ATCM: 'Checking the Fact-Checkers'

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "Checking the 'Fact-Checkers'," by Mark Hemingway. 

Among the myriad of ways that America turned into a dystopian nightmare in 2020, the hysteria over Covid and Donald Trump’s possible re-election created an information landscape that Americans thought was unthinkable a decade ago: Powerful institutions have normalized widespread, Soviet-style political censorship. What’s more, the American media have been the biggest cheerleaders for singling out and punishing people for no other reason than they have departed from the enforced ideological consensus by being willing to state demonstrably true facts.

There’s much to be said about how we got to this place, but it’s worth zeroing in on two particular mechanisms responsible for this state of affairs. The first is the rise of politicized media “fact-checkers,” and the second is Facebook, the social media site. The fact that these two entities have now joined forces means that speaking freely online without an algorithm slapping a warning label on innocuous opinions is now impossible. The Facebook-owned site Instagram has actually run a “fact check” on a meme that criticized lawmakers who “spend trillions on bills they haven’t read, but want details on how you spend $600.” They also have algorithms psychoanalyzing the potential for extremism. People in Facebook groups dedicated to canning food have been receiving warnings that say, “Are you concerned that someone you know is becoming too prepared?”

While I confess that I didn’t see this censorship algorithms regime gaining power so quickly, as a reporter in D.C. for more than twenty years, I did see plenty of warning signs. One in particular was hard to ignore: In the summer of 2018, I was sitting in a staff meeting at the now-defunct magazine The Weekly Standard when an editor at the publication started yelling at me.

At the time of the argument, The Weekly Standard was four months away from being shuttered, and though no one in the meeting knew we were facing the axe, a profound sense of unease had descended on the place. A hardline opposition to Trump wasn’t universally shared by the magazine’s staff, but for the two years following his election, top editors at the magazine regularly lambasted Trump and indulged in some regrettably erroneous Russia-collusion reporting. This approach was not appreciated by our regular subscribers who had overwhelmingly voted for the president.

You really can't hate them enough.

And the argument that led to me getting yelled at was another exhibit in prosecuting the case for how things at The Weekly Standard had gone wrong: We had gone from being an outlet that regularly published hard-hitting media criticism to enabling the worst media innovation in decades—so-called fact checking.

In 2017, editors above my paygrade decided that we were going to be one of a handful of media outlets that agreed to collaborate with Facebook for the social media giant’s “fact checking” program. In exchange for a few crumbs from a company with $700 billion, we would write “fact checks” taking politicians and pundits to task for spreading “disinformation” that Facebook would then use to make content-moderation decisions. In addition to writing fact check columns for our website, we would be hiring and employing an in-house fact checker whose salary was paid by Facebook. This fact checker would also be serving as a traditional in-house fact checker, going over magazine articles pre-publication to root out “errors.” The editors saw this as a win-win.

I was never consulted by the editors about this decision to work with Facebook for several obvious reasons. In 2016, I wrote a piece for the magazine’s website bluntly calling Facebook’s plan to collaborate with outside media organizations to fact check content on the platform “a terrible idea.” And years before that, in 2011, I had written a cover story for the magazine headlined “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking.’” It was the first major—and deeply critical—examination of media “fact checking” organizations, such as PolitiFact and The Washington Post Fact Checker. The article made a splash and I spent years afterwards writing tens of thousands of words inveighing against the dishonest tactics of corporate media “fact checkers” that were now working for Facebook.

The actual track record of media fact-checker malpractice and dishonesty isn’t up for debate. Long before Trump, there were critical university studies showing that fact checkers accused Republicans of lying three times as often as Democrats. Further, fact checkers’ reticence to fact check Democrats was pretty clearly tied to helping Democrats win elections. PolitiFact rated Obama’s famously dishonest 2012 campaign promise about the Obamacare law—“if you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance”—as “true” six different times. When the law phased in after Obama had lied to secure his re-election, millions of Americans were suddenly kicked off their health insurance plans. PolitiFact then disingenuously made it “lie of the year” in 2013, one year after telling the truth about the law might have made a difference in the election...

Pre-order here.