Fact-check fury: How progressives react when their own misinformation gets exposed
October 8, 2024
Progressives don’t like it when their own claims are fact-checked. In fact, the woke start spitting with rage when their misinformation is pointed out to be misleading the public. This is interesting when it’s they who have been saying that everything must be fact-checked and that no misinformation can be allowed.
It gets even more fun when it’s electoral claims. There has been an insistence that Facebook – just to give an example – must check all political ads during an election for the truth of factual claims. This is exactly the thing done which has Jezebel doing that spitting-with-rage thing.
This is not about the rights and or wrongs of abortion — it’s about the attitude toward misinformation and its correction by progressives, and that the underlying is abortion is a side issue.
On Saturday, Florida-based journalist Jason Garcia shared a letter dated October 3 that the Florida Department of Health sent to WFLA TV’s vice president Mark Higgins, in response to an ad about Amendment 4 that the station shared during last week’s vice presidential debate. In the ad, a woman named Caroline shares her story of being unable to receive timely cancer treatment because she was pregnant and couldn’t get an abortion in Florida. “The doctors knew that if I did not end my pregnancy, I would lose my baby, I would lose my life, and my daughter would lose her mom,” she says. “Florida has now banned abortion … even in cases like mine. Amendment 4 is gonna protect women like me.”
Well, that’s a political ad, during an election period, making a factual claim.
In its letter to WFLA TV, the state Health Department says the ad is illegal
You can read the full letter here. The claim itself, that the lady could not gain an abortion under Florida law despite the necessity of starting cancer treatment, is wrong. That’s, therefore, a political ad during an election period that has been fact-checked and found to be misinformation.
But more, the Florida Health Department is not insisting that the ad not be run for that reason. Rather, peddling disinformation about health care is dangerous. Yes, women who require health care treatment to save their own lives – or health – can get an abortion in Florida. To tell stories that they can’t endangers the health of those who might need exactly such health care and abortion. So, Florida does not have laws insisting that political ads tell the truth – but it does have laws insisting that you don’t damage peoples’ health by mis- or dis- informing them.
The truth is that the fact-checking organizations are largely progressive themselves. Which is why these media outlets are so keen on the idea – it’s never going to be them that are found to be at fault. Which is what drives that rage when a progressive message is found to be misinforming. That wasn’t the point of the idea at all.
Which is also why we need to be so skeptical upon that insistence of the fact-checking. It’s so clearly something regarded as being to partisan advantage, it’s not about truth at all.