Why Are the Leftwing Media's "Fact-Checkers" Giving Stacy Abrams a Complete Free Pass on Her False, Conspiratorial, and Dangerous Claim That She's the Actual Winner of the Georgia Senatorial Election?

Why indeed. Why indeed.

Why, there are certain well-known Social Media Monopolists who routinely ban people from public speech, and certain banks that strip people of their checking accounts, for the sin of spreading false, conspiratorial, and harmful-to-the-very-pillars-of-our-precious democracy claims.

At least -- social media monopolies and banks do that when the propagators of so-called false news are on the right.

And CNN's dedicated Deplatforming Squad of Oliver Darcy, Brian Stelter, and BuzzFeed Andrew are there presenting the case to Social Media Monopolists to ban such people, and running negative stories about those monopolists until they comply with CNN's will and ban market competitors from the market square.

So why the silence now?

Oh right, because she's a leftwing Democrat who is being pushed as a vice presidential prospect.

So -- no rules.

There's no such thing as a lie in the leftwing media's eyes, if that lie advances the leftist agenda.

This absurd declaration is predicated on a cascading series of misleading statements Abrams is making about voter disenfranchisement. A May 15 New York Times op-ed by Abrams, headlined, "We Cannot Resign Ourselves to Dismay and Disenfranchisement,” details more of these disputable and tendentious claims.

This kind of thing began even before the campaign had ended. As if to inoculate herself, Abrams accused her opponent, Brian Kemp, of fostering an"“atmosphere of fear" during a debate two weeks before Election Day. Georgia voters, she proclaimed, "have been purged, they have been suppressed, they have been scared."

With all the attention Abrams is getting as a rising Democratic Party star and a rumored contender for the party’s 2020 vice presidential slot, one would think that her eyebrow-raising claims about the Georgia election would be getting more scrutiny. Specifically, there is a special kind of journalist that exists solely to verify the factual statements made by politicians.

Incredibly, however, not a single major media fact checker has taken Abrams to task for asserting that she "won" the election, a claim that rests on various empirical assumptions. PolitiFact hasn’t done it. FactCheck.org hasn't done it. Snopes? Nope. The paper of record hasn’t gone on record here. Somewhat to its credit, the Washington Post did fact-check some tangentially related falsehoods about voter suppression in Georgia when Hillary Clinton tried to claim she lost 2016 for unfair reasons. But Abrams herself has never been questioned.

Let’s start with her most basic declaration. She did, in fact, lose the election by 50,000 votes. Although that's a close margin in an election where millions of votes were cast, it’s not close enough to seriously dispute who the victor was. So the first response would be that Abrams' claim that she "won" the election is rhetorical.

Mark Hemingway proceeds to note the various "fact-checks" routinely performed on Republicans, especially Trump, when the fact-checkers resort to a pseud-autistic sort of hyperliteralism to spot lies that no one else can see.

And yet on this huge one -- "I won" -- the media just can't be bothered to say anything at all.

posted by Ace of Spades at 01:56 PM

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