Some years back I came across a link on Facebook to a claim that "Over Half of all Statements Made on Fox News are False," based on a story in the Tampa Bay Times' PunditFact.
There is no proof that Joe Biden delivered political actions in exchange for money. There is massive evidence that the Biden family, principally Hunter, received large amounts of money from foreign actors at times when Joe Biden, as VP, was in a position to do things for those actors, a fact not mentioned in the Snopes article. It is possible that Hunter managed to fool Ukrainians, Chinese, and Russians into paying him millions of dollars for imaginary favors from his father but it is not the most likely explanation.
Really enjoyed this article and its revision, David, I hope you can continue to add examples of biased fact-checking. Super interesting and the bias is beautifully explained.
Modern media prioritizes the emotional, sensational, dramatic, and even figurative in a narrative form, rather than measured and precise and literal. With regard to climate, as David recently addressed, the claims are about oceans "boiling" and the summer air temperatures "scorching" and measurements, if offered at all, are chosen for drama like a baseball color commentary: "the MidWest has seen the most successive days in July with temperature over 96". It all falls in line with GLOBAL Warming narrative even if ski slopes in California still had ski-worthy snow in the same month, and the UK was experiencing a cooler-than-typical July. ("Fewest successive days with temps below 30 C since 1975..." Or whatever. "Highest on-base percentage of a left-handed shortstop in the 16th week of the season since Arky Vaughan..." Factoid fillers. ) A fact check might reasonably assert that oceans are nowhere near the 212 F or 100 C temperature, or that wet pale clothes hung on the line come back in an hour or so later dry, but without the brown charred marks associated with "scorching". Other context might be teased out of the records to make comparisons of the day's weather to historical patterns. But such a "check" would be scorned, rightly, for disallowing rhetorical hyperbole.
Once a sensational word or phrase enters the headlines, the truth barely matters. "Star Wars" over "Strategic Defenses". "Trickle Down Theory"; "Unilateral Disarmament"; "Saturday Night Specials"; and "Midnight Basketball" of which examples from the Left dominate a dozen times over from similar sloganeering from the Right like "Welfare Cadillacs". It's been going on for as long as I've been paying attention, and I see no way to remedy the problem.
Uwe writes that "it is very difficult to get out of any bias". I frequently think the same thing, and moreover, that it is true even when the source in question is trying its honest best. It's inherent to the venue. There are only so many minutes in the segment, inches on the broadsheet, and time in the investigation team's budget. And even a website, where one might expect unlimited virtual space in which to host all angles, aggregated at low cost from other sources, will run into the ultimate bottleneck of the reader's attention span. There's only so much that can go on the website's top three bulletins.
If the bottleneck is ultimately the reader, it would seem tough to put together a source that eliminates bias on a reliable basis, and that scales with the volume of news worth reporting.
My approach in the direction of an ideal is to try to browse sites with multiple known biases and attempt to resolve any inconsistencies on my own. In practice, I commonly find that most sources presenting as serious are fundamentally correct in their claims, but wrap their claims in biased portrayal, and if I peel away the bias and extract the claims of fact alone, they largely agree, and are also uninteresting. When factual claims don't agree, I often find I don't have any universally recognized third source to resolve them, and so the claims resolve to "he said, she said". When I *do* have a third party source, I find I have too little time to resolve the claims except for a tiny handful of issues.
I always learn from this blog and appreciate it! Would add, however, that it is very difficult to get out of any bias. A case in point is a bias toward the lab leak theory I share with the author and I took great interest in the Bayesian analysis offered here earlier. Then I read David Quammen's piece in the NYT from 7/25, which shows some of the opposite bias but makes persuasive points, IMO, mainly the point that the lab leak theory is better understood as a concatenation of competing hypotheses. There appear to be serious difficulties with this. Can you refute this point? This is all quite separate from the fact that both governments have an interest in debunking evidence for a lab leak.
Thanks for this, best summary I've seen:
There is no proof that Joe Biden delivered political actions in exchange for money. There is massive evidence that the Biden family, principally Hunter, received large amounts of money from foreign actors at times when Joe Biden, as VP, was in a position to do things for those actors, a fact not mentioned in the Snopes article. It is possible that Hunter managed to fool Ukrainians, Chinese, and Russians into paying him millions of dollars for imaginary favors from his father but it is not the most likely explanation.
Really enjoyed this article and its revision, David, I hope you can continue to add examples of biased fact-checking. Super interesting and the bias is beautifully explained.
Modern media prioritizes the emotional, sensational, dramatic, and even figurative in a narrative form, rather than measured and precise and literal. With regard to climate, as David recently addressed, the claims are about oceans "boiling" and the summer air temperatures "scorching" and measurements, if offered at all, are chosen for drama like a baseball color commentary: "the MidWest has seen the most successive days in July with temperature over 96". It all falls in line with GLOBAL Warming narrative even if ski slopes in California still had ski-worthy snow in the same month, and the UK was experiencing a cooler-than-typical July. ("Fewest successive days with temps below 30 C since 1975..." Or whatever. "Highest on-base percentage of a left-handed shortstop in the 16th week of the season since Arky Vaughan..." Factoid fillers. ) A fact check might reasonably assert that oceans are nowhere near the 212 F or 100 C temperature, or that wet pale clothes hung on the line come back in an hour or so later dry, but without the brown charred marks associated with "scorching". Other context might be teased out of the records to make comparisons of the day's weather to historical patterns. But such a "check" would be scorned, rightly, for disallowing rhetorical hyperbole.
Once a sensational word or phrase enters the headlines, the truth barely matters. "Star Wars" over "Strategic Defenses". "Trickle Down Theory"; "Unilateral Disarmament"; "Saturday Night Specials"; and "Midnight Basketball" of which examples from the Left dominate a dozen times over from similar sloganeering from the Right like "Welfare Cadillacs". It's been going on for as long as I've been paying attention, and I see no way to remedy the problem.
Uwe writes that "it is very difficult to get out of any bias". I frequently think the same thing, and moreover, that it is true even when the source in question is trying its honest best. It's inherent to the venue. There are only so many minutes in the segment, inches on the broadsheet, and time in the investigation team's budget. And even a website, where one might expect unlimited virtual space in which to host all angles, aggregated at low cost from other sources, will run into the ultimate bottleneck of the reader's attention span. There's only so much that can go on the website's top three bulletins.
If the bottleneck is ultimately the reader, it would seem tough to put together a source that eliminates bias on a reliable basis, and that scales with the volume of news worth reporting.
My approach in the direction of an ideal is to try to browse sites with multiple known biases and attempt to resolve any inconsistencies on my own. In practice, I commonly find that most sources presenting as serious are fundamentally correct in their claims, but wrap their claims in biased portrayal, and if I peel away the bias and extract the claims of fact alone, they largely agree, and are also uninteresting. When factual claims don't agree, I often find I don't have any universally recognized third source to resolve them, and so the claims resolve to "he said, she said". When I *do* have a third party source, I find I have too little time to resolve the claims except for a tiny handful of issues.
I always learn from this blog and appreciate it! Would add, however, that it is very difficult to get out of any bias. A case in point is a bias toward the lab leak theory I share with the author and I took great interest in the Bayesian analysis offered here earlier. Then I read David Quammen's piece in the NYT from 7/25, which shows some of the opposite bias but makes persuasive points, IMO, mainly the point that the lab leak theory is better understood as a concatenation of competing hypotheses. There appear to be serious difficulties with this. Can you refute this point? This is all quite separate from the fact that both governments have an interest in debunking evidence for a lab leak.
I'd say the lab leak is more likely than natural origin based on a the undeniable facts:
1. We have not yet found a natural vector for Sars-CoV2.
2. The outbreak started within a stone's throw of the institute that was doing research on its closest known natural relative.
3. That institute was inserting furin cleavage sites onto said viruses, which is one of the major changes that Sars-CoV2 had from its relative.
4. Sars-CoV2's closest relative is many hundred miles away from Wuhan, and there are probably hundreds of wet markets in between the 2 locations.
Since we do not have a definitive smoking gun either way, a natural origin explanation would be one of the history's greatest coincidences.