It amazes me how conservatives to this day are sitting around bemoaning being ‘fact-checked’ by committees of imbeciles. They’re everywhere, Snopes, Facebook, Twitter, boards of ideological imposters occupying every major media outlet, claiming ‘objectivity. I propose a real board of fact-checkers to check Big Media and Big Tech.
There’s no punch line to this proposal; its straightforward and I could stop here but a few elaborations might be helpful. First, let’s look at existing ‘fact-check’. I mentioned Snopes first. Snopes was started by a media hobbyist and a hooker. This is quite old revelation and yet since then, they went from being an amusing sideshow to now where they’ve been appropriated as a self-licking ice-cream cone of left-wing validation.
Self: I hear that conservatives kill people, is that true?
Also Self: I’m checking Fact-O-Meter and it is 96.4% true that conservatives kill people.
Self: Thank you Also Self, I was hoping you’d back me up on that.
This is the level of engagement that Big Media exercises in their fact check operations. They are boards made up of themselves. Big Tech is even more insidious because they’re opaque and anonymous. They’re secret courts with no doors and no faces. What we can surmise based on occasional dissent that seeps out of the loading dock from other departments is that their courts are made up of millennial crusaders doing the good work of their dark emperors. Angry boys and girls from good schools paid for by Daddie’s money.
What is clear based on their track records is that ‘facts’ must be filtered through a matrix suitable to their organizations beliefs. They first choose what to check and what to ignore entirely. Omission is the greatest lie of media. If they check conservatives, they’ll routinely place their finger on the scale, leave something intact for the sake of believability and otherwise undermine the balance, littered with their own fraudulent assertations with no independent citation. Evidence? I present to you the entire turn-around on Covid, Fauci, and Wuhan as chronicled her at Northeast Reader and every other conservative periodical.
A special note about conspiracy theories, as I detailed in my article ‘A Primer on How to Evaluate Media for Yourself and for Self Defense’ , “If news were like science, ‘conspiracy theory’ would be known as ‘hypothesis’ the first step in scientific inquiry“.
So what do conservatives really need in response?
- Assemble a board of conservative journalist, lawyers, and academics. Six to twelve should suffice. Pay them accordingly. Reallocate the funds from PACs, pitch in.
- Take on each high-profile distortion offered by major media sources, especially the New York Times, The Washington Post, Twitter, Facebook, et al. Also independently take on new breaking news and claims by high profile people. Directly address Jen Psaki on a daily basis.
- Render judgements to include supporting citations and annotations. I’d commend the methodology of Kayleigh McEnany on this point.
- Create a syndicated outlet for the conclusions.
- Build the brand
In the near term, such a board would attract a mountain of naysaying. This is to be expected. Conservatives would need to have a long-range vision for building a fact checking board as a solid institution. It took twenty plus years for the corrupt Snopes, our hobbyist and hooker org, to go from amusing urban legends to ‘respected’ organ of the self-licking ice cream cone ‘fact’ industry. Conservatives need the same commitment.