On Bias, Yet Again

TNR's risible goof -- failing to see that Obama was obviously using body-English to psychically influence another one of his many-thousand golf shots, in a hilarious p-shop -- isn't just all fun and games.

It illustrates the blind spots and double standards and political biases of the "objective" press.

Any statement which helps Obama is deemed presumptively true by liberals. No fact-checking needed, no skepticism applied; if it helps Obama, then it must be true, right? After all, Obama's right, ergo, claims which demonstrate he's right have a higher-than-usual chance of themselves being right. Right?

And of course any statement which hurts Obama is deemed presumptively false-- even if it appears superficially true, it's time to put on your skepticism hats and start parsing like the Dickens, to find that fundamental falsity which you're sure lurks somewhere inside it.

You can see this effect in full, uhhh, effect in the various "Fact Checking" columns the liberal press uses to attack Republicans.

Democratic statements tend to only be evaluated on their superficial truthfulness (or truthiness, to use a term I've never liked, but it's useful here). If Obama makes a claim, and on its most superficial reading it's got "truthiness" to it -- even though it's being used in service of making a very tendentious point -- then the Fact Checkers rate it as true.

They presumed it true from the start, and it passed the most superficial once-over, so they're comfortable now calling it "True."

But if a Republican makes a statement about Obama... well then a whole different process is employed.

Now, the statement is presumed false -- and the game is now to simply discover in what way it's false. And you do know, ab initio, it's false -- after all, a Republican said it. Gotta be false.

So now, if you find a Republican statement about Obama that is superficially true, you now have to consider all the implications that may or may not flow from it. And if you can find one implication of the true statement which you deem to be false (or at least arguable), then you now proceed to branding the entire statement "false."

After all, the statement may have been true, but it may mislead you into thinking something else, so the statement is False. *

Glenn Kessler, Politifact, and the rest of the liberal liars never apply this second- or third-order analysis of possible implications when it comes to a superficially true Democratic statement. If the Democrats claim that Paul Ryan "cosponsored" a bill with Todd Akin, for example, they'll label that as "True." They don't bother examining the intended implications of that, such as "Paul Ryan has the same crude beliefs as Todd Akin" and "Paul Ryan hates women." **

Democrats are permitted their untrue implications. Republicans, on the other hand, are not permitted their own tendentious implications.

Or even implications that aren't even fairly present in their claim. The liberal fact-checkers will check, and re-check, and sur-check until they can find something, some tendentious implication, that they don't like, at which point they label the initial statement "false" or "misleading," precisely as they had intended before even bothering to fire up the Google machine.

TNR's goof here (apparently duplicated by the brain trust at Buzzfeed) is superficially laughable -- until you realize the mindset that produced it (and will continue to produce the same error until the end of time itself) is no laughing matter at all.

This stupidity -- this dishonesty -- this low-order conclusion-driven do-not-question-assumptions herd-thinking -- actually shapes our country's political trajectory and ultimately affects our individual fates.

* This is the reason for the well-known, and completely true, phenomenon that parroting back the tendentious claims of your professor will get you a better grade, and disputing his claims will get you a worse one.

When you agree with him, he presumes you're right (after all, you're agreeing with him) and you don't have to bring much evidence or argument to the table to convince him of that which he already believes.

But when you disagree with him -- why, now, he's going to want to see each of your subsidiary premises demonstrated with citations and he'll brook no sloppy logic as you press them.

The media is a liberal professor, and Obama is -- as he's been throughout his life -- the lazy and yet dutifully doctrinaire Apple of the Professor's Eye, gifted with the ability to tell them that which they believed without needing to be told.

And they give him straight A+'s, of course. Only occasionally docking a point here or there just to show they're "fair."

And anyone who disagrees with the Liberal Professor -- well, if you write a sumptuously-cited, impeccably-argued refutation of his beliefs, he'll give you a very grudging B-. Anything short of that and you're looking at a C, D, or F.

** And speaking of Todd Akin -- it was just this sort of thinking (if a claim supports another claim I think is true, that first claim must most likely be true as well) that got him into trouble, and exposed him as a conclusion-driven illogical dummy.

And yet the same liberal press that savaged him for this sort of conclusion-driven non-thinking engages it in with every firing of every synapse.

posted by Ace at 02:30 PM

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