I wonder if this will be as sketchy as politifact? I hope it won't be, but I reckon it might be. (What I mean is: extremely uncharitable readings of things that they don't like, but overly charitable readings of anything that they like.)
[1] http://www.poynter.org/fact-checkers-code-of-principles/
Take the recent opinions of anonymous officials that Russia's objective in leaking DNC corruption was to get Trump elected. That's being reported on as news and fact, with the opinion aspect of it turned down to obscurity.
What exactly do you disagree with in this code of principles? [0] Or is the problem that reporting reality accurately undermines your fantasy?
[0] http://www.poynter.org/fact-checkers-code-of-principles/
I see nothing wrong with the document you link.
Sites like Snopes and Politifact do the research, with primary sources, to actually validate claims. Since conservatives can't actually invalidate those claims, they've decided to simply claim that any source which disagrees with them is biased.
It's gaslighting.
Worth scrolling through this Twitter feed [0] for individual examples. They can be validated and many are not just 'gaslighting by the right'. And others feel this way, too [1].
[0] https://twitter.com/PolitiFactBias
[1] https://twitter.com/jamestaranto/status/809480523693387777
The latest claim is that even Snopes is politically motivated and lying. The amount of gas lighting which the alt-right is doing is absurd.
The American right's association with reality is well known to be, uhh... tenuous. So it's not too surprising that they tend to disagree with people who verify facts.
Edit for downvoters: The mainstream positions of the Republican party are, objectively, factually incorrect on the issues of climate change, evolution, and women's health. I'm not aware of any issue where the left's position completely disagrees with established scientific fact. Thus, anyone concerned with basing their understanding of reality on facts is going to be "left-leaning" by simple virtue of the right's disregard for fact.
I've vouched your prior comment because I believe its content should be visible. It would be a shame if anyone were to confuse that action with an endorsement.
I don't think the fake news is actually what won the election anyway. If anything it was Wikileaks' extreme authenticity that won the election, and I'm struggling to understand how this is 'fake'. I'm assuming that they're trying to delegitimise it by association however.
I also find it hard to believe that it was Russia that orchestrated the leaks with zero evidence shown. It's not so easy to trace cyberattacks, and it just seems like officials are looking for a scapegoat for why they didn't win.
There seems to be just as much fake news coming out of the left as from the right, albeit smarter less off-the-wall/gutter stuff.
Frankly the news media seems not to have learned this lesson. If anything the last few weeks have seen them even further off the reservation. When in a decade it's clear that the institution of journalism is completely dead, this episode will loom large in explanation. "Journalists" are seriously arguing that providing relevant information about political candidates is an "attack on the nation". They're mortgaging all their credibility for the latest unsourced meta-analysis of months-old public information spoon-fed to them by petulant spurned spooks. Every day they come up with something goofier, and yet they can't escape the impression that we've heard this all before.
What stands out the most is the complete lack of objectivity. If a Republican candidate were crying about losing due to anonymous (even if vaguely Slavic...) revelations about her banal tawdriness, they'd be falling over themselves to laugh at her.
Take a look at these two stories:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/oct/...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
Now, the first story is simply true. Hillary Clinton did attack her husband's mistresses and accusers, and there's a long history of documentation of that. But Politifact labels it "mostly false" because it was never proven to have come directly from her. As if Sidney Blumenthal just took it upon himself to slander Lewinsky as a delusional nymphomaniac.
In the second link, Clinton claims none of her emails were labelled Top Secret. Note the dodge, here. She didn't say, "I didn't send or receive classified information", she said "those emails didn't contain the correct headers". I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest, given that we know she tried desperately to modify the records of the emails once they were discovered, if those headers were simply stripped either before or after the fact. Either way, she is simply not stupid enough to not know what she was doing. But she claims innocence through stupidity, and politifact labels it "mostly true".
What do both of these examples show? That when Hillary walks the line and is careful not to explicitly say anything demonstrably false, while clearly lying in substance, politifact says she's honest. When Trump says something that's substantively true, while not paying attention to specifics, politifact says he's lying.
This is not intellectually honest fact-checking. Letting one candidate play word games and lie while calling out the other for being less careful but telling the truth is not fact-checking, it's shilling.
> But Politifact labels it "mostly false" because it was never proven to have come directly from her.
These statements are mutually incompatible. There can't be a long history of documentation for something which is proven.
Start your own fact-checker. Your examples just affirm that Politifact is doing it's job correctly.
Thing is, you're not pretending to be impartial and non-partisan. Nor am I. Politifact is. When Politifact's standard of objectivity is indistinguishable from that of a reasonably intelligent random commenter on the Internet, that's a problem.
There can't be a long history of documentation for something which is proven.
> There can't be a long history of documentation for something which is unproven.
Source?
But privately, she embraced the Clinton campaign’s aggressive strategy of counterattack: Women who claimed to have had sexual encounters with Mr. Clinton would become targets of digging and discrediting — tactics that women’s rights advocates frequently denounce.
The campaign hired a private investigator with a bare-knuckles reputation who embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”
In a pattern that would later be repeated with other women, the investigator’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know Ms. Flowers, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.
By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by the private investigator to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”
Mrs. Clinton’s level of involvement in that effort, as described in interviews, internal campaign records and archives, is still the subject of debate. By some accounts, she gave the green light and was a motivating force; by others, her support was no more than tacit assent.
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The Clintonian strategy of attacking, slandering, and blackmailing his accusers is a matter of historical record. And there are many people in the know who said she was a driving force behind it, while others claim she merely acquiesced to it. You can read Hitchens recount the sordid affair here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/1999/05/christopher-hitchens-...
Or read No One Left to Lie to for a more in-depth look.
Now you don't have to believe she was the one driving the bus in the smear campaigns against her husband's accusers, even though plenty of people who were there at the time have said she was. But it does show that Politifact is being especially uncharitable to that claim, when they simply could have said it was disputed.