FACT CHECKERS LIE TOO

There are three areas in public life where we expect unbiased opinions. The first is our courts. If a judge has political bias, the court is dysfunctional and actual does more harm than good. The next is pollsters. The mere fact that they carry labels such as he/she is a republican pollster or he/she is a democratic pollster invalidates any result they want to sell. Media outlets should not use their results. If they do, they contaminate their news paper, TV show, or magazine. Recently, the Republican convention revealed the third area. One I had not thought about before, and that is fact checkers. Speakers at the Republican convention in Tampa lied mightily and Republican fact checkers scored the lies as truths while the Democratic fact checkers scored them as lies.

The paradox is that the media outlets beg us to trust them. They claim the their readership or listeners depends on them to tell the truth. FOX News used to have a blub: Fair and Unbiased. They are not fair; they are biased, still they have a huge following. It appears that people who listen to them want them to lie. This is unsettling. I heard something the other day that summed up the situation nicely about ownership of political influential news media—Rupert Murdock type people, “No one buys a bicycle if they don’t want to ride.” Thus the greatest fact checker, the one we should be able to depend on, often lie, just as defendants what judges to make decisions that favor them, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United, and pollsters to show their candidate is winning when he/she is not.  This is corruption of our cherished free enterprise system. The conclusion is simple: it is not the judges, the pollsters, or the fact checkers who are wrong it is you and me for not demanding integrity publically, such as on Twitter, Facebook, or Goggle Blogs.  Like Shakespeare wrote, “To be or not to be”, now is the time to be noticed, to be, for the good of everyone.