provides free books to Jewish children, was inspired by Parton’s organization. But the two have no formal relationship.”
Phew! That was close! (This episode is funnier when one discovers that the article’s author, Nur Ibrahim, “started her career as an associate producer with Al Jazeera English ” — because of course she did.)
One might ask: “What’s the problem? There was an online rumor, and Snopes disproved it. Isn’t that its function?”
As my friend Noam Blum explained, “‘Dolly Parton donated books to Israel’ would only be a statement worth debunking if its untruth was somehow harmful. The framing of ‘don’t worry, folks, she didn’t do it, and you can keep loving her’ is the problem.”
No one would feel compelled to correct the assertion that Dolly Parton prefers spring over autumn. Fact-checkers, especially of the Snopes variety, usually address the wild, the fantastical, or the defamatory. But for the modern-day Snopes , the claim that Parton’s foundation might have benefited Jewish children occupies the same moral universe as allegations that Katy Perry has a “ penchant for cannibalism .”
The point is: Modern fact-checking groups exist largely to peddle this sort of junk, serving institutional interests or personal bugaboos, but rarely the public good.
Snopes is hardly unique; examples abound.
PolitiFact , which has been a mess for years, awarded its “Pants on Fire” rating to the hypothesis that Covid-19 was “not from nature” but “a man-made virus created in the lab.” ( It later retracted its rating .) By contrast, the outfit declined to penalize either Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) or then–Senator Kamala Harris when both repeated the objective lie that a police officer “murdered” Michael Brown .
In other words, they run interference.
My favorite “fact-checker” story involves a piece that my Bearing Arms editor Cam Edwards wrote when Kamala Harris was named Joe Biden’s running mate. He pointed out her anti-gun past, completely with sourced quotes, and ran it. At the time, Facebook used these fact-checkers to flag “misinformation,” and so when the fact-checker tried to claim that Cam was wrong, it hurt the story’s reach on the platform.
Townhall fought it and won, but the damage was done. The window closed.
See, the issue is that fact-checkers are people, which is fine. What’s not fine is that many people let their biases color their view of the truth. We all do it, to some degree, even if we genuinely try not to.
The difference is that, for example, I write opinion, which means I’m pretty explicit that I’m sharing my opinions. I can be factually wrong, and while it’s not acceptable, it’s also not like I’m pretending I’m the arbiter of truth.
Fact-checkers, however, do. They use their position to dismiss actual facts that happen to be inconvenient to one side. They decided they need to fact-check the claim that Dolly Parton might have donated books to Israeli kids, not because there’s anything actually wrong with it, but because they think there is.
They shield leftist politicians from the ramifications of their own lies, while attacking anyone else who says inconvenient truths that the left has decreed as forbidden.
Fact-checking counts on trust. Back in the day, Snopes was trusted because they backed things up and told the truth. They weren’t talking about politics, but whether the story about the guy who killed someone on a town’s “lover’s lane” every Valentine’s Day was true.
That was simple and defensible.
Then politics got into the mix, as it all too often does, and they started talking nonsense.
So, the fact-checkers aren’t checking facts. They’re spouting fiction, just fiction from Team Blue, and calling everything Team Red says a lie.
What happens, though, when everything you do is built on trust, only you betray it— not through mistakes, but through conscious decisions?
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You’re going to lose that trust. You’re going to lose that status you had and replace it with that of a propagandist.
Especially when, even if you’re not lying, just the choice of target betrays your biases and firmly places you as marketing for the left rather than anything else. Like the Dolly Parton thing above, or this from Adams:
Finally, consider Trump’s State of the Union address this year when he declared: “The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended. It still continues because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American patriot, and our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder, and more glorious than ever before.”
Not so fast , countered an Associated Press fact-check: “The American Revolution started the previous year, on April 19, 1775. . . . The colonies declared independence in 1776. It ended Sept. 3, 1783.”
I mean, it’s not wrong, but it’s not exactly relevant for anything except showing that any mistake by Team Red is unforgivable, even as “fact”-checkers shielded those who claimed Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri.
The usefulness of fact-checking, at least as a profession, is dead. Again, it was a suicide.
Of all the things I find worthy of preserving for the future, this is most definitely not one of them, and it’s because of the fact-checkers themselves.
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