Do you believe in “fact-checker” webstites which pretend they diligently, neutrally find out what is and isn’t true?
Before you answer, I suggest you keep reading.
The Media Research Center (MRC) put together this chart of “fact-check” items covered by the large, Spanish-speaking Univision network.
From inauguration day, 2017 to the present, here is its display of “neutral attention to political discourse:
62 fact-checks, and 59 of them are against Republicans. Not one fact-check done on anything any Democrat said. Zero.
From Kathleen Krumhansi and Ken Oliver’s article at newsbusters.org (MRC is its parent company):
The findings buttress data reported by pollsters such as Rasmussen, which indicate that an astonishing 62% of American voters believe fact-checkers are biased.
Univision’s fact-checking operation is evidently selling its audience a distorted bill of goods that explicitly serves the interests and agenda of only one side (the liberal Democrat side) of the political spectrum. The study of Univision’s fact-checking operation was done as part of the Media Research Center’s new “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers” project, which aims to bring much-needed accountability to the media’s “fact-checking” sector.
It is also worth noting that MRC separately examined Univision’s online ‘fact checks’ from the platform’s debut in March of 2016 to the last day of the Obama administration, and that during this period President Obama was, tellingly, not the subject of a single ‘fact check.’
With track records like these, it is little wonder that Univision and other liberal media-driven ‘fact-checking’ operations have not only abjectly failed to stem the public’s loss of confidence in the fairness and impartiality of the national media, but contributed to its further erosion.
Univision is a joke. But no more of a joke than the leftward “fact-checking” jokes like snopes, politifact, fact-checker, etc.
On what basis do these sites claim to be the arbiters of what is and isn’t true? Who checks them?
Please remember that the next time one of these jokes is quoted by someone purporting to be a serious journalist.
