A couple of days ago Dinesh D’Souza posted a video examining the claim of Politifact’s Angie Holan that her Florida based “fact checking” agency was politically neutral. Presumably, that would be a primary requirement for those concerned with “just the facts.”
Dinesh focuses on a recent interview in which Angie is asked to comment on Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the Covid pandemic in N.Y. State. Her reaction to the question is immediately, noticeably defensive. Whereas Cuomo’s strategy, which he started in late March and suspended in early May, clearly led to the deaths of more than 10,000 of the elderly, a statistic which he lied about until being recently exposed, Ms. Holan goes on at some length about how the death rate in New York was really not all that different from other states. In watching her it becomes quite clear that had Trump pursued the same sort of policy as Cuomo, she would be exploding with “factual” documentation of his vileness. But as it is a Democrat who is under the microscope, her response consists of vague generalizations about the pandemic without ever really confronting the “facts” of the issue she was asked to consider. Dinesh concludes that her claim to be an unbiased “fact checker” has no more integrity than CNN’s ludicrous claim to be just about the news.
Liz Wheeler, another wonderful, intelligent, rational “conservative” whom I access on a regular basis, has just revealed she has been impugned by Lead Stories, another fact checking agency which purports to be devoid of bias. But, she asserts, Lead Stories is funded by Google, Facebook and a Tik Tok affiliate. She has, in other words, been sanctioned by the brazenly biased agents of both Big Tech and the Chinese Communist Government! Her sin, it would seem, was to question the wisdom of a proposed N.Y. Bill which would entitle that State’s government to round up those who tested positive for Covid and place them in detention centers. Accusing Wheeler of a minor piece of misinformation of which she was not guilty, Lead Stories was allowed to cast her entire on-line presentation into question by declaring it to be of dubious content.
Perhaps my most powerful motivation these days is the imperviousness of many so-called intelligent people to the incredible pollution of our culture by the unconscious biases of the Left. In 90% of its usage, the term “hate speech” is used to denigrate statements that are perfectly rational. In the same way the term “fact checker” has come to be used to disguise the intentions of those who are actually interested in anything but the “facts.” How, a rational, traditional liberal [i.e., a “conservative”] might ask, is communication of any sort possible in a world where both Logic and Language have been robbed of their integrity?
“Unconscious bias of the left” most on the left are very conscious of their bias. They justify this bias in their superiority.
It’s a matter of semantics, I suppose…..They don’t think they’re biased, they think they’re right, which means they are in effect unaware of their bias.