The Washington Post’s “fact check” of Donald Trump’s inaugural address is a pretty perfect distillation of one of the most egregious aspects of “fact checking.” It kind of pains me to say this, because while I have serious problems with other fact-checking organizations that are institutionally corrupt, the Post’s chief fact checker Glenn Kessler is responsive to criticism. He’s a reporter with real integrity who does good work, even though I often disagree with him.
You’d think coming up with outrageous things Trump and his minders have said to fact check wouldn’t be a problem, but what the Post has done here is pretty indefensible. Fact checkers often descend into trying to correct opinions, rhetoric, and implicit meanings of disputable interpretations, at which point you end up with absurd pieces like what Kessler and his colleague Michelle Ye Hee Lee came up with. Here’s the first section (the statement being fact-checked in bold):
It’s baffling how one can say there’s no “empirical evidence that the D.C. area got rich off the rest of the country.” Of course it did! Are we going to pretend it’s irrelevant that government is the biggest industry in one of the richest parts of the country, rather than the defining factor of the local economy? Or that the local economy is either paid for by tax dollars or saddling future generations of taxpayers with debt?
Further, there are many ways to measure how D.C. has remained prosperous in spite of woes in the rest of the nation, rather than income growth. I crunched the numbers from the Office of Personnel Management some years ago—ironically enough, in an article on the problems of media fact checkers—during President Obama’s first two years in office. While the unemployment rate hovered near or above double digits, the size of the federal workforce increased by seven percent. Further, if the rate of income growth in the D.C. area has tracked closely with the national rate, that exposes a disparity between the ordinary private sector income workers in the D.C. area and, say, federal workers who saw their salaries grow awfully fast:
Keep in mind that this was reported in 2012, and since then Obama imposed a federal pay freeze (albeit one that didn’t amount to much and still saw 1.1 million federal workers—a majority of the federal workforce—get raises anyway). Then there was the two-percent across-the-board federal budget sequester imposed by a GOP Congress that Obama and Democrats railed against. This may have brought things in D.C. a little bit more under control, but that hardly disproves Trump’s supposition that people in D.C. are benefiting while ordinary Americans are failing to share the wealth.
As for the distinction that pay in D.C. is deservedly greater because the federal workforce demands higher levels of education, well, perhaps there’s something to that. There’s no reason to disparage federal workers as a whole, because some are valiant public servants who work hard and do necessary work. However, anyone who’s spent any time in and around the federal government will tell you that buildings all over D.C. are stuffed full of barely sentient sacks of meat that no one can get rid of. The negligent Veterans Administration allows patients in need of care to die on its watch, and yet the agency disregards acts of Congress basically telling it to fire people. Entire federal agencies go years without terminating people for cause. Perhaps there are useless drones at large corporations, too, but there’s still far more accountability.
Regardless, this is all a lot of facts to bandy about considering how limited Trump’s rhetoric was relative to the case Kessler was trying to make. However, I’m afraid that this might not even be the most egregious thing the Washington Post did here. Take a gander at this:
Kessler goes on from there to talk about vote totals and the electoral college and all manner of irrelevant nonsense. It’s a fact that tens of millions of people did vote for Trump. Beyond that, absolutely everything Trump says is subjective beyond the reach of fact checkers.
Here’s another choice bit:
While Trump did speak derogatorily of the United States subsidizing the defense of other nations, he did not bemoan the depletion of the U.S. military relative to other countries. That’s imposing context that isn’t actually there. The issue is not whether the U.S. military is bigger than other countries—of course it is—but whether we’re spending money to protect other countries at a time when our own military needs resources. How much we spend helping allies versus shoring up our own capabilities is purely argumentative. And there are absolutely issues with military readiness relative to the U.S. military’s own past capabilities. The Tomahawk missile shortage is a good example. As is the size of the navy, which is a question fact checkers keep getting embarrassingly wrong.
Oh, and this is a personal pet peeve of mine:
Personally, I’m not a fan of protectionism, and I think arguments for it are weak. But what is the Post doing here? Pointing out that Trump is hypocritical is not a “fact check.” One can be hypocritical in their personal behavior and still be correct in their public pronouncements. Pretending hypocrisy is discrediting in and of itself is fallacious, pure and simple.
I suppose Kessler and Ye Hee Lee could argue that using Trump’s rhetoric as a launching point to discuss broader issues is informative to readers, but “fact checking” by its very nature is adversarial. Implying that Trump isn’t telling the truth for engaging in rhetorical arguments is discrediting for a lot of readers, at a time when the media’s approval ratings and institutional credibility is in the dumper.
