Authored by Jay Syrmopoulos via TruthInMedia.com,
With the rise of the term “fake news,” many individuals have turned to self-proclaimed fact-checking sites like Snopes and PolitiFact; the objectivity of these sites tends to be questioned by conservatives as having a covert liberal bias.
On Tuesday, the conservative Media Research Center unveiled a new project entitled “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” which is designed to “ensure the fact-checkers themselves are reliable, or exposed as liberal partisans if they aren’t.”
The Media Research Center explained in its announcement:
Sometimes you have to check the fact-checkers.
More and more, major news outlets are relying on “fact checkers” to, allegedly, ensure that the news is factual, sources are reliable, and statements are accurate.
In theory, this is admirable. In practice, it has proven to be simply another opportunity for the media to push their leftist agenda.
Fact checking groups — such as PolitiFact — routinely cast judgments while failing to disclose their own left-wing bias. Their allies in the media try to cast these groups as neutral third parties when, in fact, they are card-carrying members of the liberal echo chamber.
It’s no wonder that the public has so little faith in the fact-checkers. A 2016 Rasmussen poll found that an astonishing 62% of American voters think the fact-check-ers are biased.
The Media Research Center is flipping the script on these faux-fact-checkers. It’s time to turn the tables and give the public the real facts.
While Americans attempt to separate truth from propaganda, especially in regards to politics, some of these reportedly neutral third-party fact checkers - accused by conservatives of having a progressive bias - has left some consumers unsure of their reliability.
“In an era of ‘fake news’ and inaccurate reporting, it is important now more than ever that the fact-checkers themselves are exposed for their biases,” MRC President Brent Bozell said in a statement.
“MRC routinely finds instances when fact-checkers bend the truth or disproportionately target conservatives,” Bozell continued.
“We are assigning our own rating to their judgments and will expose the worst offenders. Americans deserve the truth. There must be accountability across the board, and that includes these alleged arbiters of fact and fiction.”
Some of the purported “fact-checking” sites the project plans to monitor are PolitiFact, FactCheck, Snopes, Washington Post Fact Checker, AP Fact Check, and CNN Fact Check.
As previously reported at Truth In Media, Emmy-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson held a recent Tedx talk at the University of Nevada, discussing the “fake news” narrative that gained tremendous discussion during and following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, saying that “the whole thing smacked of the roll-out of a propaganda campaign.”
While Attkisson acknowledged that fake news has long existed in various forms, she said that noticed something different taking root within U.S. mainstream media in 2016.
Suspecting that the origins of this growing “fake news” narrative were less than organic, Attkisson began researching and said that she connected the origins of this phenomena to a decidedly progressive non-profit organization called “First Draft,” which, she notes, “appears to be the about the first to use ‘fake news’ in its modern context.”…
Upon investigation, Attkisson discovered that one of the major financial backers of First Draft’s anti-fake news coalition was none other than Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, was chaired by major Clinton supporter Eric Schmidt until Dec. 2017.
Schmidt “offered himself up as a campaign adviser and became a top multi-million donor to it. His company funded First Draft around the start of the election cycle,” Attkisson said.
“Not surprisingly, Hillary was soon to jump aboard the anti-fake news train and her surrogate, David Brock of Media Matters, privately told donors he was the one who convinced Facebook to join the effort.”
To learn more about the rise of the “fake news” narrative, watch Attkisson’s enlightening TedxTalk below:
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