00:02:36.580Therefore, you need this like separate ancillary thing to be like, by the way, is the thing that that guy is saying every single speech, is that true?
00:02:46.580But then what's so interesting to me looking into this is that fact-checking was born out of a critique of both sides of journalism.
00:02:55.120Like a lot of the people who started fact-checking within these newsrooms were crusaders and reformers against exactly the critiques of media that me and you make on this show all the time.
00:03:04.000So this is an excerpt from a really interesting book called Deciding What's True, The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism by Lucas Graves.
00:03:14.340The speech by Zell Miller was a kind of epiphany for me, where I did nothing but write a horse race story and really felt guilty about it.
00:03:20.680Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, told fellow fact-checkers at a 2011 meeting,
00:03:26.160I had covered political campaigns and felt that I had been a passive co-conspirator in sort of passing along inaccurate information and hadn't fact-checked it the way I should.
00:03:35.740And so I went to my editors with a proposal that we create a website where we would do fact-checking full-time.
00:03:41.440So between 2004 and 2007 is where we start to get the foundation of things like PolitiFact.
00:03:46.000The New York Times has its own fact-checking desk.
00:03:48.480This becomes like a department within newsrooms of like, we have specialists that are going
00:03:53.100to look into all of the factual claims that you're hearing.
00:03:56.620Washington Post launches the fact-checker column in 2007.
00:04:03.460And Glenn Kessler himself says that the Pinocchio ratings, which is not something that he invented,
00:04:08.780that was the previous guy that did the fact checker column, but he kept, he sort of relaunched
00:04:13.340the fact checker column and he decided to keep the Pinocchio ratings specifically as a response
00:04:19.420to both sides of journalism, right? That we need to have standard metrics. That's his idea of a
00:04:24.320standard metric. This thing is not arbitrary at all. It's an objective metric of whether or not
00:04:29.340somebody's lying. This is from the introduction to his 2020 book, Donald Trump and His Attacks
00:04:34.780on truth. It is like a reverse restaurant review, ranging from one Pinocchio, selective telling of
00:04:40.600the truth, to four Pinocchios, a whopper. Those Pinocchios got politicians' attention. No longer
00:04:46.740could they expect the newspaper to settle for dueling quotes from both sides, leaving readers
00:04:50.880puzzling over who was right. Instead, we are the reader's advocate, showing them how we do our
00:04:55.640research and why a politician's claim is misleading. So we're not doing both sides stuff.
00:04:59.920You can actually look at this as like an index and they pretty soon they start producing kind of like home pages with politicians where you can look through.
00:05:09.160You can like look up, you know, Bill Clinton or like Bernie Sanders and be like, OK, what's what's his overall Pinocchio rating?
00:05:15.320How many Pinocchios has he accumulated over time?
00:05:17.840Over time. Right. And then you can have like almost like an index of like, OK, here's Hillary Clinton.
00:05:22.300She has like 3.17 Pinocchios and here's Donald Trump. He has like 3.8 Pinocchios.
00:05:27.320And you can actually start to look at like different averages.0.97
00:05:30.000I think this is fucking asinine, but I'm going to pretend that I don't because we're going to have, you know, like developments and twists later.0.95
00:05:35.080This is very admirable to think that you could sort of like do – or to want to do this.0.99
00:06:23.820But then I think, I mean, this sort of starts to point to some of the problems with this entire endeavor that if you're only rarely giving out a that was true rating, you're obviously choosing the lies.0.54
00:06:36.980Like you're choosing to look into things that are misleading.
00:06:40.120So an index of a politician of like how many Pinocchios they've gotten over the years, it's like, well, yeah, if you're only choosing their lies, every politician is going to look equally dishonest.
00:06:53.100Like if you went through the show and you chose every single thing that you said that was like slightly exaggerated and everything that I said that was roughly true, you could say like, oh, well, Peter gets four Pinocchios and Mike has zero Pinocchios.
00:07:05.180But you're not looking at the entire corpus of things that we've said, right?
00:07:08.940You're not – unless you're doing it systematically.0.99
00:07:10.700And if you did, you would realize that I am the moron.1.00
00:08:46.240Well, okay. A couple of them I cut because they overlap with yours and then a couple of them are kind of repetitive. I have 12. But I don't think we're going to do all of them. I'll vibe it out. So we're going to go over these in three categories. I will present mine and then we'll talk about whether or not yours fall into the same kind of category.
00:09:04.400I think we both looked into this and came up with our own typology of these, which I think are a little bit different.
00:09:10.440You can give me as many Pinocchios as you need to for my structure, for my episode structure.
00:09:15.580The first major problem that you see with it is the selective use of pedantry.
00:09:21.780With fact-checking, there's the question of are we checking the literal words in the sentence that politicians are saying or are we checking kind of whether this is meaningfully true?
00:09:33.780Right. So in 2020, Bernie Sanders gives a speech where he says, we will not give tax breaks to billionaires when half a million Americans sleep out on the streets. So that's the claim. For this episode, I'm going to have me read the claims and you read the Glenn.
00:09:50.580What if I anticipated what Glenn's going to say right now?
00:09:53.380Well, I know you know this because you did the Schellenberger research. What is he about to say?
00:09:57.880I believe that he's about to say that just because you are homeless does not mean that you are sleeping out on the streets.
00:11:46.920I would say it's like I mean, if we were doing Pinocchios, I would do maybe like half a one or one.
00:11:51.200And it's sort of like, yeah, I mean, you shouldn't do this kind of thing, but also you sort of get how it happens, right?
00:11:56.320It's hard to even call this dishonest.
00:11:58.520No one is staking out a policy position based on the sleeping on the streets line and then finding out that actually a good chunk of these people are in emergency shelters and being like, oh, well, then what are you complaining about, right?
00:12:10.320You know, the policy issue is still being framed largely correctly.
00:12:13.900Yeah, he's also kind of fucking up the distinction between technically true and meaningfully true.
00:12:19.280Glenn says, oh, these people are not technically sleeping on the streets because a lot of them are in emergency shelters, but a lot of people in those emergency shelters are regularly sleeping on the streets.
00:12:32.800They may not have been on the particular night when the point in time count was taken, but if you're saying 500,000 people sleep on the streets, Bernie may not have meant that on a specific night.
00:12:44.060He may have meant that habitually, and it turns out on top of the roughly 200,000 unsheltered homeless people, there's around 200,000 temporary beds.
00:12:54.120I don't even – you know, the more I think about this, the less I'm even sure that it's like –
00:13:00.200Well, I'm leaning towards like 0.25 to zero because when you hear sleeping on the streets, I don't necessarily think of literally sleeping on the streets.
00:13:08.000To me, that just sounds like this is the amount of homeless people, right?
00:13:19.560And I think this is possibly a you-know-what-he-means situation.
00:13:23.060I love the car example because then it's like, well, you can do pedantry of like, oh, well, they're not technically sleeping on the streets.
00:13:29.620But then you can do like uno reverse double pedantry and be like, well, the cars are on the streets.
00:13:34.140Technically, they are sleeping on the streets.
00:13:38.100Yeah, like what level of pedantry are we going for here? Yeah. So, OK, so that was the example of like, OK, we're pedantically fact checking the literal words in a politician statement. We then rewind to 2011. This is Glenn's first year as the Washington Post fact checker. We have a statement in a speech by President Obama during the recession.
00:13:58.240He says, Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes American taxpayers for their support during my presidency.
00:14:06.320So that's the claim that Obama makes in 2011.
00:15:06.120Well, yeah, that's that's kind of the asterisk on this.
00:15:09.960And this one is so egregious that the actual White House response, the White House puts
00:15:14.580out a press release saying, like, first of all, they paid back three billion of the four
00:15:18.640billion that George W. Bush loaned them.
00:15:21.160And if Obama hadn't extended them the further $8.5 billion, they would have recouped none of that.
00:15:28.040The question, again, is like, is this technically true or meaningfully true?
00:15:31.600It's a much better outcome to extend them more credit and they pay back more of the original loan than to simply lose that $4 billion anyway.
00:15:39.820So it's sort of like, what actual point are you making here?
00:15:42.420Right. So we're seeing both sides of this.
00:16:46.340All of these examples get to the core problem is that the fact checkers think of themselves as doing something like above judgment, right?
00:16:54.400They're just applying this like objective lens and they don't want to come to any conclusions, right?0.96
00:16:59.900Whereas any intelligent person who's remotely familiar with Donald Trump would say like, yeah, he doesn't recognize any form of accountability as legitimate, including the last time he fucking lost a presidential election.
00:17:10.860So probabilistically, you know, can you say this as a fact? No. But probabilistically, it's very likely that he will not accept the results of this election. But also that requires you to be doing a little bit of opinionating. Like that is opinion, right?0.92
00:17:25.740Right. But people who do this fact checking are not allowed. I think their self-conception prevents them from doing this. So they have to rely on these weird hair thin pedantic corrections of statements like that when you're essentially you're correcting an opinionated statement.
00:17:43.860I mean, I feel like what's happening is that Amy is looking at every line said by Joe Biden and trying to locate a falsehood, right?
00:17:58.940So from time to time, you're just going to get over your skis because you're searching for it, because you want it to be there, because not to get too dramatic, but like your career to some degree relies on you being able to locate these misleading statements.
00:18:13.400And also what's so interesting about that one specifically is that, you know, Glenn oftentimes defends the practice of fact-checking by saying, look, we don't want to be too pedantic.
00:18:21.200What we're basically trying to do is inject a little bit of context.
00:18:23.520We want voters to be informed and we're kind of using the fact-check as a platform to just inform people about like, OK, how does like the GDP work or whatever?
00:18:31.800But the Amy example is actually misinforming the public.
00:19:02.780This is sort of like, and there's, you know, there's, these are obviously all existing in an overlapping Venn diagram, but that Obama statement is very much like, well, this is true, but.
00:19:15.420So my favorite example of this comes from a presidential primary debate in 2019 when Beto O'Rourke, he's talking about like the Green New Deal stuff.
00:19:26.580He says, wind and solar jobs are the fastest growing jobs in the country.
00:21:41.580Like what does a true statement mean in this context?
00:21:44.760This is another situation where if the name of the column was like some additional context, then you'd be like, all right, sure.
00:21:52.940But the fact that you are presenting it as a fact check makes the whole sort of framing a little bit suspect because you're not really fact checking.
00:22:01.380You're just adding information that you think is useful.
00:22:04.040That's great, but it's not fact checking.
00:22:05.660I probably have too many examples, but there's also – there's an infamous one where Bernie Sanders said millions of Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.0.98
00:22:15.580And Glenn is like, well, that's true.0.82
00:22:18.160There's 5.2 million people working two or three jobs, but a lot of those jobs are part
00:24:54.820This is another like specific Glenn pattern, not necessarily a problem in fact checking, but a problem with Glenn that like he does not take criticism well at all.
00:25:13.460I love it when pundits frame criticism as like Twitter criticism just to demean it when it'll be like, no, it was like other journalists on Twitter.
00:25:26.040And like articles in like various political blogs and stuff who are also pointing this out.
00:25:30.320There was some Twitter outrage about our conclusion that the comparison was not especially meaningful.
00:25:34.420So we checked with Emmanuel Saez, the University of California Berkeley professor who was the pioneer in this field of research and often cited by Sanders.
00:25:43.460He said he agreed with our assessment.
00:26:48.020No, everyone agrees with that, Glenn.1.00
00:26:49.980It's the conclusion you're drawing from that that everyone thinks is fucking stupid.0.99
00:26:54.040And also the guy in his email points out that they used to own 1% of total wealth and now billionaires own 3.5% of total wealth.0.99
00:27:01.240So we're talking about an overall problem of increasing inequality in the United States, right?
00:27:05.220And so the basic fact here, which is true, is that if you have $1, if your net worth is $1, you are richer than the bottom 50% of the United States, technically, right?
00:27:14.660Because if you go to college and you're $90,000 in student debt, then your net worth is negative $90,000.
00:27:21.360So anyone who has a dollar has technically more net worth than you.
00:27:25.180But the idea is that basically you have this asset, essentially, that you paid $90,000 for.
00:27:29.660eventually your earning power will be such that you're much more likely to have a sort of an okay
00:27:34.780life after that. What Bernie is saying here is, A, I mean, it is true, right? Billionaires have
00:27:39.080more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. And he's essentially doing like a rhetorical flourish,
00:27:44.580right? He's talking about the top 0.001% and the bottom 50%. He's using that as an illustration
00:27:50.640of rising inequality in America, which is true. There's a sort of an interesting methodological
00:27:56.240thing about how they measure net worth. Right. But why is that not a meaningful comparison?
00:28:01.180It is a meaningful comparison. And like debt is worse than no debt. And like, yeah, there are
00:28:06.660some people who, for example, when you are fresh out of law school, you might be a couple hundred
00:28:11.640grand in debt, but also making a couple hundred grand. That person is not experiencing any
00:28:16.840financial difficulty. And so measuring their financial situation by their wealth is a mistake,
00:28:23.360Right. Right. But student debt is also crippling for people who don't have higher incomes in many cases.
00:28:29.340So, like, you do want to count their debt in those situations.
00:28:32.080I don't know. There's many countries where if you go to medical school or law school or college, you don't end up $90,000 in debt.
00:28:37.660The fact that so many people are in so much debt is kind of part of the problem of inequality that Bernie is talking about.
00:28:42.800All right. I have one. I have one in this category, I think.
00:28:45.440OK. There was a statement by Hakeem Jeffries at the DNC.
00:28:49.180He said, quote, Trump was the mastermind of the GOP tax scam, where 83 percent of the benefits went to the wealthiest 1 percent in America.
00:28:59.300Kessler described this as mostly false.
00:29:01.960And he says that he has previously given the statement three Pinocchios.
00:29:07.680Yeah, he did a lot of these, like the same thing when all this debate was going on.
00:29:10.980When Republicans passed their big tax cut bill in 2017, they put an expiration date on some of the tax cuts for individuals, meaning that over the span of the next decade, people whose taxes were initially cut, their taxes would rise again.
00:29:28.580That allowed the budget math to make a little bit more sense and it also creates political pressure to extend those tax cuts before they expire, right?
00:29:38.540Any president who's in office when the taxes are about to go back up again might think, ooh, bad idea.
00:29:44.760Let's get a bill passed to keep those cuts in place.
00:29:47.560So Hakeem Jeffries' statement that 83% of the benefits of the bill went to the wealthiest 1% is true, but it assumes that the tax cuts won't be extended, which they might be.
00:30:00.940So Kessler is saying that that makes it mostly false because the tax cuts might still be extended.
00:32:47.080That's the first sentence of your essay.
00:32:49.080Investopedia defines short selling as.
00:32:53.100A corporate raider is an investor who buys a large number of shares in a corporation whose assets appear to be undervalued.
00:32:59.940The large share purchase would give the corporate raider significant voting rights, which could then be used to push changes in the company's leadership and management.
00:33:07.700This would increase share value and thus generate a massive return for the rater.
00:33:11.760So that's the Investopedia definition of corporate rater.
00:33:14.660So here's the rest of Glenn's fact check.
00:33:16.700In other words, this is generally an adversarial stance in which an investor sees an undervalued
00:33:21.100asset and forces management to spin off assets, take the company private, or break it up.
00:33:25.840In a previous life, the fact checker covered renowned corporate raters such as Carl Icahn
00:33:56.780I love using the technical definition of corporate raider, which it's not like the SEC has a
00:34:05.140definition of this that i know of you know what i mean it's just a pejorative term for private0.94
00:34:09.420equity yeah yeah it's basically it's like yeah fuck these guys you buy a company you make it0.56
00:34:13.800more quote-unquote efficient which oftentimes means laying people off shipping jobs overseas0.99
00:34:17.380whatever and then you sell it back for a big profit you're basically flipping it the way that
00:34:21.080you would flip a house right this is an opinion it's like i was thinking of you know if someone
00:34:25.060called us like mike and peter like dirtbag leftists you can't like fact check that that's
00:34:31.580Like, that's a pejorative way of saying we're like a progressive podcast.
00:34:34.980Or like maybe like maybe like seven years ago, someone put together a definition of dirtbag leftist that like technically wouldn't encompass us.
00:34:43.560And then we were like, actually, the definition of dirtbag leftist is this.0.99
00:34:48.100It's basically what they're saying is like this is a left leaning podcast and these guys suck.0.99