When Kelly Conway first uttered the phrase “fake news,” it was quickly ridiculed by Democrats across the country. When President Trump adopted it, it became a punchline to any conservative claims, facts, or observations that didn’t fly with mainstream media coverage. Democrats, as they do so well, effectively turned it into a punchline that often made the person who said it in seriously out to be a nutjob conspiracy theorist. But they also went one better. They improved on it. The Democrats came up with “misinformation,” which sounds far more serious and sophisticated. While “fake news” is the utterance…
Fact checkers = thought police
As 2020 winds down, there’s plenty of “Orwellian” distinctions to be made, but is there any more so than the idea of “fact-checkers?” Near as I can tell, fact-checking was invented by the media to address their bias-by-omission approach to news reporting. The greatest source of news bias has always been what they left out, not what they reported. When they did report something that was true, but went against their narrative, they didn’t really have a way to rationalize it. Enter fact-checking. Humans have always been remarkably creative problem-solvers. It’s why freedom always leads to the best problem-solving…