I Started Fact-Checking Trump — And Realized It’s Not Easy
It’s difficult to check someone’s facts if they aren’t actually providing any
When I say that our President isn’t providing any facts, I don’t mean that he’s a liar — though he is. Only 14% of his statements were categorized as mostly true or true by Politifact, and the Washington Post reports that he has made almost 8,000 false or misleading claims since taking office. When I say that he isn’t providing facts, what I mean is, he’s giving conclusions without evidence. This is to say, he’s not lying, he’s just wrong. But you can’t lie about being wrong.
The press has a mandate to provide the public with the truth, so when President Trump’s highly anticipated Oval Office address was scheduled to air, smart audience members knew that the real story would be the fact-checks of the next day. The problem was, those fact checks weren’t so clear.
The NY Times rated two claims as “false,” one as “misleading,” and six as “this needs context.” Not exactly a stirring argument for truth. I checked to see whether this vague reality is characteristic of Trump, and found that only 19% of the statements checked by Politifact were either indisputably true or false (source). For Hillary Clinton, that number is 26% (source), for Bernie Sanders, it’s 25% (source)…
