Fact-checking - a tiresome, misleading scourge on actual reporting - hardly existed in 1997 Britain. Fact-checking was the core of any reporter’s job because the school teaching did not involve checking boxes; instead, it was solely based on writing essays. That’s how students learn to write quickly and fluently when faced with a blank sheet of paper.
While fact-checking organizations employ fact-checkers to judge a reporter’s work and are granted an authority they have never earned or deserved.
“Members of the fact-checker species are no more likely to be right than the reporters whose work they presume to judge. They are themselves often merely former reporters who reached their ceiling in real journalism, or else young novices who have still to learn how it’s done.”
The people from this profession hurled accusations of falsehood on Sen. Tom Cotton while others suggested that the COVID-19 virus emerged from Wuhan’s lab in China. While this held as much logic as possible, it still contradicts Beijing’s narrative and the left-wing media.
“Former President Donald Trump mentioned it, so it had to be dismissed by the Washington Post, for example, as a “conspiracy theory” that had been “debunked.”
While John Sexton writes, “What this comes down to is the fact that more than a year after the worst pandemic in a century, China’s story about where the virus originated has fallen apart, and they don’t claim to have a better one. Meanwhile, they continue to stifle and control any investigation or even reporting on the topic. It’s still just circumstantial, but they certainly behave as if they have something to hide."
Coming back to the ordeal of fact-checkers, “mistakes cannot be eliminated from news reporting” … “But that’s a better system than having jumped-up journos acting like officials from the Ministry of Truth, denigrating perfectly good work until given permission by the biased grey lady to change the narrative.”