James Taranto: "Fact-Checkers" Become Rent-Seekers

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Or as I've put it: the Washington Post "Fact-"Checker is just more Washington Post.

The WaPo's biases and the WaPo Fact-Checker's biases are basically the same.

And:

In Ye Olden Days, Dems and Pubs just called each other liars.

In Ye Now-en Days, Pubs call Dems liars...Dems create whole new institutions--academic departments, new branches of the MSM, novel bureaucratic institutions--to issue official proclamations that Pubs have been The Science(tm)-tifically proven to be liars.

And now, it seems, our new disinformation-industrial complex has ruled that this description of the disinformation-industrial complex is disinformational.

A thing is: we already know how to distinguish pretty well between (to focus on the media) reporting and opinion. But one of the main problems with the MSM is that its coverage of areas of American political and cultural disagreement is so obviously infused with leftist opinion. Think of, e.g., how rapidly--nay, even eagerly--MSM reporting (or "reporting") became infused with gender ideology. Not just mentioning it, but accepting it. Presupposing it.

Wikipedia is another example. It claims "NPOV," but leftist doctrines clearly rule the roost there. Consider e.g. just the fact that the gender ideological idea that "deadnaming" is out. Whole Wikipedia entries often fail to mention the fact that the person in question is "trans" at all. This is part of the radical doctrine that, basically, if someone doesn't want their former name or that part of their history disclosed, we--even our truth-seeking institutions--must comply. In such cases Wikipedia generally doesn't just report on the facts, reporting on past names and "genders"...it just pretends that there was no such name, and was no such past. But, of course: only in the super-special case of "gender"...it is not a generalizable principle.

In this respect, Wikipedia is the perfect Orwellian institution.