Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle criticized the community of fact-checkers who have attempted to hold former President Trump accountable throughout his political career, admitting that they have ultimately failed to thwart his support and have damaged their own institutions.
The author, a staunch Trump critic, accused those trying to stop the spread of Trump's “disinformation” of being arrogant and confusing their own opinion with objective facts. She even accused them of censorship. All of this, she wrote, has ultimately led to voters questioning them and other institutions more than they ever questioned the former president.
“After eight years of all-out disinformation warfare, Trump's approval ratings remain better than public trust in academia and journalism,” McArdle lamented.
STEPHEN COLBERT'S NEW YORK CITY AUDIENCE LAUGHS AFTER HE PRAISES CNN'S OBJECTIVITY
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle admitted that fact-checkers have been ineffective during the Trump era. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The columnist began her piece by describing the idealized mission of Trump-era fact-checkers, saying that they “are dedicated to checking the internet for bad data and bad actors, and especially Trump's malevolent impulses.”
But in his view, they did not save the world. At best, they criticized Trump for some of his bragging, and at worst, they censored real facts in their eagerness to correct him.
“Some of their efforts have been helpful, including their fact-checking of Trump's more frenetic flights of fancy,” he said, adding: “But the broader effort has been repeatedly marred as disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false.”
McArdle provided some prime examples of this suppression, examples in which most media outlets participated at the behest of these fact-checkers.
“Remember when it was considered 'disinformation' to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Remember how a group of so-called experts assured us that Hunter Biden's laptop was likely a 'Russian information operation' rather than… Hunter Biden's laptop.”
STEPHEN COLBERT'S NEW YORK CITY AUDIENCE LAUGHS AFTER HE PRAISES CNN'S OBJECTIVITY
Former President Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Bozeman, Montana, on Friday, Aug. 9. The poll found that American adults think more highly of Trump's ability to handle the economy, compared to Harris. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)
He added a more recent one: “If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple of months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden's obvious decline were actually 'cheap fakes' certified by experts.”
The author even noted that after each of these fact checks blew up in the experts' faces, they learned some “humility.” “And each time, they have reemerged, unapologetic,” she said.
McArdle also mentioned how EU Commissioner Thierry Breton intervened when he tried to criticize Elon Musk with a “bad-tempered and, as it turned out, unapproved letter” after the X owner allowed alleged Trump disinformation to spread on X during his lengthy interview on Monday night.
“Breton's interference had no effect; Musk, quite rightly, went ahead with his show, and what followed was more dangerous to Trump's campaign than to democracy,” the columnist said.
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And he concluded: “The episode encapsulates all the ways the 'disinformation' industry has failed under Trump: the arrogance, the confusion of opinion with legal or empirical facts, the attempts to destroy the people in order to save them, to prop up democracy by repressing political speech. Not to mention the ineffectiveness of it all.”
