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WFB ATTACK

2025 Man of the Year: Glenn Kessler, The Fact Checker

Washington Free Beacon Staff

January 1, 2026

BS

Donald Trump said WHAT??? Quick, check the Washington Post! Glenn Kessler is on the case, pounding out a truth bomb! Time to slap that lyin' POTUS with a Pinocchio the size of Freedom Tower!

Of all the notable deaths in 2025—Brian Wilson, Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Olivia Nuzzi's career, and Ryan Lizza's dignity—none were more devastating to our country's moral order than the demise of the beloved "fact-checker" at the paper where democracy thrives on light, and dies in darkness.

Kessler left the Post in July after almost 30 years, accepting a generous buyout as part of the new leadership's effort to root out partisan hacks. The descendant of Dutch oil magnates who founded what is now Shell, Kessler explained that as much as he would like to continue saving democracy from Trump's lies, the "financial considerations were impossible to dismiss." Republic imperiled, bag secured. Hunter Biden would be proud.

Like a good captain, Kessler brought the ship down with him after setting it on fire. "The Fact Checker" would share his martyred fate. Pinocchio, an orphan, slouching toward the guillotine of truth's distortion. His sentence read: castration of the face.

In Kessler's absence, America struggles to endure. The braying masses need his expert guidance. Without it they might succumb to dangerous misinformation. After all, it was Kessler who debunked the racist "lab leak" conspiracy about the origins of COVID-19 and exposed the Republican plot to defame Joe Biden using "cheapfake" videos that made him look senile.

Kessler's crowning achievement—dismantling Sen. Tim Scott's (R., S.C.) bogus claims about the poverty his ancestors faced during the Great Depression—evinced a measure of courage in defense of democracy not seen since the bloodbath at Omaha Beach. Scott, the first black senator to represent a southern state since Reconstruction, had said his grandfather dropped out of school in the third grade. Kessler pounced, mobilizing a team of historians who found evidence suggesting Scott's grandfather may have actually dropped out in the fourth grade.

Without him, we are truly lost.

Since leaving the Post, Kessler has joined the distinguished array of former mainstream journalists who have embraced irrelevance by taking their "talents" to Substack. Jim Acosta, John Harwood, Jennifer Rubin, Joy Reid, Karen Attiah—a murderer's row of righteous nags. Kessler continues to follow his passion. He writes a regular column on "Trump's Bullshit," cashes checks on the Swedish-speaking circuit, and no longer has to pretend that Democrats also lie.

Claim: Glenn Kessler is a 2025 Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year.

Verdict: In grateful recognition of a debt we can never repay.

Published under: COVID-19 , Donald Trump , Glenn Kessler , Joy Reid , Ryan Lizza

...Michael Shellenberger

Aug 15, 2023

For the last 20 years, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that his social media company is the “digital equivalent of a town square,” committed to factual accuracy, and protecting the natural environment.

But now, Facebook is censoring accurate information about the relationship between industrial wind energy development and the increase in whale deaths off the East Coast.

Yesterday, Facebook and Instagram censored my post linking whale deaths to wind energy off the East Coast of the United States. The censorship came in the form of a “FactCheck.org” article from March 31, 2023, which relied entirely on U.S. government sources.

The censorship came on the exact same day that Public and Environmental Progress released anew documentary, “Thrown To The Wind,” which proves that the FactCheck.org article is false.

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“Thrown To The Wind” presents powerful new scientific evidence that the wind industry is responsible for the increase in whale deaths and that U.S. government agencies are either covering up the evidence or have failed to do the research that is described in the film.

Facebook last year defended its censorship by saying its “fact-checks” are just “opinion” and thus immune from defamation lawsuits, like the one brought by former ABC News correspondent John Stossel.

But that means that Facebook is spreading disinformation. By “disinformation,” I mean information that the person knows to be false. Facebook knows its “fact checks” are just their “opinion.” Thus, labeling FactCheck.org, which in this case is simply repeating US government misinformation, as a “fact-checker” is disinformation.

And the consequences are serious. According to Facebook, “Each time a fact-checker rates a piece of content as false, Facebook significantly reduces the content’s distribution … We … apply a warning label that links to the fact-checker’s article, disproving the claim.”

Why is that? Why is Facebook censoring accurate information and spreading disinformation? And how can we fight back?

Please subscribe now to support our investigative reporting, our fight against censorship, and our defense of the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whales.

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Facebook’s Renewable Energy Investments...pix

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/ron-johnson-obsessing-hunter-biden/

an 6 22

Ron Johnson (R-WI) made it clear why it's so difficult to get Republicans and Democrats to come together around gun safety solutions that are overwhelmingly supported by American voters.

On Tuesday, Johnson was asked about increasing the age to buy a gun to 21 and expanding background checks. Instead of talking about bipartisan efforts or indicating what he would support, he turned to attack Hunter Biden.

The right has used President Joe Biden's son in the same way they used Hillary Clinton's emails. The last surviving Biden son is the source of several conspiracy theories involving Ukraine and China. Former President Donald Trump even went so far as to claim that Hunter Biden got $1.5 billion from China and used the government plane to do it. There's never been any proof to confirm it. At the same time, Hunter Biden isn't listed on the Forbes list of American billionaires. FactCheck.org ruled the claim unsubstantiated and Trump hasn't been able to provide the world with proof for his claims.

Still, Republicans have decided that if they take back the House and Senate, their main goal will be bringing down President Joe Biden by destroying his children, who haven't served in the White House as a senior advisers. Republicans have indicated that they intend to spend the two years leading into the 2024 election investigating Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in an attempt to get Donald Trump reelected.

It prompted those online to question why Ron Johnson cares more about the president's son over the safety of children, churches, movie theaters and other mass shooting sites.

Others couldn't help but joke that Hunter Biden's laptop never killed anyone.

See the comments below:

Doctor Makes False Claim About Stillbirths in Canadian Hospitals

By Brea Jones

Posted on December 16, 2021

the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends COVID-19 vaccines for pregnant people, and the World Health Organization says the vaccines are safe for them. Yet online articles cite a Canadian doctor who falsely claims that the vaccines have caused an unusually high number of stillbirths in Canadian hospitals. A hospital representative told us there was “no truth to this claim."

Full Story

Pregnant people have an increased riskfor severe disease from COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC also reports that among delivery hospitalizations from March 2020 to September 2021, women with COVID-19 were at increased risk for stillbirth.

The CDC says that implementing COVID-19 prevention strategies, including vaccination before or during pregnancy, is critical to reducing the impact of COVID-19 on stillbirths.

And, as we’ve reported, there is no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines pose a risk to pregnant people and their fetuses.

But Dr. Daniel Nagase, a Canadian family physician, has falsely claimed that the vaccines are the cause of an “increase in stillbirths” across Canada, with one birthing center in Vancouver having “13 stillbirths in a 24-hour period.”   

Conservative outlets are spreading Nagase’s unfounded claim. TheGateway Pundit, a website that has repeatedly spread misinformation, carried a headline on Dec. 11 that said: “Doctor Warns Stillbirths Are Rampant Among Fully Vaccinated Mothers, Launches Investigation.”

Trending Politics, another conservative website, borrowed content from the Gateway Pundit story and ran a similar headline: “SHOCK REPORT: Rampant Stillbirths Among Fully Vaccinated Mothers Concerning.” 

But Canadian health officials have refuted Nagase’s claim.

‘No Truth’ to Claim About Stillbirth Data

In a video shared in the Gateway Pundit article, Nagase named Dr. Mel Bruchet — a former family doctorfrom Vancouver who has also advocated for the use of ivermectin on COVID-19 patients — as the individual who shared the information about the Vancouver stillbirths with him. 

“That is what I heard, but the thing is I also heard a similar story out in Waterloo, Ontario. So, in Waterloo, Ontario, I have a more reliable statistic that there was 86 stillbirths between January and July,” Nagase said. “Normally, it’s only five or six stillbirths every year. So, about one stillbirth every two months is the usual rate. So, to suddenly get to 86 stillbirths in six months, that’s highly unusual. But, the most important confirmation that we have from the Waterloo, Ontario report was that all of the 86 stillbirths were fully vaccinated.”

Nagase nodded his head “yes” when asked in the video if he meant all the stillbirths involved fully vaccinated mothers.

But Celso Pereira, a spokesperson for the regional health authority Vancouver Coastal Health, told us in an email that VCH was “aware of disinformation spreading on social media regarding stillbirths at Lions Gate Hospital (LGH) as a result of mothers having been vaccinated against COVID-19.” 

“There is no truth to this claim and the individuals spreading this false information have no affiliation to either Lions Gate Hospital or Vancouver Coastal Health,” Pereira said.

“There has been no notable change to the incidence of stillbirths in the VCH region throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of disinformation adds unnecessary stress to expecting parents who have received a COVID-19 vaccine, on health-care staff who must reassure their patients, and on the health-care system, as resources are stretched further during the ongoing pandemic response,” Pereira said.

“COVID-19 vaccines are recommended for pregnant women and safe for both mother and fetus,” Pereira also said.

Dr. Peter Potts, joint chief of staff at Grand River Hospital in the Waterloo region of Ontario, told the Canadian news site CityNews that 12 stillbirths occurred in the last fiscal year between both Grand River Hospital and Cambridge Memorial Hospital in Cambridge, Ontario.

“This year, we have had 982 deliveries in Cambridge and four still-births,” Kristin Wadsworth, chief of obstetrics and gynecology at Cambridge Memorial Hospital, said in the CityNews article.“That is a still-birth rate of 0.41%, which is our average.”

Potts also said, “we feel COVID vaccinations during pregnancy are a normal part to prenatal care and the obstetricians and midwives in the community strongly support the vaccination during pregnancy. There is a growing body of evidence that the vaccination is safe.”

On its website, the CDC says “the benefits of receiving a COVID-19 vaccine outweigh any known or potential risks of vaccination during pregnancy.” In fact, the CDC says, “people who have COVID-19 during pregnancy are at increased risk of preterm birth and stillbirth.”

This isn’t the first time that he has attracted the attention of Canadian health officials. Nagase triggered a public health warning from the Alberta Health Service in October, after he claimed online to have treated COVID-19 patients with the unapproved drug ivermectin while he acted as afill-in doctorat AHS.

“Neither the veterinary nor human drug versions of ivermectin has been deemed safe or effective for use in treating or preventing COVID-19,” AHS said in its statement on Twitter. “It is extremely disappointing that someone would spread misinformation about COVID-19 treatment in this way,” the health service’s statement said.

As we’ve written, the Food and Drug Administration says “currently available data do not show ivermectin is effective against COVID-19.”

The CBC reported that, following the incident, Nagase wasn’t scheduled to work as a fill-in physician at AHS and that the health service would conduct a review.

Editor’s note: SciCheck’s COVID-19/Vaccination Project is made possible by agrant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.The foundation has no control over FactCheck.org’s editorial decisions, and the views expressed in our articles do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation. The goal of the project is to increase exposure to accurate information about COVID-19 and vaccines, while decreasing the impact of misinformation.

Sources

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Risk for Stillbirth Among Women with and Without COVID-19 at Delivery Hospitalization — United States, March 2020 — September 2021.” Updated 26 Nov 2021. 

“Doctor who says he gave ivermectin to rural Alberta COVID-19 patients prompts warning from health authority.” CBC News. 8 Oct 2021.

Gill, Divya. “Stillbirth rates not increasing in the region according to hospital officials.” CityNews Kitchener. 27 Nov 2021.

Jones, Brea.“Bogus Campaign Signs in Virginia Were Not Posted by McAuliffe or Democrats.”FactCheck.org. 29 Oct 2021.

McDonald, Jessica. “CDC Data Thus Far Show COVID-19 Vaccination Safe During Pregnancy.” FactCheck.org. Updated 8 Nov 2021.

“Nagase, Daniel Yoshio” webpage. College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. Accessed 13 Dec 2021.

Parks, Gord. “Dr. Nagase Files Conflicts of Interest Complaints Against B.C. Top Docs.” Brightlight News. 23 Nov 2021.

Powe, Alicia. “(VIDEO) Doctor Warns Stillbirths Are Rampant Among Fully Vaccinated Mothers, Launches Investigation.” Gateway Pundit. 11 Dec 2021

Risdon, Melanie. “WATCH: Emergency doctor says authorities are ‘standing in the way of life-saving medications’.” Western Standard. 6 Oct 2021

Salvatore, Johnny. “SHOCK REPORT: Rampant Stillbirths Among Fully Vaccinated Mothers Concerning.” Trending Politics. 11 Dec 2021. 

Snowdon, Wallis. “Doctor who says he gave ivermectin to rural Alberta COVID-19 patients prompts warning from health authority.” CBC News. 8 Oct 2021.

Spencere, Saranac Hale. “Evidence Points to Safety of COVID-19 Vaccines for Pregnant People.” FactCheck.org. Updated 16 Aug 2021.

Van Beusekom, Mary. “COVID-19 tied to higher risk of stillbirth, maternal death.” Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. 22 Nov 2021.

Vancouver Coastal Health (@VCHhealthcare). “Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH) is aware of rumours and disinformation spreading on social media regarding stillbirths at Lions Gate Hospital (LGH) as a result of mothers having been vaccinated against COVID-19.” Twitter. 24 Nov 2021. 

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mma 120

Judd Legum reported that Facebook is allowing a major pro-Trump Super PAC, the Committee to Defend the President, to “run ads with lies.”

“Since Saturday, the Committee to Defend the President is running multiple ads that claim former Vice President Joe Biden is ‘a criminal who used his power as Vice President to make him and his son RICH,’” according to Legum’s report.

According to Facebook's own fact-checking partners, this claim is false. PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, both fact-checking partners of Facebook, debunked Trump's suggestion previously.

Facebook’s ad policy specifically bans ads that have been debunked by third-party fact-checkers.

The social network has neglected to enforce the few rules that it has. Despite prohibiting attacks that target a group of people based on their immigration status, Facebook let Trump run over 2,000 ads in early 2019 referring to immigration to the United States as an “invasion,” which has long been a white supremacist talking point. Facebook also let Trump run hundreds of ads in April of 2019 that violated its policyabout “personal attributes” of users. And just today, CNN reported that Trump is running ads blatantly lying about the Super Bowl.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/the-washington-posts-three-pinocchios-for-aoc-shows-how-incoherent-mainstream-fact-checking-really-is/

The Washington Post's "three Pinocchios" for AOC shows how incoherent mainstream "fact-checking" really is.

A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats any lie you can invent

– William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

Fact-checking political discourse is noble in theory, but it can easily go wrong. That’s what happened in 2011, when PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” — the claim that Republicans wanted to end Medicare — was actually true, as Paul Krugman, Steve Bennen and others pointed out. Writing for the Columbia Journalism Review, Greg Marx summarized the problem with PolitiFact’s “reasoning”:

You can’t report your way to the conclusion that it’s okay to say, as leading Republican Mitt Romney has, that the GOP plan will “fundamentally transform Medicare,” and basically okay to say, as President Obama has, that the plan would “end Medicare as we know it,” but that it’s an egregious falsehood to simply say it would “end Medicare.”

The problem with “fact-checking” was much bigger than this one spectacular misfire. As Marx noted, most articles in the genre “actually contain counterarguments— many of which are solid, some shoddy or tendentious, but few of which really fit in a ‘fact-check’ frame.” Such articles are engaged in “patrolling public discourse,” he continued, a project that “will inevitably involve judgments not only about truth, but about what attacks are fair, what arguments are reasonable, what language is appropriate.”

If that was problematic in 2011, welcome to 2019, as fact-checkers have homed in on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., face of the progressive resistance, while Donald Trump is burning down their house.

It happened again last week, when Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave AOC “three Pinocchios” for comments she made about economic justice, echoing Dr. Martin Luther King, at an event honoring his birthday. Kessler ignored the context of her argument and picked out four claims, three of which he deemed false. But Kessler actually confirmed one of those without realizing it, while another was purely semantic and the third was at worst debatable, not a clearcut falsehood. If anything, Matt Bruenig’s detailed attack on Kessler’s analysis for Jacobin made it seem more substantial than it actually was.

In part, fact-checkers are always seeking a false balance — as PolitiFact was doing in 2011, after twice awarding its “Lie of the Year” to Republican falsehoods about Obamacare — in 2009 for “death panels,” and in 2010 for calling it a “government takeover.” Now the Post Fact Checker’s database has tallied 8,158 false or misleading claims made by Trump in his first two years as president, so its team feels obliged to ding Democrats as well.

But there’s something more complex happening here too, that’s probably best understood in terms of press scholar Daniel Hallin’s three-sphere model of how the media functions, from his 1986 book The Uncensored War. At the center is the sphere of consensus, mom-and-apple-pie country. Surrounding that, like a donut, is the sphere of legitimate debate, where journalists’ attention is usually focused, where there are two sides to every story and a need for objectivity and balance to be maintained.

Beyond that, though, is the sphere of deviance, the outer darkness in which dwell “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” The shoddy fact-checking directed at Ocasio-Cortez reflects a boundary-policing instinct, and an outdated one, considering that the entire political landscape has been irrevocably changed.

To understand how shoddy it is — and the unspoken agenda involved — we need to take a closer look at the totality of what went down. Kessler was quoting from a snippet of AOC’s response to a question by Ta-Nehisi Coates in an MLK Day interview. The context is important, because context is everything in political discourse: What’s radical in one context is mom-and-apple-pie material in another.

King, paradoxically, is both. The question asked and the answer given were both in King’s spirit — but not the mom-and-apple-pie version of him the media (and much of America) loves to celebrate. It more reflected the actual, radical Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke out against the “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism,” and said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”

This is exactly what Coates asked about in asking, “Do we live in a moral world that allows for billionaires? Is that a moral outcome?” Ocasio-Cortez answered, “No it’s not,” with an immediate clarification: “I think it’s important to say that I don’t think that necessarily means that all billionaires are immoral. It is not to say that someone like Bill Gates, for instance, for example, Warren Buffett are immoral people, I do not believe that.” Contrary to a favorite media trope, she’s not demonizing the wealthy just as Republicans demonize the poor. Then she returned to core King mode:

But I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong. And I think it’s wrong that [1] a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage, I think it’s wrong that [2] you can work 100 hours and not feed your kids. I think it’s wrong that [3] corporations like Walmart and Amazon can get paid by the government, essentially experience a wealth transfer from the public, [4] for paying people less than a minimum wage. And it not only doesn’t make economic sense, but it doesn’t make moral sense and it doesn’t make societal sense.

The section of that passage in italics is what Kessler chose to fact-check, broken into four parts (indicated in brackets). He awarded her “three Pinocchios,” which the fact-check guide explains as “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of ‘mostly false.’ But it could include statements which are technically correct (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading.”

Here, however, the situation is the opposite: even if some of AOC’s statements were technically incorrect — if she were wrong in the ways Kessler claimed — that wouldn’t necessarily invalidate hermoral argument. That would require an error or contradiction in her moral reasoning — about which Kessler has nothing to say.

Kessler admitted that claim No. 2 was correct — in fact, it could be 135 hours, he said. But what of the other three claims? Ocasio-Cortez claimed that “a vast majority of the country doesn’t make a living wage,” while Kessler claimed the figure was “only” “about 32 to 38 percent of workers,” relying on calculations based on the MIT Living Wage calculator. Even if he’s right, that’s still morally outrageous, and serves to support her larger argument.

She claimed that Walmart and Amazon “experience a wealth transfer from the public,” and Kessler argued that only amounted to “between 20-30 percent of the benefits,” essentiallyconfirmingwhat she had claimed. Ocasio-Cortez said such companies were “paying people less thanaminimum wage,” which was likely a simple misstatement. Kessler responded that they paid more than theminimum wage — but not more than a livingwage, which was clearly the intended focus of her remarks.

So even if Kessler were right on every factual point, and Bruenig and AOC were wrong, her argumentwould still stand. If fewer people earn below less than a living wage than she stated, then arguably the situation is less dire than she described — but it’s not radically different. Furthermore, MIT’s “living wage” isn’t the last word on that subject. It’s an admirable measure, but it’s a “surviving wage,” not a “thriving wage.” A true living wage would mean more than simply surviving from paycheck to paycheck. It would mean the ability to build a future for oneself and one’s family. Here’s how the MIT Living Wage website puts it:

When coupled with lowered expenses, for childcare and housing in particular, the living wage might also free up resources for savings, investment, and/or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g. provisions for retirement or home purchases) that build wealth and ensure long-term financial security.

In short, without lowered expenses the MIT living wage does not allow people to thrive — as Ocasio-Cortez knows from her own lived experience. So she was well justified in having a higher standard in mind. The flood of hardship stories from the recent government shutdown should make it obvious how precarious most middle-class families are, and how many of them fall between the MIT living wage and what a truly thriving living wage would be.

So, read in context,everything AOC said was true, even if we accept Kessler’s factual counterclaims! The entire fact-checking ritual was a charade. As I suggested earlier, it was really a boundary-policing episode, meant to keep her “radical” ideas outside the sphere of legitimate debate by portraying her as untrustworthy. Further, it was meant to deter others from similar infractions while trying to break through the barriers excluding them from legitimacy. (See AOC’s related Twitter thread on “gravitas” here.)

But the problem is that Kessler’s implied boundaries are not worth policing, or even recognizing. The whole system is in crisis, and the mainstream media’s assessment of what is deviant, what reflects normative consensus and what represents legitimate debate bears little or no relationship to reality. Take two other examples AOC has been associated with — raising top marginal tax rates to 70 percent and a Green New Deal. The first idea drew immediate majority support — 59 percent in a poll for the Hill, including 56 percent of rural voters and 45 percent of Republicans—and scorn from the 1 percent at Davos.

Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell laughed at the idea (video here), and said he thought it would be bad for economic growth. “Name a country where that’s worked,” he responded. “Ever.” Sitting there with him was MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who supplied the example: the United States, throughout most of its post-World War II expansion. It was a rare, Marshall McLuhan-in-“Annie Hall” moment. Usually, when the super-rich or their sycophants spout off like that, truth does not intrude. Certainly not from the fact-checking media.

But the media’s failure is even more striking when it comes to climate change and the Green New Deal. It’s still a rarity for the media to treat climate science as firmly within the sphere of consensus, where all reputable researchers say it belongs. As far back as 2004, a study found that “US prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse,” and that “the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropogenic contributions to global warming and resultant action.”

Four years later, just after the financial crisis hit, George Soros told Bill Moyers that something akin to AOC’s Green New Deal was needed, to respond both to global warming and the financial collapse:

*For the last 25 years … the motor of the world economy that has been driving it was consumption by the American consumer, who has been spending more than he has been saving, all right? Than he’s been producing. So that motor is now switched off. It’s finished. … You need a new motor. And we have a big problem. Global warming. It requires big investment. And that could be the motor of the world economy in the years to come.

For all Soros’ supposed power, you’ve probably never heard that idea. It remained on the fringes, if not beyond the fringe in the sphere of deviancy. But if that prescription had been followed, rather than the austerity economics that took over after 2010, we’d be living in a radically different and more hopeful world today.

Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas — on marginal tax rates, a Green New Deal  and economic justice — are only deviant in a media system that’s utterly divorced from reality. That’s why it would be a serious mistake to view her in isolation. The intellectual incoherence of “fact-checking” poses a serious threat to Democrats and progressives — and to democracy itself — through the 2020 election, at least. The sooner we all wake up to that, and respond to it, the better.

==

rww

, the Media Research Center will now be “fact-checking the fact-checkers”: “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 routinely finds instances when fact-checkers bend the truth or disproportionately target conservatives. We are assigning our own rating to their judgments and will expose the worst offenders.”

==

KHJameson

She is co-founder of the Webby award-winning FactCheck.org, which researches the veracity of claims made by political players. Its SciCheck feature was launched in 2015 to expose the misuse of scientific evidence in political discourse.

science beat

http://www.factcheck.org/2017/02/no-data-manipulation-at-noaa/

2016 whoppers:

A year ago, we broke with past practice and named Donald Trump our first ever “King of Whoppers.” This year, the reigning champ defended his title well – once again dominating our annual review of political whoppers.

At his campaign rallies, Trump regularly disparaged the media as “dishonest,” referring at one point to fact-checkers as “dishonest scum.” Yet, he peddled conspiracy theories from a supermarket tabloid and a website that serves as a platform for the alt-right.

The Republican president-elect used a thinly sourced story from the National Enquirer to make the baseless claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father “was with Lee Harvey Oswald” prior to John F. Kennedy’s assassination — a claim he doubled down on after Cruz already had dropped out of the presidential primary. Trump also cited Breitbart as evidence that he was “right” when he suggested that President Obama supported terrorists. No, Trump wasn’t right.

During the campaign, Trump also made the wild accusation that Obama “is the founder of ISIS,” the terrorist group based in Syria and Iraq, and retweeted a fake image of Fox News host Megyn Kelly that purported to show her posing with Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal.

Of course, we wrote about plenty of others who distorted the facts and made false claims in 2016. After all, it was the year when the facts caught up with Hillary Clinton’s numerous false and distorted claims regarding her use of a private email server while secretary of state. Contrary to what she said, Clinton did have classified material on her server and did not have government approval to use a private server because she never requested it.

Even so, Trump is in a league of his own.

Here we present — as we do every year — a wrap-up of the biggest whoppers in an election year that stunned the political experts, shook up the party establishment and kept fact-checkers very busy.

Analysis

Trump’s Whoppers

On the campaign trail, Trump relentlessly portrayed the U.S. as a once-proud nation in decline, and held himself out to voters as the man who could make it great again. That’s his opinion, of course, and he is entitled to it.

We took issue, though, with how he distorted the facts on employment, crime, immigration, taxes, refugees, terrorism and other topics, to make his case.

In February, Trump said he “heard” the unemployment rate was really 42 percent, and vowed to be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created.” At the time, the official unemployment rate was 4.9 percent, and it has since dropped to 4.6 percent — the lowest in more than nine years. Trump’s inflated figure includes millions of people 16 years and older who are not in the labor force and don’t want to work — including retirees, high school and college students, and stay-at-home parents.

Even after the election, Trump continued to grossly misrepresent the facts on unemployment, claiming that “96 million people out there … gave up looking for jobs” and that they “want to work,” when, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 5.5 million of them “want to work.” His 96 million figure, for example, includes 18.2 million people age 75 and older who were not in the workforce in November, BLS says.

Similarly, Trump took up the mantle as the “law and order candidate,” claiming in October that the murder rate in the U.S. last year was the “highest it’s been in 45 years,” and lamenting that “the press never talks about it.” Wrong and wrong.

The murder rate in 2015 was 4.9 per 100,000 inhabitants — far lower than it was 45 years ago at 7.9 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970, according to FBI data. It peaked at 10.2 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1980 — which was 35 years ago. In fact, the murder rate was lower in 2015 than it had been at any time between 1965 and 2009.

As for his claim that the “the press never talks about it,” Trump was actually distorting news reported by the New York Times.In September, the paper reported that the 2015 murder rate was 10.8 percent higher than it was in 2014 — the highest one-year increase “in nearly half a century.” That’s not the same as saying the murder rate is the “highest it’s been in 45 years,” as Trump claimed.

There are many more examples of false and misleading claims by Trump, and readers can see them all by clicking here. For now, we review some of his whoppers:

Trump Wildly Inflates Unemployment, Feb. 10

Groundhog Friday, Dec. 9

Trump’s Attack on Clinton’s Character, June 22

‘What Evidence Do You Have?’ June 24

FactChecking the Second Presidential Debate, Oct. 10

Donald Trump and the Iraq War, Feb. 19

Trump Muddies Immigrant Voting Issue, Oct. 7

Trump’s Foreign Policy Speech, April 28

Trump Wrong on Iraqi Oil, June 7

Trump’s ISIS Conspiracy Theory, June 16

FactChecking the First Debate, Sept. 27

Trump on Birtherism: Wrong, and Wrong, Sept. 16

Trump’s Bogus Voter Fraud Claims, Oct. 19

Trump Sticks with Bogus Voter Fraud Claims, Nov. 28

Trump’s Defense of His ‘University,’ March 1

Trump University’s D- Rating, March 8

Donald Trump on Orlando Shooting, June 14

Trump Retweets Bogus Fox Graphic, Jan. 28

Trump Landslide? Nope. Nov. 29

Trump’s Tall Tabloid Tale, May 3

Clinton’s Whoppers

News about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for government business as secretary of state dominated the coverage of her candidacy — and her statements on the topic headline the false claims she made in 2016. In her public comments dating to March 2015, Clinton wrongly claimed that she didn’t send or receive any emails that contained classified information – a claim she later revised to say she did not send or receive any information that was “marked classified.” After an investigation, FBI Director James Comey said in early July that more than 2,000 emails contained classified information, including 110 emails that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received. Three emails “bore markings indicating the presence of classified information.”... many more

...

Fake News

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention a bit about what has become a hot topic since the election, the prevalence of “fake news.” Here, we are not talking about distorted or misleading political rhetoric, but rather outright made-up news.

Fake news stories are nothing new; we have been dealing with viral claims in Ask FactCheck for nine years. But the growth of social media has made it possible to spread fake news farther and easier than ever before. In fact, an entire cottage industry of fake news has emerged, with purveyors in places as far flung as Macedonia making substantial advertising profit by getting readers to click on totally made-up stories.

Nearly a quarter of Americans fessed up to sharing a fake news story, though more than half said they didn’t know it was fake until after they shared it, according to a new Pew Research Center report. About two-thirds of those surveyed said fake news had caused “a great deal of confusion” about “basic facts of current events.”

We flagged a few such stories this year:

Did Obama’s mother-in-law get a $160,000 pension for babysitting her granddaughters during Obama’s time as president? No. Did the pope endorse Trump? He did not. Did President Obama sign an executive order banning the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools? Of course not. Did the Obamas buy a vacation home in Dubai? Negative.:{

}:

All of these bogus stories came from fake or satirical news sites.

Another whopper: the fake medical records for Clinton, which circulated on social media and some conservative websites, purporting to show that she suffers from seizures and dementia. Clinton’s longtime physician — whose name appears atop the alleged “leaked” documents — released a statement to FactCheck.org calling the documents “false,” and reiterating her diagnosis that Clinton was “in excellent health and fit to serve as President of the United States.”

No ‘First Grandma’ Pension, Nov. 9

Did the Pope Endorse Trump? Oct. 24

Obama Did Not Ban the Pledge, Sept. 2

Debunking Obama’s Dubai Domicile, Feb. 10

Fake Clinton Medical Records, Aug. 16

Although Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, scoffed at the idea of fake news influencing the outcome of the presidential election, he acknowledges that fake news spread via Facebook is a growing problem. On Dec. 15, Facebook announced an experiment to try to stem the spread of fake news by, in part, enlisting the help of independent fact-checkers — including us here at FactCheck.org — to flag fake news. Stay tuned.

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/12/the-whoppers-of-2016/

==

http://www.factcheck.org/2016/06/trumps-attack-on-clintons-character/

Summary

Donald Trump’s once delayed, and much anticipated, speech on Hillary Clinton’s character, included numerous false and misleading statements:

Analysis

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, originally planned to deliver a speech attacking Hillary Clinton’s character on June 13. He postponed it because of the mass shooting a day earlier in Orlando by an avowed follower of the terrorist Islamic State. Trump gave his speech in New York on June 22.

In his speech, Trump described Clinton, the Democratic presumptive nominee, as “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency,” and laid out his case against her. But his rhetoric was not always supported by the facts.

The 3 a.m. Call

:{Trump falsely claimed that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.” Two emails from Clinton show that she was awake after it was learned that Stevens had died in the attack on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi.

}:

We have written before about Trump’s repeated claim that “instead of taking charge” during the Benghazi attacks, then-Secretary of State Clinton “decided to go home and sleep.” Clinton says she was continuously engaged in responding to the attack from the moment she learned of it in the afternoon and “did not sleep all night.”

Trump has used the claim to suggest that Clinton failed the “3 a.m.” test, referencing Clinton’s famous 3 a.m.” campaign ad in 2008, in which she claimed she was more “tested” and prepared than Barack Obama to handle a late-night call to the White House about a dire emergency.

Trump, June 22: Among the victims is our late Ambassador, Chris Stevens. I mean, she — what she did with him was absolutely horrible. He was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed. That’s right. When the phone rang, as per the commercial, at three o’clock in the morning, Hillary Clinton was sleeping.

The embassy in Tripoli alerted the State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., about the attack on the diplomatic facility in Benghazi at about 3:45 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Sept. 11, 2012. We detailed some of Clinton’s activities in the ensuing hours, and concluded that “the evidence shows Clinton was fully engaged in the immediate response, and subsequent congressional investigations concluded the government response to the attack — including Clinton’s — was appropriate.”

It is true that, at some point in the night, Clinton decided to leave the State Department and continue working from her home. But Clinton testified before a House Select Committee hearing on Benghazi that she was continuously engaged in responding to the attack, that she stayed in constant contact with various officials through secured phone lines at home, and “did not sleep all night. I was very much focused on what we were doing.”

Other than Clinton’s word, we can’t independently verify whether Clinton did sleep for a brief period that night. She testified that she was home alone. However, two emails made public contradict Trump’s claim that Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.”

Public records show that at 11:12 p.m., Clinton sent an emailto her daughter, Chelsea (who is identified in the email under her alias “Diane Reynolds”). In that email, the secretary of state wrote: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an al Qaeda-like group: The Ambassador, whom I handpicked and a young communications officer on temporary duty w a wife and two young children. Very hard day and I fear more of the same tomorrow.”

We also know that at 11:38 p.m., Clinton emailed State Department officials Cheryl Mills, Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland, to ask if the State Department should announce Stevens’ death that night or wait until the following morning.

*Update, June 24: Trump acknowledged in a June 23 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that he had no evidence to support his claim that Stevens “was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed.” Trump said “who knows if she was sleeping … she might have been sleeping.”

Jewels from Brunei

Trump: Hillary Clinton accepted $58,000 in jewelry from the government of Brunei when she was secretary of state.

This is false. Clinton traveled to Brunei in September of 2012, and she did receive — on behalf of the U.S. — jewelry (“Mouawad Larme D’Amour 18k gold, sapphire, and diamond earrings, necklace, and bracelet”) worth an estimated $58,000, according to the Department of State’s Office of the Chief of Protocol.

However, Clinton did not keep the jewelry. The gifts were transferred to the General Services Administration, the chief of protocol report said.

This is standard practice when federal employees receive gifts from foreign countries. The U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 9, clause 8) prohibits all federal officials from receiving any “presents” from foreign governments, kings, or princes, without the consent of the Congress, as explained in a 2012 Congressional Research Service report.

“The Congress has consented generally, in the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act, to the acceptance of gifts of ‘minimal value’ from foreign governments offered as souvenirs or marks of courtesy, and the acceptance of other gifts when a refusal of the gift may cause ‘offense or embarrassment’ or otherwise harm the foreign relations of the United States,” the CRS report says. “A tangible gift of more than minimal value accepted for reasons of protocol or courtesy may not be kept as a personal gift, however, but is considered accepted on behalf of and property of the United States.”

In Clinton’s case, the department’s chief of protocol noted that the jewelry was accepted because “[n]on-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and U.S. Government,” and the gifts would be transferred to the GSA.

Bogus Refugee Budget Claim

Trump: Hillary also wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to settle Middle Eastern refugees in the United States, on top of the current record level of immigration that we already have.

There’s no evidence that Clinton wants to spend that much.

Clinton has said that she would admit as many as 65,000 refugees from Syria, which is a 550 percent increase from the 10,000 Syrian refugees that President Obama said that he would authorize for admission in fiscal year 2016. However, Clinton has not specified how much she would be willing to spend on those refugees.

The total authorized budget for “Refugee and Entrant Assistance” was $1.67 billion in fiscal 2016. And $948 million of that was not for refugees, but for unaccompanied minors who immigrate to the U.S. illegally. The fiscal 2016 figure was also when the ceiling for global refugee admissions, not just those from Middle East nations, was 85,000. It’s hard to see how Clinton’s proposal to add 55,000 Syrian refugees to the 10,000 authorized by Obama would add “hundreds of billions” to the budget for refugee assistance.

The Administration for Children and Families, which includes the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has asked Congress for $2.18 billion for refugee and entrant assistance in FY 2017. That’s an increase of just over $510 million from the last fiscal cycle. And assistance for unaccompanied minors accounts for $373 million of that increase.

Trade with China

Trump: Our trade deficit with China soared 40 percent during Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state — a disgraceful performance for which she should not be congratulated, but rather scorned.

Trump greatly exaggerated the rise in the trade deficit with China while Clinton was secretary of state.

The trade deficit with China went up 17.5 percent in that time, not 40 percent. Clinton was secretary of state from January 2009 to February 2013, and we’d note that trade is under the purview of the Commerce Department. Still, to reflect the change during her tenure, we would start the clock in 2008, when the trade deficit with China was $268 billion. By the end of 2012, two months before Clinton left office, that trade deficit was $315 billion, an increase of $47 million, or 17.5 percent.

It’s possible to look at the trade deficit with China for the particular months Clinton was in office, but the figures are not seasonally adjusted (they show a 15 percent growth, anyway).

This isn’t the first time Trump has been wrong in citing statistics on the U.S. trade deficit with China. We have pointed out several times now that he is off the mark when he repeatedly claims that it’s $505 billion. The trade deficit with China was $367 billion in 2015.

In his speech, Trump went on to say that “Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs,” and in a tweet on June 21, he directly linked a rise in the trade deficit to the loss of “millions” of jobs. As our fact-checking colleagues at the Washington Post wrote, “[a] billion dollars of exports is estimated to create about 6,000 jobs.” That’s according to a Commerce Department analysis of U.S. jobs supported by exports. So, if one wanted to run a back-of-the-envelope calculation using that formula, the $47 billion increase in the deficit over four years would amount to 282,000 jobs. That’s not “millions.”

Worth noting is that the Commerce Department analysis found that U.S. jobs supported by all exports increased by more than 100,000 from 2008 to 2012, and have gone up further since.

Iraq Departure and Clinton

Trump blamed Clinton for the “disastrous strategy of announcing our departure from Iraq, handing large parts of the country over to ISIS and the ISIS killers.” The departure date was set by President George W. Bush. Obama did not change the scheduled departure date, and ultimately it was Obama’s call, not Clinton’s.

Trump: Then there was the disastrous strategy of announcing our departure from Iraq, handing large parts of the country over to ISIS and the ISIS killers. ISIS threatens us today because of the decisions Hillary Clinton has made, along with President Obama.

As we have written before, Bush signed an agreement, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, on Dec. 14, 2008, that said: “All the United States Forces shall withdraw from all Iraqi territory no later than December 31, 2011.”

Nevertheless, Obama had three years to negotiate a new agreement prior to the Dec. 31, 2011, withdrawal date to keep some U.S. troops in Iraq. Leon Panetta, who was Obama’s defense secretary from July 2011 to February 2013, wrote in his 2014 book, “Worthy Fights,” that as the deadline neared “it was clear to me — and many others — that withdrawing all our forces would endanger the fragile stability” in Iraq. As a result, the Obama administration sought to keep 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. combat troops in Iraq.

But negotiations with Iraq broke down in October 2011 over the issue of whether U.S. troops would be shielded from criminal prosecution by Iraqi authorities. Panetta said the Obama White House did not press hard enough to reach a deal, and that the U.S. “had leverage” and could have “threatened to withdraw reconstruction aid” if Iraq didn’t agree to “some sort of continued U.S. military presence.”

Clinton was involved in the negotiations as Obama’s secretary of state and, at least publicly, supported the president’s decision. Days after Obama announced he would withdraw all troops by Dec. 31, 2011, Clinton was asked on “Meet the Press” if critics had a point that such a withdrawal would “endanger recent success in Iraq by not having any residual force.” She replied: “They should have raised those issues when President Bush agreed to the agreement to withdraw troops by the end of this year.”

She later defended Obama’s actions at a 2014 town hall meeting televised by CNN. This time, she blamed the Iraqi government.

Clinton, June 17, 2014: Some now say, well, you should have made him or you should have — but that’s not the way it works. You have to — if you’re going to having American troops in harm’s way — and we knew Iraq would be quite dangerous for a long time, unpredictable, at the very least — you have to have the host government, in this case Iraq, say, OK, here’s what we want. We’re signing this agreement which will protect American soldiers. We didn’t get that done. And I think, in retrospect, that was a mistake by the Iraqi government.

Trump is free to argue that Clinton should have done more to persuade Obama to renegotiate a withdrawal agreement with Iraq, but it was ultimately Obama’s call, not Clinton’s. And the initial departure date was set by Bush.

Clinton Doesn’t Support ‘Open Borders’

Trump falsely claimed that Clinton would “end virtually all immigration enforcement and thus create totally open borders for the United States.” Clinton supported the 2013 Senate immigration bill that, in addition to a path to earned citizenship for those currently in the country illegally, would have included significant investments in border security.

Trump: She’s pledged to grant mass amnesty and in a first 100 days, end virtually all immigration enforcement and thus create totally open borders for the United States, totally open borders.

Clinton has said she supports “comprehensive immigration reform,” and she has vowed that within the first 100 days as president, she would send a plan to Congress that would include “a path to full and equal citizenship” for those currently in the country illegally. She has also said that she would defend Obama’s executive orders that “provide relief from deportation for DREAMers and parents of Americans and lawful residents.”

But that’s a far cry from ending “all immigration enforcement” and “open borders.” Clinton’s campaign website says she supports “humane, targeted immigration enforcement.” Specifically, the website says she would “focus enforcement resources on detaining and deporting those individuals who pose a violent threat to public safety.”

In her book, “Hard Choices,” Clinton said she supported the 2013 Senate immigration bill, S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. (page 459)

Clinton, “Hard Choices”: I only wish that the bipartisan bill passed in the Senate in 2013 reforming our immigration laws could have passed the House.

The bill would have funded an enhanced border security plan, additional border fencing, the implementation of an E-Verify system, and an exit visa system to stop visa overstays.

“Border security has always been a part of that debate,” Clinton said during a Democratic debate in November.

In short, Trump goes too far with his claim that Clinton’s support for an immigration overhaul that includes an earned path to citizenship would mean she would “end virtually all immigration enforcement, and thus create totally open borders in the United States.”

Clinton’s Server ‘Easily Hacked’?

Trump: Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments, perhaps even by her financial backers in communist China. Sure they have it. Putting all of America and our citizens in danger, great danger.

Trump is wrong. There were attempts to hack into Clinton’s server, but there’s no evidence to date that shows any attempts were successful.

We wrote about this topic earlier this month when Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the chairman of the homeland security committee, said “you have to assume that our enemies and our adversaries had access to every email that ever went over her private server.” The senator’s office provided no evidence that hackers were successful in gaining access to Clinton’s emails — only evidence that attempts were made, including by hackers originating in China and Russia.

*Update, June 24: Trump said in the June 23 interview with NBC that he read or heard that Clinton’s email was successfully hacked. Asked where he got that information, Trump said, “I will report back to you. I’ll give it to you.” When asked how he could make his claim “with such certainty” without evidence, Trump said, “I don’t know if certainty. Probably she was hacked.”

Russia and U.S. Uranium 

Trump: Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.

Trump is referring to the sale in 2010 of Uranium One, a Canadian-based company with uranium mining stakes in the West, to Rosatom, the Russian nuclear energy agency. He is right about investors making contributions to the Clinton Foundation, but Trump vastly overstates the State Department’s role in approving that sale.

As we have written, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States is required by law to investigate all U.S. transactions that involve a company owned or controlled by a foreign government, including the sale of Uranium One. As secretary of state, Clinton was one of nine voting members on the foreign investments committee, which also includes the secretaries of the Treasury, Defense, Homeland Security, Commerce and Energy, the attorney general, and representatives from two White House offices — the United States Trade Representative and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. (Separately, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission needed to approve (and did approve) the transfer of two uranium recovery licenses as part of the sale.)

Peter Schweizer — author of “Clinton Cash,” which Trump referred to in his speech — claimed in a TV interview last year that Clinton, as a committee member, had “veto power” and “could have stopped” the sale. But that’s not accurate. The committee can approve a sale, but it cannot stop a sale. “Only the President has the authority to suspend or prohibit a covered transaction,” according to guidelines adopted by the Department of Treasury, which chairs the committee.

*Correction, June 23: Our original story incorrectly stated that Schweizer wrote in his book that Clinton had veto power over the sale. Schweizer said that in a TV interview, not in his book. We have revised our story to correct the record. :{:{}: 

Opposition to Iraq War

Trump: Though I was not in government service, I was among the earliest to criticize the rush to war, and yes, even before the war ever started.

As we have said before, there is no evidence that Trump opposed the war before it started. We wrote a timeline of all Trump’s public comments that we could find in 2002 and 2003, and found no instances of Trump voicing his opposition before the war started on March 19, 2003. Trump has stated during primary debates that his opposition was “loud and clear” and well covered by newspapers, claiming erroneously that he could provide “25 different stories” to prove his opposition. He has yet to provide any evidence.

Trump is right, however, that he was an early critic of the war. As our timeline showed, Trump said four months into the war that the U.S. was wasting moneyin Iraq that could be better spent in U.S. cities, and after six months he suggested it was a mistake going to war in Iraq. “I guess maybe if I had to do it, I would have fought terrorism but not necessarily Iraq,” Trump said in a TV interview on Sept. 11, 2003.

Wages Actually Are Up

Trump wrongly said that “real wages for our workers have not been raised for 18 years.” Average weekly earnings for production and non-supervisory employees are up 10 percent, adjusted for inflation and seasonal factors, over that time period.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ figures show average weekly earnings were $280.90 in May 1998, as expressed in 1982-84 dollars. The figure was $309.22 in May 2016, 18 years later. Here’s the BLS chart showing the increase:

Trump isn’t the only politician to claim that wages have stagnated. Democratic candidates Clinton and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley made similar claims about real wages last year.

NAFTA and Free Trade 

Trump: Hillary Clinton supported Bill Clinton’s disastrous and totally disastrous NAFTA. Just like she supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization.

It is true that President Bill Clinton signed the enabling NAFTA legislation in 1993. However, the trade agreement was negotiated and signed by the prior president, George H.W. Bush in 1992. Also, the NAFTA bill could not have reached Clinton’s desk without Republican support in Congress.

The Senate passed the North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act, 61-38, on Nov. 20, 1993, with 34 Republican votes, and the House passed it three days earlier, 234-200, with 132 Republican votes.

So to call it “Bill Clinton’s disastrous NAFTA” ignores the trade agreement’s history.

As for China, the Clinton administration in 1999 negotiated the U.S.-China WTO trade agreement, as explained in a Congressional Research Service report updated in November 2001. It officially joined the WTO in December 2001, when President George W. Bush was in office.

Hillary Clinton supported both trade deals, but did not vote on either one. She did not join the Senate until January 2001.

Trump: We’ve lost nearly one-third of our manufacturing jobs since these two Hillary-backed agreements were signed.

Trump overstates the job losses. NAFTA took effect Jan. 1, 1994. As of December 1993, the U.S. had 16,815,000 manufacturing jobs and as of May it had 12,285,000 jobs — a decline of 4,530,000 jobs since NAFTA took effect, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s a decline of 27 percent – closer to a quarter than a third.

But more importantly, Trump ignores the impact of jobs created elsewhere by trade agreements that offset manufacturing job losses, and he ignores other reasons for the loss of manufacturing jobs, such as technological advances that have reduced employment.

As we have written, a 2015 report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service called NAFTA’s impact “relatively modest.” CRS said, “In reality, NAFTA did not cause the huge job losses feared by the critics or the large economic gains predicted by supporters.” That’s because NAFTA, like all trade agreements, created and destroyed jobs. For example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace did a report in 2004 called “NAFTA’s Promise and Reality” that said the NAFTA Trade Adjustment Assistance program provided assistance to 525,000 workers affected by the agreement as of September 2003. However, the report said that those jobs “were likely offset by other jobs gained” and resulted in “either a neutral or very small net positive effect on employment.”

China’s entry into the WTO had a greater impact. In fact, China, in 2010, displaced the U.S. as the largest manufacturing nation in the world, based on the value of each country’s manufacturing in U.S. dollars, according to a CRS report called “U.S. Manufacturing in International Perspective.” China’s manufacturing rise, which can be seen in Figure 2 of the report, has taken place since China entered the WTO.

But the CRS report also notes that “U.S. manufacturers’ large investments in automation … have eliminated many routine assembly jobs; only two in five workers in U.S. manufacturing establishments are now directly engaged in production.” So not all the job losses can be attributed to trade deals and those job losses were offset in part by job gains elsewhere.

*— by Eugene Kiely, Lori Robertson, Robert Farley and D’Angelo Gore

Sources

==

This is it — our last Groundhog Friday for this election year. We’ll bring back these wrap-ups of repeated claims during future campaigns. But for now, here’s our final look of 2016 at the president and president-elect rehashing talking points we’ve debunked before.

President-elect Donald Trump on his victory, Dec. 19 statement: “Today marks a historic electoral landslide victory in our nation’s democracy.”

Trump repeated his false claim of an “electoral landslide victory” on Dec. 19, after the Electoral College officially voted to elect Trump president. Trump’s margin of victory ranks 46th out of 58 presidential elections, as shown in a chart by John Pitney, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College, of the Electoral College share won by every president.

Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton was initially 306 to 232, giving him 56.9 percent of electoral votes. After the electors cast their ballots on Dec. 19, the spread was 304 to 227, with two electors pledged to Trump and five pledged to Clinton casting their votes for someone else. This puts Trump’s percentage of electoral votes at 56.5 percent. But it doesn’t change his standing on Pitney’s list.

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight also found that the percentage of electoral votes won by Trump was well below the historical average of 70.9 percent.

Trump clearly won, but as Pitney told us, “it was no landslide by any accepted definition of that term.”

“Trump Landslide? Nope,” Nov. 29

Share The Facts

Donald Trump

President-elect

Claims he won "the Electoral College in a landslide."

In a tweet – Sunday, November 27, 2016

SHAREREAD MORE

Trump on the murder rate, Dec. 17 speech in Alabama: “The murder rate has experienced its largest increase in our country in 45 years. Think of it, the murder rate, more people are being murdered than in 45 years. And the press never tells you that. Do they ever write that? No.”

Trump continues to sometimes get this statistic right and sometimes get it wrong — even in the same speech. He’s right in saying that the “murder rate has experienced its largest increase in our country in 45 years.” But he’s wrong to tell the crowd: “Think of it, the murder rate, more people are being murdered than in 45 years.”

In fact, the number of murders nationwide was 15,696 in 2015. That’s below the number in 1970, which was 16,000. And the number last year was significantly below the total in 1991, the peak year, when 24,703 people were murdered, according to FBI data.

Those numbers aren’t adjusted for population growth; they show a drop in the annual number of murders in the United States over the past few decades, despite the fact that the population of the country has increased.

The murder rate has dropped substantially since its peak in 1980 (at 10.2 per 100,000 inhabitants) and similarly high levels in the early 1990s. Last year, the rate was 4.9 per 100,000 inhabitants. But that’s an increase from 2014, when the rate as 4.4. In fact, the one-year increase is the largest increase “in nearly half a century,” as the New York Times said in September, contrary to Trump’s claim that the “press never tells you that.”

Trump has distorted this statistic repeatedly in telling the public that he’ll “bring this terrible crime wave to a very rapid end,” as he said in Alabama. Earlier this month, Trump also got it right in saying the murder rate “has experienced its largest increase in 45 years,” but then went on to wrongly say the rate was the “highest in 45 years.” It’s not.

“Trump Wrong on Murder Rate,” Oct. 28

Share The Facts

Donald Trump

President-elect

"Think of it, the murder rate, more people are being murdered than in 45 years."

Speech in Alabama – Saturday, December 17, 2016

SHAREREAD MORE

Trump on veterans, Dec. 17 speech in Alabama: “People that come into the country illegally, people that come into the country and cause problems, they’re taken care of better than our vets in many cases. Yeah. Time to take care of our vets.”

As we said when Trump made this same claim in late August, it’s a matter of opinion whether one group is treated better than another, but immigrants in the U.S. illegally are largely barred from receiving benefits or participating in government programs. They can’t get Social Security, or enroll in Medicaid or Medicare. They don’t qualify for food stamps, government housing or unemployment benefits, and they can’t vote.

The U.S. Code says an immigrant in the country illegally “is not eligible for any State or local public benefit,” with a few exceptions: They can get emergency medical care; “short-term, non-cash” disaster relief; limited immunizations and treatment of communicable diseases; in-kind community assistance such as soup kitchens, crisis counseling or short-term shelter that “are necessary for the protection of life or safety.”

They also can be deported. More than 400,000 immigrants in the country illegally were deported in fiscal 2014. Some noncitizen veterans have been deported too, after committing a crime or because they were in the U.S. illegally.

Our fact-checking colleagues at the Washington Post took a closer look at this claim, calling it “an absurd comparison” and awarding Trump four Pinocchios for it.

“Trump Still Off on Immigration,” Sept. 1

Share The Facts

Donald Trump

President-elect

“People that come into the country illegally, people that come into the country and cause problems, they're taken care of better than our vets in many cases.”

Speech in Alabama – Saturday, December 17, 2016

SHAREREAD MORE

Trump on the trade deficit, Dec. 17 speech in Alabama: “At the center of our agenda is fixing our absolutely terrible trade deals. America is now running, listen to this, nearly $800 billion in annual trade deficits.”

We feel like a broken record pointing out, yet again, that Trump is overstating the total trade deficit, which was $531.5 billion in 2015 — not $800 billion. Trump’s figure is a generous rounding-up of the trade deficit for goods only, which was $758.9 billion in 2015. The U.S. has a trade surplus in services, such as travel, education and intellectual property, which makes the total trade deficit over a quarter of a trillion dollars less than the figure Trump has cited over and over again.

“FactChecking the 11th GOP Debate,” March 4

Share The Facts

Donald Trump

President-elect

“On trade, our trade deficit now nearly $800 billion a year.”

Speech in North Carolina – Tuesday, December 6, 2016

President Obama on renewable energy, Dec. 16 press conference: “We’ve … doubled production of renewable energy.”

This has been a frequent talking point for the president — one that we first wrote about four years ago when he was running for reelection. We’ve written about it in other Groundhog Friday stories, too.

The president is cherry-picking data here. According to the Energy Information Administration, the net generation of electricity from renewable sources has increased by about 43 percent from 2008 to 2015, as measured in thousand megawatthours, from 380,932 in 2008 to 544,241 in 2015. When we asked how the president arrives at a doubling of renewable energy production, we were told by the White House that it is excluding hydropower — which is the largest source of renewable energy and one of the oldest sources of electrical energy. Why? Because, we were told, the administration has “mainly focused on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.”

It’s true renewable energy other than hydroelectric power has more than doubled. But it would be more accurate for the president to say that wind and solar power has more than quadrupled on his watch, as we have written before, rather than to redefine the term “renewable energy.”

“Groundhog Friday,” June 10

“Groundhog Friday,” July 1

“Renewable Energy ‘Doubled’?” Sept. 14, 2012

Share The Facts

Barack Obama

President of the United States

"We've ... doubled production of renewable energy."

Press conference – Friday, December 16, 2016

SHAREREAD MORE

Obama on federal deficits, Dec. 16 press conference: “And we’ve done all this while cutting our deficits by nearly two-thirds.”

The president has been spinning the facts about deficit reduction for years. We wrote about a similar deficit reduction claim that he made in his State of the Union address earlier this year, and we wrote about another deficit claim he made in August 2013.

There are a few things to know about his claim that deficits have been cut by nearly two-thirds. First, the president is measuring deficit reduction by the $1.4 trillion deficit in fiscal 2009. It’s true that the FY2009 budget was signed by President George W. Bush, but Obama ignores his own contribution to that record-setting deficit. As we’ve written before, Obama’s programs early in his first year increased FY2009 spending — and thus the deficit — by as much as $203 billion. Second, the deficit for the most recent fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 was $587 billion — a 58 percent reduction from Obama’s preferred measure. But that’s just as close to one-half as it is to two-thirds (8 percentage points in either direction). If measured by the $1.2 trillion deficit that he inherited from Bush, then the deficit reduction is closer to half than two-thirds.

Finally, we note that the annual deficit in FY2016 increased for the first time in five years. It was up about one-third from the $438.9 billion deficit in FY2015. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects (see Table 1-2) that under current law, annual deficits will continue to rise and again hit $1 trillion in 2024 and beyond. So deficits are trending up, not down, as Obama leaves office.

“FactChecking the State of the Union,” Jan. 13

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T his week, the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change convened in Washington, D.C. But don't confuse it with the "IPCC"—the United Nations group that puts out climate reports based on the work of hundreds of scientists. The ICCC, as this conference is known, is instead sponsored by the Heartland Institute—the conservative think tank that promotes skepticism about human-caused global warming.

The Takeaway's Washington correspondent Todd Zwillich attended the meeting, and reports here on comments by Senator Jim Inhofe and Representative Lamar Smith, and discusses whether some politicians are shifting their tactics on climate change. Dave Levitan, a science writer at FactCheck.org, double-checks the science behind a few of climate claims.

http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/06/12/2015/climate-skeptics-convene-on-capitol-hill.html

LONDON — FactCheck.org was started in 2003 by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and the Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact were launched in 2007.

But since 2010, scores of fact-checking Web sites have sprung up across the world. This week, under the auspices of the Poynter Institute, fact checkers from six continents and more than 20 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Chile, Egypt, India, Italy, Serbia, South Africa and Ukraine, gathered for the first time in London to exchange ideas and assess the state of the fact-checking movement. Lucas Graves, a University of Wisconsin scholar who is writing a book on the rise of journalistic fact checking, said only four of the sites represented at the conference existed before 2010. (Istinomer, based in Serbia, was founded in late 2009.)

Participants at the conference voted overwhelmingly to lay the groundwork for an international association of fact checkers, both as a way to highlight the work being done around the world and to serve as an annual forum for exchanging ideas. Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab, which helped organize the meeting, counts 48 active fact-checking organizations in the world.

...

wikipedia

actCheck.org is a nonprofit,[2] website that describes itself as a non-partisan[3] "'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics".[4] It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation.[4] FactCheck.org has won four Webby Awards in the Politics category, in 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2012.[5]

Most of its content consists of rebuttals to what it considers inaccurate, misleading, or false claims by politicians. FactCheck.org has also targeted misleading claims from various partisan groups. Other features include:

Contents

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History

FactCheck.org was launched in December 2003 by Brooks Jackson, a former Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, and CNN reporter who had covered Washington and national politics since 1970.[10] As a special assignment correspondent at CNN during the 1992 political campaign season, Jackson became well known for his “Ad Police” reports, which monitored candidates' advertising and financing strategies throughout the campaign.[11] In 2003, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center approached Jackson about forming FactCheck.org, and the site was online in December of that year.

In 2007, UnSpun was published. This book was co-written by Brooks Jackson, the Director Emeritus of Factcheck.org and by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. It teaches readers how to be aware of the deceptions, or "spin", that is commonly used in media and by politicians.[12]

In January 2013, Jackson stepped down as director of FactCheck.org. He now holds the title of director emeritus. Eugene Kiely, a former reporter and editor at The Record (of Hackensack New Jersey), the Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today, is now the site’s director. FactCheck.org employs a staff of four full-time journalists: Kiely, D’Angelo Gore, Robert Farley and Lori Robertson; and offers yearly fellowships to undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania.[13]

Topic in the 2004 Vice-presidential debate

FactCheck.org became a focus of political commentary following the 2004 vice-presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. Cheney cited the website, claiming that the independent site defended his actions while CEO of Halliburton. Cheney's claim is disputed by FactCheck.org as wrong, saying that "Edwards was mostly right" when talking about "Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles".[14]

Cheney's reference created some controversy because he incorrectly cited the web site's address as "FactCheck.com." At the time of the debate, factcheck.com was controlled byFrank Schilling's company Name Administration Inc., who quickly redirected the address to point to an anti-Bush website owned by Bush critic George Soros.[15]

Topic in the 2012 Presidential Election

FactCheck.org also became a focus of national attention in the summer of 2012, during the presidential race between incumbent Democrat Barack Obama and GOP challengerMitt Romney. The Obama campaign ran a TV ad accusing Romney of involvement in the outsourcing of American jobs overseas by Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that he had founded in 1984.[16] FactCheck.org ruled this ad to be false, claiming that the acts of outsourcing occurred after Romney had left the company to head the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.[17] In response, the Obama campaign contested FactCheck.org’s ruling in a six-page letter that was distributed to major news corporations, holding that Romney still retained responsibility for the company’s actions.[18]

Awards and recognition

The site has gained recognition and won numerous awards for its contributions to political journalism. In 2006, TIME magazine named FactCheck.org one of the “25 Sites We Can’t Live Without.” [19] In 2008, PC Magazine called it one of the “20 Best Political Websites.” [20] Between 2008 and 2012, the site won four Webby Awards in the Politics category, in 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012; as well as four People’s Voice Awards in Politics, in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012.[21] FactCheck.org also won a 2010 Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for reporting on deceptive claims made about the federal health care legislation.[22]

See also

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wapo