Not at all, it's a legitimate fact check. Too bad

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Facts Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias

By Paul Krugman
Dec. 8, 2017



Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, in October.CreditCreditGabriella Demczuk for The New York Times


There are two central facts about 21st-century U.S. politics.

First, we suffer from asymmetric polarization: the Republican Party has become an extremist institution with little respect for traditional norms of any kind.

Second, mainstream media – still the source of most political information for the great majority of Americans – haven’t been able to come to grips with this reality .

Even in the age of Trump, they try desperately to be “balanced”, which in practice means bending over backwards to say undeserved nice things about Republicans and take undeserved swipes at Democrats.

This dynamic played a crucial role in last year’s election; it’s one of the reasons major news organizations devoted more time to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined.

But it has been going on for years. It’s the whole story of Paul Ryan’s career: journalists trying to be centrists desperately wanted to show their neutrality by praising a Serious, Honest, Conservative, and promoted Ryan into that role even though it was obvious from the beginning that he was a con man.

And it’s still playing out, as we can see from what looks like a looming debacle in Facebook’s efforts to institute fact-checking.

Facebook wanted responsible fact-checking organizations to partner with, and several such organizations exist. But all of these organizations are constantly attacked by the right as having a left-wing bias – so it added The Weekly Standard, even though it clearly failed to meet internationally accepted standards for that role.

So what’s the basis for claims that, say, PolitiFact is biased? Hey, The Weekly Standard itself has explained the criteria:

Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial “fact checking” news organization rates Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims and twice as much, respectively.

Notice the implicit assumption here – namely, that impartial fact-checking would find an equal number of false claims from each party. But what if – bear with me a minute – Republicans actually make more false claims than Democrats?

Take a not at all arbitrary example: tax policy. The GOP is deeply committed to the proposition that tax cuts pay for themselves, a view that has no support whatsoever from professional economists. Can you find any comparable insistence on a view experts consider false on the Democratic side?

Similarly, the GOP is deeply committed to climate change denial, despite the overwhelming consensus of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real and dangerous. Again, where’s the Democratic counterpart?

There are, of course, individual liberals who say things that aren’t true, on all sorts of issues. But huge falsehoods by major party figures – where by falsehood I mean something demonstrably false, not a view you disagree with – are far more common on the right than the left.

It’s interesting and important to understand where this difference comes from. It’s also something of a puzzle. True, the parties are very different institutions – the GOP has historically been hierarchical, with top-down direction and monolithic doctrine, while Democrats have always been a loose-jointed coalition. But these days the GOP looks pretty chaotic – yet the insurgent forces seem to be pushing it even further away from any respect for facts.

Whatever the deep explanation, however, the parties are not the same. And trying to pretend that they are the same isn’t just foolish, it’s deeply destructive. Indeed, it’s one important reason Donald Trump sits in the White House.

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