Some Liberal Networks Replace “Fact Check” With “Reality Check”: Former Term Became Too Politicized, And So Will the New One

I see that NBC News and CNN both replaced their “fact checks” with “reality checks.”  I thought something like that was going to happen as “fact checks” and all the variants had become political hot potatoes.   And since President Trump is openly treating the news networks as an opposition party, the fact check terminology was not working to their advantage anymore.

A lot of people would instantly start to bristle if they heard a news anchor even say “fact check” or read it on an openly biased news network’s web site.    I looked at CNN’s evaluation of the President’s address to Congress last night, and the only thing that changed was the title of the piece.

They still issued verdicts of Trump’s statements as being “true”, “true but misleading”, “mostly true”, and “false.”

The problem with these kinds of checks is that the statements of CNN and other news organizations in their fact checks also have to be checked for accuracy.  They got into a nasty habit of misleading readers with inaccurate statements in their own fact checks.

For instance, the following on-screen fact check was put on the air on August 11th, 2016, in response to Trump’s political statement that Obama founded ISIS:

See the fact check?  It’s wrong.  ISIS was founded by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, while al-Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS after al-Zarqawi’s death.   I found it particularly funny that CNN had “He’s Not” in parenthesis in their defense of their Great Leader.

Trump was making a political statement that because the Obama Administration pulled troops out of Iraq too soon, it became possible for groups like ISIS to fill the vacuum as the still-in-training Iraqi Army wasn’t up to the task of fighting off ISIS.   (The Iraqi Army was badly beaten in 2014 and ISIS took over a large swath of Iraq).   Trump was saying Obama should be credited for making the conditions possible for ISIS to flourish, but it didn’t come across right and the left tried to make political hay about it with….mixed results as the photo above shows.

And then there’s the question of one news outlet saying that a statement is true, and another one blasts the same statement as being absolutely false, especially if both news outlets are of the same political color—such as CNN vs. MSNBC.   Throw both fact checks out and go to a third, fourth, fifth or sixth source.

I couldn’t help but notice that the Washington Post’s fact check piece focused in only on statements it considered false and ignored everything else from the rest of the speech, including statements that CNN said were true. 

“Reality checks” will take on the same hue as “fact checks” did, and possibly faster, even without a red-hot political campaign raging across the country.  They’re mostly political attack articles from the Democrats, who really need to get over themselves.