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So as not to further hijack the Cartoons and Funnies thread, this thread is first a follow-up on the story about the government providing crack pipes for addicts, which was broached in the C&F thread, https://community.notpolitical.info/...234#post352234
Invasion of the Fact-Checkers - Tablet Magazine
This piece by Jacob Siegel vivisects so-called fact-checkers with a number of recent examples. It begins this way:
The big tech leaders experienced the same vise Bill Gates was once in, when he was threatened with dismemberment unless he started donating to political interests. This:
Mr. Siegel concludes,
Top o' the hat to Newsbusters, Hunter Biden Laptop Revamp Prompts Sharp Piece on 'Invasion of the Fact-Checkers'
Then there are those hard-to-miss moments when factual reports of obvious blunders are recontextualized as “mostly false” or “misleading,” in order to spare political officials and their patrons the trouble of defending their unpopular policies. In early February, the Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration was “set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance ‘racial equity.’” The report was quickly seized on by conservative commentators and politicians who picked up on the fact that millions of Americans would see such a plan as, on its face, idiotic, and cartoonishly racist, and thus an embarrassment to the White House. In the old days, the revelation might have led to some lower-level bureaucrat stepping forward to fall on his or her sword, or at least admit blame. But times have changed, and now instead of managing public fallout from the gaffe, the advanced guard of the fact-checking bureau can issue official decrees that there never was a gaffe and any suggestions of one are misinformation, while erasing the evidence of contrary views.
Which is exactly what happened in the case of some bureaucrat’s brilliant plan to hand out free crack pipes to promote racial “equity.” Within days, the fact-checking lobby leaped into action to defend the honor of the White House. Snopes and Politifact both declared the Beacon’s report “mostly false,” while Factcheck.org referred to it as misinformation. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, Forbes, USA Today, and dozens of other members of the media’s fact-checking clusterfuck issued similar verdicts, backed by their brand names and by official-sounding pods at big-name universities.
What is striking here, aside from the level of unanimity, is that none of the fact-checkers disputed the assertion that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) grant included funding for “safe smoking kits” to be distributed to drug users. Rather, they simply echoed the government’s denial that crack pipes would be included in the kits—a denial made only after the Beacon article was published—and then seized on the fact that not all of the $30 million set aside for the grant would be used to purchase the kits, which the Beacon had never asserted, in order to claim that the entire story was false. In true Stalinoid fashion, Snopes added an editor’s note to its entry explaining that it had changed its rating from “Mostly False” to “Outdated” after HHS “stipulated that federal funding would not be used to include pipes in the safe smoking kits.” Translation: The Beacon’s reporting was essentially accurate all along, and labeling it false was a stalling tactic to buy time for the government to prepare a response that could then be retroactively applied to rewrite the past.
By putting an official stamp on obvious manipulations of language, the fact-checkers license false and misleading coverage by outlets that playact the quaint 20th-century practice of objective news reporting—calling balls and strikes—while also batting for Team Democrat. The convergence of fact-checking and Democratic Party priorities is not a matter of speculation. The Democratic National Committee calls for establishing a “political misinformation policy” and repeatedly cites the International Fact-Checking Network’s partnerships with tech companies as a model for the party’s national censorship policy.
Once the fact-checkers issued their professional verdicts, multiple articles appeared that slammed the Beacon’s report while affirming its central claims. The Chicago Tribune decried the “misleading ‘crack pipes’ uproar” in a piece that also acknowledged the “slender glass tube used to smoke crack cocaine and other drugs” are, in fact, “the key part of so-called safe smoking kits” distributed by local groups. But instead of drawing attention to the use of crack pipes for smoking crack—an uncomfortable association freighted with unsavory and potentially racist connotations—the article coaches readers to understand that the “slender tubes” are “an innocuous part of the arsenal” for harm reduction specialists. In its own article on the controversy, The New York Times acknowledged “some harm reduction programs do include sterile pipes—which are used for smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl as well as crack cocaine,” before declaring with utmost seriousness that “nonpartisan fact-checkers have debunked the claim” that the Biden administration “intended to pay for distribution of pipes.”
Which is exactly what happened in the case of some bureaucrat’s brilliant plan to hand out free crack pipes to promote racial “equity.” Within days, the fact-checking lobby leaped into action to defend the honor of the White House. Snopes and Politifact both declared the Beacon’s report “mostly false,” while Factcheck.org referred to it as misinformation. The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Reuters, Forbes, USA Today, and dozens of other members of the media’s fact-checking clusterfuck issued similar verdicts, backed by their brand names and by official-sounding pods at big-name universities.
What is striking here, aside from the level of unanimity, is that none of the fact-checkers disputed the assertion that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) grant included funding for “safe smoking kits” to be distributed to drug users. Rather, they simply echoed the government’s denial that crack pipes would be included in the kits—a denial made only after the Beacon article was published—and then seized on the fact that not all of the $30 million set aside for the grant would be used to purchase the kits, which the Beacon had never asserted, in order to claim that the entire story was false. In true Stalinoid fashion, Snopes added an editor’s note to its entry explaining that it had changed its rating from “Mostly False” to “Outdated” after HHS “stipulated that federal funding would not be used to include pipes in the safe smoking kits.” Translation: The Beacon’s reporting was essentially accurate all along, and labeling it false was a stalling tactic to buy time for the government to prepare a response that could then be retroactively applied to rewrite the past.
By putting an official stamp on obvious manipulations of language, the fact-checkers license false and misleading coverage by outlets that playact the quaint 20th-century practice of objective news reporting—calling balls and strikes—while also batting for Team Democrat. The convergence of fact-checking and Democratic Party priorities is not a matter of speculation. The Democratic National Committee calls for establishing a “political misinformation policy” and repeatedly cites the International Fact-Checking Network’s partnerships with tech companies as a model for the party’s national censorship policy.
Once the fact-checkers issued their professional verdicts, multiple articles appeared that slammed the Beacon’s report while affirming its central claims. The Chicago Tribune decried the “misleading ‘crack pipes’ uproar” in a piece that also acknowledged the “slender glass tube used to smoke crack cocaine and other drugs” are, in fact, “the key part of so-called safe smoking kits” distributed by local groups. But instead of drawing attention to the use of crack pipes for smoking crack—an uncomfortable association freighted with unsavory and potentially racist connotations—the article coaches readers to understand that the “slender tubes” are “an innocuous part of the arsenal” for harm reduction specialists. In its own article on the controversy, The New York Times acknowledged “some harm reduction programs do include sterile pipes—which are used for smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl as well as crack cocaine,” before declaring with utmost seriousness that “nonpartisan fact-checkers have debunked the claim” that the Biden administration “intended to pay for distribution of pipes.”
This piece by Jacob Siegel vivisects so-called fact-checkers with a number of recent examples. It begins this way:
In the past five years, a cadre of fact-checkers has marched through the institutions of journalism and installed itself in the U.S. media as a privatized, quasi-governmental regulatory agency. What’s wrong with facts, you say? Fueled by a panic over misinformation, the fact-checking industry is shifting the media’s primary obligation away from pursuing the truth and toward upholding vague notions of public safety, which it gets to define. In the course of this transformation, journalists are being turned into rent-a-cops whose job is to enforce an official consensus that is treated as a civic good by those who benefit from—and pay for—its protection.
At Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—content flagged as false or misleading gets downgraded in the platform’s algorithms so fewer people will see it. Google and Twitter have similar rules to bury posts. In reality, America’s new public-private “Ministry of Truth” mainly serves the interests of the tech platforms and Democratic Party operatives who underwrite and support the fact-checking enterprise. This, in turn, convinces large numbers of normal Americans that the officially sanctioned news product they receive is an ass-covering con job—an attitude that marks many millions of people as potentially dangerous vectors of misinformation, which justifies more censorship, further ratcheting up the public’s cynicism toward the press and the institutional powers it now openly serves. On and on it goes, the distrust and repression feeding off each other, the pressure building up until the system breaks down or explodes.
At Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—content flagged as false or misleading gets downgraded in the platform’s algorithms so fewer people will see it. Google and Twitter have similar rules to bury posts. In reality, America’s new public-private “Ministry of Truth” mainly serves the interests of the tech platforms and Democratic Party operatives who underwrite and support the fact-checking enterprise. This, in turn, convinces large numbers of normal Americans that the officially sanctioned news product they receive is an ass-covering con job—an attitude that marks many millions of people as potentially dangerous vectors of misinformation, which justifies more censorship, further ratcheting up the public’s cynicism toward the press and the institutional powers it now openly serves. On and on it goes, the distrust and repression feeding off each other, the pressure building up until the system breaks down or explodes.
t first, Mark Zuckerberg resisted charges that social media policing, or the lack thereof, was responsible for the results of the 2016 election, saying it was “a pretty crazy idea” and that it was “extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome.” But under pressure from leading Democrats including Hillary Clinton, a coordinated push from the party’s halo of nonprofits, and a coup from his own employees, who include some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, Zuckerberg buckled.
On Nov. 17, 2016, a new organization called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to the beleaguered Facebook CEO. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN generously offered on behalf of the letter’s signatories, a group of 20 nominally independent fact-checking organizations grouped under its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in a new fact-checking initiative that would vet information—all information—on the world’s largest and most influential social media platform. So who is the IFCN again?
The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based media nonprofit that calls itself a “global leader in journalism” and has become a central hub in the sprawling counter-disinformation complex. Poynter’s funding comes from the triumvirate that undergirds the U.S. nonprofit sector: Silicon Valley tech companies, philanthropic organizations with political agendas, and the U.S. government. The nonprofit sector, as it’s euphemistically called, is an immense, labyrinthine engine of ideological and financial activism that was valued at almost $4 trillion in 2019, the overwhelming majority of which is dedicated to “progressive” causes. The IFCN’s initial funding came from the U.S. State Department-backed National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
With no formal membership, the IFCN acts as the high body for the dozens of fact-checking organizations grouped under its umbrella that have endorsed its code of principles. According to the organization’s website, its mission is “to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
The IFCN’s fact-checking operation offers something different to all of the various players who directly and indirectly shape its mission. For government officials, it provides a means to outsource both political messaging and the responsibilities of censorship. For technology companies, it’s a method of exercising control over their own regulators by putting them on the payroll. And for journalists, watching their industry collapse and their status erode as the public turns on them, its steady work in one of the media’s only remaining growth fields, as information regulators.
The consequences for anyone who resisted the new mandate were serious. Social media companies and newsrooms that did not get with the program and empower the brigades of truthy technocrats were accused of helping Russia, bringing fascism to America, supporting white supremacy, and worse.
Contrary to the preferred self-image of data scientists, neutrally officiating claims from the sidelines, fact-checkers tend to see their work in salvationist terms. In his final day on the job in 2019, the IFCN’s founding director, Alexios Mantzarlis, published a blog post where he wrote: “fact-checkers are no longer a fresh-faced journalistic reform movement; they are wrinkly arbiters of a take-no-prisoners war for the future of the internet.” Mantzarlis provided a useful overview of their guiding mission, which is to turn back the tide of populism empowered by the internet and restore the hierarchies of knowledge, which, in the technocratic mind, are the proper foundation of liberal societies. Mantzarlis now works at Google as a policy lead.
On Nov. 17, 2016, a new organization called the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) published an open letter to the beleaguered Facebook CEO. “We would be glad to engage with you about how your editors could spot and debunk fake claims,” the IFCN generously offered on behalf of the letter’s signatories, a group of 20 nominally independent fact-checking organizations grouped under its network. The following month, Facebook announced that the IFCN would be its main partner in a new fact-checking initiative that would vet information—all information—on the world’s largest and most influential social media platform. So who is the IFCN again?
The IFCN was launched in 2015 as a division of the Poynter Institute, a St. Petersburg, Florida-based media nonprofit that calls itself a “global leader in journalism” and has become a central hub in the sprawling counter-disinformation complex. Poynter’s funding comes from the triumvirate that undergirds the U.S. nonprofit sector: Silicon Valley tech companies, philanthropic organizations with political agendas, and the U.S. government. The nonprofit sector, as it’s euphemistically called, is an immense, labyrinthine engine of ideological and financial activism that was valued at almost $4 trillion in 2019, the overwhelming majority of which is dedicated to “progressive” causes. The IFCN’s initial funding came from the U.S. State Department-backed National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
With no formal membership, the IFCN acts as the high body for the dozens of fact-checking organizations grouped under its umbrella that have endorsed its code of principles. According to the organization’s website, its mission is “to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.”
The IFCN’s fact-checking operation offers something different to all of the various players who directly and indirectly shape its mission. For government officials, it provides a means to outsource both political messaging and the responsibilities of censorship. For technology companies, it’s a method of exercising control over their own regulators by putting them on the payroll. And for journalists, watching their industry collapse and their status erode as the public turns on them, its steady work in one of the media’s only remaining growth fields, as information regulators.
The consequences for anyone who resisted the new mandate were serious. Social media companies and newsrooms that did not get with the program and empower the brigades of truthy technocrats were accused of helping Russia, bringing fascism to America, supporting white supremacy, and worse.
Contrary to the preferred self-image of data scientists, neutrally officiating claims from the sidelines, fact-checkers tend to see their work in salvationist terms. In his final day on the job in 2019, the IFCN’s founding director, Alexios Mantzarlis, published a blog post where he wrote: “fact-checkers are no longer a fresh-faced journalistic reform movement; they are wrinkly arbiters of a take-no-prisoners war for the future of the internet.” Mantzarlis provided a useful overview of their guiding mission, which is to turn back the tide of populism empowered by the internet and restore the hierarchies of knowledge, which, in the technocratic mind, are the proper foundation of liberal societies. Mantzarlis now works at Google as a policy lead.
. . . [T]he convergence of government power with fact-checking is neither a conspiracy nor an accident. A 2018 report from the Columbia Journalism Review offered “lessons for platform-publisher collaborations as Facebook and news outlets team to fight misinformation.” It also offered a warning:
“If Facebook creates entirely new, immensely powerful, and utterly private fact-checking partnerships with ostensibly public-spirited news organizations, it becomes virtually impossible to know in whose interests and according to which dynamics our public communication systems are operating.”
“If Facebook creates entirely new, immensely powerful, and utterly private fact-checking partnerships with ostensibly public-spirited news organizations, it becomes virtually impossible to know in whose interests and according to which dynamics our public communication systems are operating.”
I hope you're right.
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