Facebook, keep the fact-checkers in their place

Facebook’s choice of partner immediately cuts off a large swathe of conservative readers. Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, home to the code of principles, is funded, among other donors, by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations — enough for many of those who repost stories from Breitbart News and more extreme conservative sites to see it as part of a globalist conspiracy.

Nor will these people, or even less rabid conservatives, accept the assessments of, say, PolitiFact as gospel. PolitiFact is the favorite target of conservative bloggers — there’s even a site called PolitiFact Bias, which regularly disputes the fact checkers’ work, often making valid points. It recently explained, for example, that checking a Republican description of Trump’s electoral college win as a “landslide” makes no sense because “landslide” is a matter of opinion, not fact. The site has also claimed to catch out members of the PolitiFact team in inconsistencies.

Breitbart, too, gets into disputes with PolitiFact. In July, they argued about a fact check of Donald Trump’s use of a story from “Clinton Cash,” a bestselling book by Peter Schweizer, concerning the sale of a uranium company with mines in the U.S. to a Russian state-owned firm. Schweizer helped Breitbart put together a rebuttal. PolitiFact came out with a point-by-point response, often saying the context provided by Schweizer wasn’t relevant to the specific fact check. The back and forth could have continued if Breitbart pointed out any context could be relevant to a complex story.