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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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NPR brutally fact-checked Trump, finding "162 lies and distortions". I am not here to inform you that Trump is a particularly honest man, but this bizarre tic that news outlets have developed of referring to statements of opinion that they disagree with as "lies and distortions" is wildly unhelpful. Let's look at a couple:

59 “The judge was a brilliant judge, and all they do is they play the ref with the judges. But this judge was a fair but brilliant judge.”

There has been lots of criticism of the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed. She had very little experience as a trial judge, made several decisions that were questioned by legal experts and early in this case, had a ruling, in which she called for a special master to review classified documents first, overturned by the 11th Circuit.

What the fuck? OK, you think she's not fair and brilliant, fine, I probably even agree with that, but it's just obviously a statement of opinion rather than an appropriate target for some nerd to "fact check".

91 “They wanna stop people from pouring into our country, from places unknown and from countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.”

Someone has likely heard of whatever the unnamed country is.

Wow, thank god for that fact check. Very serious journalism.

135 “I've never seen people get elected by saying we're going to give you a tax increase.”

Vice President Harris has echoed President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. However, Biden has called for raising taxes on wealthy individuals and raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% – halfway back to where it was before the 2017 cut. — Scott Horsley

I don't even know what NPR is trying to argue here. Again, perhaps Trump is incorrect in his assessment of the electoral success of promising tax increases, but there isn't some "lie or distortion" there.

153 “She was early, I mean, she was the first of the prosecutors, really, you know, now you see Philadelphia, you see Los Angeles, you see New York, you see various people that are very bad, but she was the first of the bad prosecutors, she was early.”

Although Harris did refer to herself in her 2019 memoir as a “progressive prosecutor,” her legacy has largely been seen as tougher on crime. She has supported some progressive reforms, such as pretrial diversion, which offers certain criminal defendants things like drug treatment instead of going to trial. — Meg Anderson

And on and on and on. These are disagreements, not "lies and distortions". Maybe you think Kamala's great! That she's actually the perfect balance of tough on crime with smart on crime progressivism, that Trump is just too goddamned stupid to understand that, and so on. That's fine! But there isn't a "lie and distortion", there's an actual disagreement.

I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become. I wouldn't object to this particular piece framed as an argument that Trump is VeryBadActually, but this smug tone intended to reward their readers with the sense that they're hearing serious truths, and that they have precisely calculated 162 lies is incredibly annoying. That figure then gets repeated by figures like Pete Buttigieg as though it's actually a serious empirical measure of dishonesty, furthering the sense that they're the party of facts. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just sick of it, but it sure feels like it's getting worse as party apparatchiks try to create an impression of the official truth.

Used to listen to NPR everyday in college. Sad to see where they are today, stooping to essentially the political punditry equivalent of CinemaSins.

I would watch PoliticalSins if he did funny commentary of all the sins with the ding and the sin counter. Whoever makes this channel first is gonna be rolling in subscribers.

It would work best if it operated in the same spirit as those "American politics with no context" videos on YouTube; mainly aiming for comedy, across both political aisles. Cinemasins was originally a comedic channel before they began using the premise as a way to deliver actual criticism. If a Politicalsins did this it would quickly become subsumed into the mud-slinging contest.

On the topic of YouTube comedy that is politically adjacent but isn't really mudslinging:

There are lots of videos on various topics where the authors commentary is delivered by AI voices of Trump, Obama, and Biden. They're usually called "Presidents ... do X" (e.g. play a videogame, react to a trailer).

These might allude to current events but the focus is usually not the presidents or the politics, it's usually the content (like the game or trailer)

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