We really thought that PolitiFact had hit its all-time low a few weeks ago when they declared it “FALSE” that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was crying over an empty parking lot while pretending to be surveilling downtrodden migrant children at a border detention center. They soberly informed readers that AOC was actually staring out at a “road” that led to the detention center. While technically, we suppose this made the original claim false, do you really think that PolitiFact didn’t understand that the real point of the criticism was that Ocasio-Cortez was staging deceptive photos for emotional-political purposes? Surely, we’d reached the absolute nadir of left-wing fact-checking.
And maybe we had. But when it comes to biased media, there are always new depths to be plumbed.
So PolitiFact proved this week, when they came to the rescue of Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris, two 2020 Democratic contenders who both lied about Michael Brown’s 2014 death in Ferguson, Missouri. Both senators memorialized Brown by tweeting that he was “murdered” by a police officer in the streets of Ferguson, a claim that – while certainly all the rage back when it happened – has since been debunked by every law enforcement investigation available. The facts simply do not abide this narrative, and even the Obama Department of Justice concluded that Darren Wilson was reasonably afraid for his life when he took Brown’s.
Easy call for an independent, nonpartisan outlet like PolitiFact, right? You simply tell the truth about what happened in Ferguson, you compare that account with Warren and Harris’ use of the word “murder,” and you give them both a Pants on Fire rating, right?
Of course not!
“In discussing the case with legal experts, we found broad consensus that ‘murder’ was the wrong word to use,” PolitiFact acknowledged in their piece.
Well, since this isn’t a case of a politician using the word “compilation” when they really would have been better off using “collection,” we’d say the word is the important thing. It’s not like you can go to your family and say, “Um guys, I murdered someone today,” and then expect everything to be okay when you later say, “Oh, sorry, I meant I hugged someone today. My bad, I always get those two confused.” The word “murder” IS why Warren and Harris took so much flack for what they said.
But then here comes PolitiFact with their BS.
“Because the significance of Harris’ and Warren’s use of the word is open to some dispute, we won’t be rating their tweets on the Truth-O-Meter,” they report. “Experts who have studied police-related deaths and race relations said that focusing too much on the linguistics in controversial cases comes with its own set of problems.”
Um, assuming that’s true…so? Is your job to further the study of race relations, or is your job to fact-check politicians? If “focusing too much” on the language is problematic, then why did you fact-check these statements at all? Oh, and give us an actual break. Saying that we can’t talk about the “linguistics” is the kind of thing you say when you’ve been caught lying.
Just as Harris and Warren were.
We already knew that PolitiFact was liberal garbage, but now they’ve put it beyond dispute.
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