10/16/2024 by AR

what? even the fact checkers?

In recent months, many have quoted fact checkers to justify the solidity of their perspective. The flaw in that logic is that many have not realized that fact checkers are also not free from bias or skewing of perspective. Fact checkers are not automatically objective arbiters. In fact, often they are not.

Sometimes it matters how an argument is asked. Sometimes an analysis suggests a claim is clearly “true” or clearly “false” when it’s not known for certain one way or another.

And living in a season when many feel empowered to fact check, inconsistently determining both who and what they will check whenever they do or do not wish, makes the process all the more confusing.

Hence, as we move further into a month where more of us are paying attention to the news — challenging and polarizing as that can so often be — let’s add fact checking to our bias conversation.

Wait… why?

Allow us to quote, AllSides, one of the rare contemporary resources where we can trust what we’re reading and hearing. As their editorial philosophy states, AllSides “strengthens our democratic society with balanced news, media bias ratings, diverse perspectives, and real conversation. We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other.”

The Intramuralist believes that better understanding the world and each other is a good thing to do.

So we recognize that bias exists. In news sources. In each of us.

But hidden bias is the larger problem. Hidden bias “misleads and divides us.” It also makes us ignorant and unaware of how our own perspective is skewed.

Hence, we present today’s fact checking resource to minimize division, believing the intensity and acceptance of division to be an increasingly unhealthy aspect of our society.

Here is how the fact checkers line up:

Notice how many fact checkers lean,This is good to know, as knowing the bias of the fact checkers can help us seek out better, more balanced news, crafting more objective and actually accurate perspective.

It can also help us think more for ourselves.

Respectfully… and yes, in this together…

AR

“Cast your mind back to the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. It was then that Joe Biden emerged as the “Great Moderate Hope.” Recall that by the time the first Democratic presidential primary debates were held in late June 2019, leading candidates were seeking to outflank one another to the left. The thinking was that a Democratic electorate radicalized by the Trump presidency would respond favorably to maximally progressive positions. Many of these candidates endorsed a wide range of radical policy options: “Medicare for All” reforms that would eliminate private health insurance; a Green New Deal with an aggressive timeline for reducing reliance on fossil fuels; banning fracking; decriminalizing unauthorized migration over the Mexican border; providing health insurance to illegal immigrants; allowing prisoners to vote; abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and promising reparations to the descendants of slaves. Joe Biden, by and large, did not participate in this race to the left. Instead, he took advantage of both his primary opponents’ radical ideas and the chaos of Trump’s governance by striking a moderate note, promising to pursue progressive but sensible policies, restore the “soul of America,” provide the help Americans needed to get through the crisis, and, of course and above all, beat Donald Trump. This was a congenial message to the Democratic primary electorate, starting with black voters in South Carolina on February 29 and running through every demographic on Super Tuesday and beyond. It turned out that, despite the strenuous appeals of many candidates to the party’s rising left, most Democratic primary voters had more pragmatic and moderate views than the media-anointed advocates for a more radical party. Other candidates’ failure to understand this emptied the field for Biden, who cruised to the nomination after Super Tuesday.

Then a funny thing happened which was a “tell” on whether Biden intended to govern—as opposed to run—as a moderate. Usually, candidates attempt to move toward the center in preparation for a general-election campaign. But Biden did the reverse. He formed six “unity task forces” jointly coordinated by Biden and Bernie Sanders campaign figures, covering climate change, criminal-justice reform, the economy, education, health care, and immigration. The co-chairs included such lions of the left as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, then-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and the task forces themselves were well stocked with Sanders (and Elizabeth Warren) supporters. The task forces produced a blizzard of positions and language considerably to the left of the “moderate, normie” politics upon which Biden had built his successful campaign. And these positions and language found their way into the Democratic Party platform, were incorporated into Biden’s campaign promises and, importantly, determined how the Biden administration made staffing and policy decisions. Despite Biden and his team’s initial insistence that the strenuous leftism found on Twitter wasn’t real life, by the end of the campaign they seemed to be quite happy to act as though it was.”