PolitiFact Issued a False Fact Check and Got a True Post about the Legality of Kyle's Gun Censored.
Now It Refuses to Correct.

Trial Update: Nothing was decided with motions. Jury was ushered into the courtroom to once again watch the prosecutor's Mystery Video (it was delivered by an unknown person and never authenticated) to watch the "enhancements."

There is nothing going on to comment on. The court feed is cut now.

...

Politi "Fact" had previously ruled that a FaceBook post stating that it was in fact legal for Kyle Rittenhouse to possess a long-barreled rifle was FALSE. Because of this claim, FaceBook censored the post.

But this "Fact" check was, as usual, itself false. Politi "Fact" lied and triggered the censorship of a true statement for the political benefit of the Democrat-Socialist Coalition, which is their primary business model now.

The judge made it clear that this was in fact a true statement when he ruled that yes, the law says that Kyle Rittenhouse can possess a long-barrel rifle and that therefore Count 6 (claiming that it was illegal for him to possess the AR-15) must be dismissed with prejudice.

Guess what Politi "Fact" did next? It of course refused to correct its own falsehood.

The day after Schroeder dismissed the gun charge PolitiFact added an editor’s note to its piece. The note pointed to Associated Press reporting, Wisconsin lawmakers' intentions, and claims that PolitiFact knew all along that there was a possible exception for rifles.

The editor’s note ended by saying, "These subsequent events show the grey areas of local gun laws -- hardly a case of something being 'perfectly legal.' Our fact-check remains unchanged."

The media keeps getting caught making partisan errors which all go in the exact same political direction.

And they get caught making a lot of such "errors."

This is leftwing pundit Andrew Sullivan, so expect some leftwing shots in here.

[W]hen the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It's as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being "fake news" the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.

And these mass deceptions have consequences. We are seeing this now in the Rittenhouse case...

I haven't watched the whole trial. But if you watch for any length of time, you realize you've been led to believe a media narrative that was way off. (Independent journalists last year, like Jesse Singal, were more clear-eyed.) Because of that narrative whiplash, we may have more rioting and violence if he's acquitted. The judge is already being targeted. I'm not defending Rittenhouse. And I understand news gathering is fallible. But there’s a media pattern here. And it reaches far wider than Rittenhouse.

We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: "Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump."

The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian -- touted across all media, including the Washington Post -- has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors' notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: "No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy," said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.

This doesn't mean that Trump wasn't eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI's original overreach; and the mass media -- Rachel Maddow chief among them-- were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the "corrections" have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.

Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin -- and Trump's denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn't woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty "white supremacy" narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of "hate," even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.

As Greenwald noted, the NYT "published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence -- that Officer Sicknick's skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died." The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden's laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.

More recently, the MSM were telling us for months that inflation is a phantasm. We were told that the "2021 Inflation Scare is another in a series of false alarms going back several decades." We were assured that “the numbers at least for now are on the side of those expecting the trend to subside and then stabilize at lower levels.” Any concern was "fearmongering politics." And now we wake up to the highest inflation in 30 years, counter-balancing wage increases. Still, they tell us, all will be well.

We were told that vaccines would end the Covid pandemic. But they merely altered Covid to a manageable disease that you could still contract while vaccinated. We were told that the migrant surge at the border was just seasonal, and nothing out of the ordinary, even as 1.7 million migrants were illegally trying to get into the country in the last year. We were told that sending migrants back to their home countries was a wicked and unconscionable Trump tactic -- even as the Biden administration swiftly copied it with Haitian immigrants -- to much success. The cruelty is the point, eh?

We were -- and still are! -- being told by most of the media that critical race theory isn’t in high schools at all. Meanwhile, a tsunami of evidence is out there showing that it absolutely is -- in every subject, and every class, as the central philosophy behind many states' education policies.

We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.

And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit?

And this is a deranged man of the left who love love loves the New York Times saying that.

Now, after being caught in all of these errors, what do they always say? What makes them not the Fake News they so obviously are?

They always claim, "The difference between our Noble Errors and your Evil Misinformation is that when we make 'errors,' we own up to them and correct them."

Do they?

In fact, they do not.

All of them are still refusing to confess their errors about the Steele Dossier, for example. And they've known that was fake since the Mueller Report. And then again since the IG Report. And now even more emphatically with the Durham indictments.

In this interview with Megyn Kelly, the Washington Post's Erik Wemple notes all the media outlets refusing to correct the record on the Steele Dossier. He gives his own paper, the Post, a pass, claiming they've done sufficient "hygiene," even though they've merely rewritten stories as "updates" rather than admitting they are retracted and nearly entirely false.

The Social Media Monopolies which are so quick to brand any non-leftwing corporate legacy media mistake (or difference of opinion!) as "misinformation" never brand their cartel partners as misinformation.

Despite the fact that the asserted difference between "misinformation" and Nobel Error they assert -- "we admit our errors and correct them" -- is provably, incandescently false.

They must start branding them as Misinformation. And deplatforming them if they persist in pushing Fake News so brazenly and so unapologetically.

It is only this distinction -- "we own up to our errors and correct them" -- that distinguishes "journalistic error" from "misinformation," and it's simply not true that the media acknowledges its errors.

posted by Ace at 03:56 PM

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