A Washington Post columnist admitted that fact-checkers in the age of Trump have been ineffective, pushed censorship and have undermined Americans' faith in institutions.
Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle ripped the community of fact-checkers who have tried to hold former President Trump accountable during his political career, admitting they’ve ultimately failed to hamper his support and have hurt their own institutions. The author, a staunch critic of Trump, accused those of trying to prevent the spread of Trump’s 'disinformation' of being arrogant and mistaking their own opinion with objective fact. She even accused them of censorship.
The columnist began her piece by describing the idealized mission of the Trump era fact-checkers, saying they 'devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump.' However, they didn’t save the world in her estimation. At best, they dinged Trump on some of his bragging and, at worst, they censored true facts in their thirst to correct him.
She added a more recent one, stating, 'If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified ‘cheap fakes.’' The author even noted that after each of these fact-checks blew up in the experts’ faces, they would learn some 'humility.' 'And each time, they have reemerged, unchastened,' she said.
She concluded, 'The episode sums up all the ways in which the ‘disinformation’ specialty has gone wrong with Trump: the arrogance, the confusion of opinion with legal or empirical fact, the destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it attempts to shore up democracy by clamping down on political speech. Not to mention the ineffectiveness of it all.'
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