''The Fact-Checkers Are Clueless''

CNN's Jake Tapper is the latest mainstream journalist to attack Bernie Sanders's Medicare-for-All plan. And just like all the others, his fact-checking is an absolute joke.

08.20.2018


Excerpt:

To determine whether the study says what Sanders says, you need to read it and independently judge that. If you are not capable of doing that, which most journalists aren’t due to the complexity of the matter, then you need to talk to a lot of people from different sides who have read the report and have the skills necessary to describe it to you. Instead, journalists like Tapper have decided to only ask Blahous, who has an incentive to deceive people, what the report says rather than asking neutral experts or experts from different political persuasions to describe the report.

It is not just Tapper who has done this, of course. According to Bernie Sanders’s policy director Warren Gunnels, the Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler did not contact the Sanders office prior to writing his similar fact check and, when Gunnels later contacted Kessler to complain, Kessler allegedly said that “he has known the author of the Mercatus study for years & basically trusts whatever he says.” Kessler went on to issue three substantive corrections to his fact check, which seems to suggest that perhaps Blahous was not steering him straight.

This is the kind of nonsense we are dealing with here. Tribal affiliations are getting in the way of basic presentations of facts and figures. The centrist and liberal media brand themselves as truth-tellers, but that’s all it is: a brand. When the truth goes against their tribe or ideological priors, they become just as bad as Fox News.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/08/bernie-sanders-mercatus-study-medicare-for-all