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Federalist Radio Hour
Exposing The Left’s Fraudulent ‘Fact-Checking’ Flunkies
00:45:18
On this edition of The Federalist Radio Hour, journalist and author Matthew Hoy joins Federalist Senior Elections Correspondent Matt Kittle to discuss the corporate media fact-checking regime's fraudulent tactics and explain how they unfairly shape...
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- [00:01]
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- [01:01]
Matt Kittle
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Matthew Hoy
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Matt Kittle
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- [01:28]
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- [01:34]
Matt Kittle
We are back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Matt Kittle, senior Elections Correspondent at the Federalist and as always, your experience Sherpa on today's quest for knowledge. And as always, you can email the show at radio the federalist.com follow us on x@fdrlst. Make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast and of course to the premium VERS version of our website as well. Our guest today is journalist Matthew Hoy, author of Fact Checking Frauds How Fact Checkers Distract, Deceive, and Distort Our Politics. And they have been doing that for some time now. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us on this edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
- [02:19]
Matthew Hoy
Thanks for having me.
- [02:21]
Matt Kittle
Well, as we were talking beforehand, I said this this book is extremely timely and I think it has been for some time now. But we have this whole side of the fourth Estate that deems itself the arbiter of fact when, as you note in your book, they have done everything against fact or so much against fact and more so for narrative in the usual accomplice media style. Let's begin with how you began reporting on this because I know you've been reporting on this for some some time before this book came out.
- [03:08]
Matthew Hoy
Well, I've been writing about this subject for a long time. I you Know, I, I, I've got a journalism degree. I spent my first 15 years in newspapers. People like to ask me, well, why aren't you still working in newspapers? And I asked them, well, do you get a newspaper delivered to your home? And they say no. And I say that's why I'm not working in newspapers anymore.
- [03:28]
Matt Kittle
Indeed.
- [03:29]
Matthew Hoy
But I, I've, I've seen the sausage made from the inside. And I started writing back around 2001 when I was became aware of the Blogger software made it kind of easier for someone with a, with less than extensive technical skills to blog. And so I've been, I was a journalist, I worked as a reporter, I worked as a page designer, copy editor, that sort of stuff. And I would see what fact checkers were putting out and it was just when it wasn't shoddy work, it was dishonest work. And kind of one of the stories I opened with was, and one that kind of got me on their radar, not in a good way, was PolitiFact way back when did a promise fact check on then House GOP House Speaker John Boehner. And Boehner had promised, should the Republicans take control of the House and he become speaker, that he would not fly, he would not use military transports to fly to and from Washington D.C. and PolitiFact, which is one of the, I call him one of the big three fact checkers, put a reporter on this, find out if he's been flying on military transport. And so she asked his office, she went through some of the public things you get from Congress as far as how they spend their money, travel money, that sort of thing, and determined that she really couldn't tell. There was no evidence he had, but she couldn't tell for sure. And this struck me, and last I checked, this reporter still works for PolitiFact 20 some odd years later. And it just blew my mind. It's like she didn't know why John Boehner had made that promise. He'd made that promise because Nancy Pelosi had been doing that for years. And how was that discovered? Well, Tom Fitton over Judicial Watch did a foia. It's like, why don't you just follow in Tom Fitton's footsteps, do what he did. And so for the first time in probably a decade, I filed a foia. Turns US Air Force gets back to me, nope, we haven't been shuttling him back and forth. And I call her out on that and I post it on my blog, instapunded. A lot of people link It. And she goes, and I send her an email saying, hey, I did your job for you. She sends back the. And I've never published it, but it was a whiny email. Why didn't you just tell me? Why didn't you contact me? I'm sitting there, I'm like, I'm an editor. I'm not your editor.
- [06:34]
Matt Kittle
Right, right.
- [06:35]
Matthew Hoy
And I, and it just kind of shot, you know, one of the, one of the, you know, the, the, the cuts against bloggers at the time was, well, you don't have layers and layers of editors like we do. Well, your layers and layers of editors didn't do you much good. If you go to the PolitiFact website today and you look for that promise kept or what we're promised fact check at the top it still says undecided or something like that or you know, may or I don't know what they've said, but it's not definitive. But if you read the text of it, she went after I did that and filed a FOIA and found the same thing. And now the text at the bottom is promise kept but the graphic at the top is still in progress or something like that.
- [07:26]
Matt Kittle
Oh my gosh, that is, it just makes you pull your hair out as a journalist and as an editor. And you're right, the criticism. Not only have we seen the criticism from newspapers and accomplished media outlets, we have also been under attack in this country by the likes of Dick Durbin, the senator from Illinois, who you remember about the time you were reporting on that I believe old Dick was trying to put together a law that would, I, that would license, effectively license journalists and, and you know, put into some kind of a law what a journalist. Was it based on the definition of a Democrat Congress? It's amazing. And yet that is one of myriad examples, isn't it, of this sort of egregious conduct by the fact checkers.
- [08:36]
Matthew Hoy
Yeah, they, I identify basically three. There's a wide variety of things you cannot trust them on. There are three things that you really can't trust them on. You can't trust them on guns, you can't trust them on climate change or climate catastrophe, whatever the day's phrase on it is that sort of anything kind of science because it involves like Covid and masking as well. You can't trust them on that and you can't trust them on abortion because again, remember, the vast majority of these fact checkers are journalists. Journalists are overwhelmingly left leaning. At the very least, I would argue that the center of Gravity for today's kind of mainstream media journalist is extremely far left. Extremely. But. And they're thin skinned as well. But when it comes to abortion, one of the things that frustrates me a lot was once the Dobbs decision returned deciding abortion laws basically to the states, the fact checkers went and abandoned any pretense, if they ever had any before, of fairness because you had laws like one in Colorado. California changed its constitution as well where it basically said the law says there is no limit on when you can have an abortion. So people like Lila Rose over at Live Action and Mike Pence and the Susan B. Anthony found PAC and whatnot pro life groups said, put up ads or whatnot saying look, this law allows abortion up until the moment of birth. And PolitiFact at least twice came on to say no, that's false. And they say it's false because third trimester abortions are rare. Well, that's not what the claim was. The claim was they're legal, not that they're rare. Right.
- [11:00]
Matt Kittle
And what is rare, by the way? What are the numbers behind rare? That's another stunt that you see pulled by the, the usual suspects in the PRAV depress. What, what constitutes rare?
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Matthew Hoy
Rare is about 9,000 a year.
- [11:17]
Matt Kittle
I don't find that rare. And I certainly for the, for the unborn, quite frankly, I don't think that's rare to them either.
- [11:27]
Matthew Hoy
It's, it's, it's not nearly as rare as school shootings, which is a big deal which they make a lot of, you know, hay out of. And I don't mean to minimize school shootings, but if you're just going by sat, and I don't like phrasing it this way, but if you're just going by body count, the third trimester abortions are worse. But they play this game and this is where I start where I kind of focus on that they're distorting our politics is that if organizations like PolitiFact would come out and say yes, it's true that this law or this constitutional amendment at a state level allows abortion up until the moment of birth, but they're rare.
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Matt Kittle
Yeah.
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Matthew Hoy
Then we would have be able to have a discussion about what numbers I've seen is between 70 and 80% of Americans think third trimester abortion should be banned at least for, you know, with the exception for the life of the mother, not the health of the mother. Because that's a loophole they drive anything through. But we could have that conversation. But when fact checkers and you Know the rest of the media ecosphere, which kind of counts on them for determining what truth is, says it's a lie, that you can do it up till birth. Well, that takes that whole discussion, they use that to kind of just get rid of the discussion. The discussion is out of bounds. Having a debate about laws that would severely restrict or eliminate third trimester abortions is beyond the pale, and it's dishonest for us to even talk about it.
- [13:20]
Matt Kittle
Well, that really is, isn't it, the ultimate question here? How do you have an informed republic when you have a dishonest media? And I, you know, I use the term quite a bit because I too have seen how the sausage is made. I have work, worked in daily newspapers and for, you know, the, the, the classic journalistic venues, of course. And, and what I found in there is exactly what you're talking about. The vast majority of people in those newsrooms were left, and they're becoming farther and farther left. How do you have an informed voter, an informed republic, if you have a dishonest media?
- [14:08]
Matthew Hoy
I don't think you can. And you know, I've mentioned this to people before, and it's, I read about. This was probably 15, 20 years ago. I haven't looked to see when it, when it came out. It's on my bookshelf. I read Weapons of Mass Distortion by Brent Bozell, and it's a good book. But even at the time, I kind of disagreed with him because his conclusion in that book was if the media wants to reclaim its credibility and wants to reflect American society and American politics in such a way that it regains the trust of conservatives, that they would have to hire more conservatives. And he was wrong. I'm sorry he was wrong, but he was wrong. What has happened is we have created our own media ecosystem. We have places like the Federalist and Hot Air and Daily Wire, because even when faced with irrelevance and economic headwinds and whatnot, they still wouldn't deign to hire conservatives.
- [15:27]
Matt Kittle
Yeah.
- [15:29]
Matthew Hoy
So what do you have to do if you're worried about democracy? You can't count on. And this is the thing that kills me, because my last newspaper I worked for was the San Diego Union Tribune, and I got laid off there basically when the bottom fell out of advertising, when all the classified ads went to Craigslist and whatnot. But the worst part of it is while we've got places like the Daily Wire, the Federalist, Hot Air, you can name others that covers our national politics, it doesn't address our state Politics nearly as much and our local politics not at all. And that's from a journalistic standpoint. That's one of the things that causes me to shudder a little bit. I worry about how much corruption and dishonesty happens at the local political level. I'm kind of getting away from the subject of the book because I don't talk about local politics much.
- [16:41]
Matt Kittle
No, no, you're right on. I think that is exactly it. Now I can speak for the Federalist, I can't speak for other publications, but we do a lot of reporting from the states, but we don't do all reporting from the different states, you know, and that's, that's a huge failing in all of this too. And those local newspapers, they like to call them community newspapers. That's the term, you know, community journalism and those sorts of things. And that's a, that's a nice sounding term. But they end up, you know, providing one sided coverage and then they get their national coverage from the same people behind the fact checkers. And I think, you know, these are the people are turning to national publications for certain news, but they are turning for, to their local publications for their community news. And therein lies a problem.
- [17:42]
Matthew Hoy
Yeah, it's, I, I, I again my background's in newspapers and I look at the newspapers that I used to work for and of the four newspapers I worked for, three still exist, one doesn't. It's gone. Of the three that still exist, they are a shadow of what they were. My first newspaper I worked for was the Lompoc Record. At the time it was a between six and $8,000, not dollars circulation, six day a week newspaper. Now they maybe have one and we had eight people in the newsroom, maybe 10 couple of photographers, two sports guys and five or six editors and reporters. Today they've got maybe one person covering that community and it's based and they're based. They don't even have the office there anymore. They're based out of a town 30 miles away. My second paper was the Daily World, Naberdine, Washington. We had 20 reporters when I was there. Now they've got three. Yeah, you can't, you can't cover the communities. And they don't get again, when it comes to state or national news, they are dependent on what those media outlets give them and what those media outlets give them that they can pull through the AP or wherever else because factcheck.org is the Annenberg Public Policy Center. But the AP has got their own fact check and they grab a lot of that stuff, what they pull from a state and national level is not, is very often not a fair representation of what's going on. And again, it takes things out of our public debate, out of our marketplace. The phrase I like to use is it takes items off the marketplace of ideas. It takes items right off the shelf. They're not there anymore. You can't get them, you can't talk about them, you can't understand them.
- [19:57]
Matt Kittle
It is a sad state of affairs. And as you note, we have seen this going on for a long time. A big part of it is, of course is the, the advent of the Internet, online publications. The cost of newsprint was always a big issue when I was in newspapers. And so there's an economic part of all of this. But we are getting our news from so many different sources. And one of the things I think that has been beneficial from that economic change has been, you know, the, the gray, the old gray lady and you know, the democracy dies in darkness. Purveyors, the Washington Post and the New York Times, their circulation is not what it was when certainly when I was starting out 700 years ago in this business. It is because of the economics, but it is also because a lot of people have figured out, wait a minute, I'm not getting a true story. And at the very least I'm not getting the full story. And that is a huge problem for our republic today. Our guest today is journalist Matthew Hoy, author of Fact Checking Frauds How Fact Checkers Distract, Deceive and Distort Our Politics. How much of this in fact checking, Matthew, is just pure laziness? How much is it ignorance? I think as you, you talked about at the outset of the conversation about the fact check on John Boe at the time. How much of this is willful?
- [21:47]
Matthew Hoy
I think a little bit of its laziness, some of its willful ignorance and some of its malevolent political views. I'm surprised. Way back when I started writing for a blog, I learned pretty quickly. And even writing for a newspaper, I learned pretty quickly you need to have a thick skin. It's not always about the whining email. Why didn't you call me and tell me how to do my job? You know, that's, that's one thing. The fact checkers are notoriously thin skinned. I've mentioned this guy before. I mentioned him in my book. His guy name is Brian White. He lives in Florida. He and another Guy started running PolitiFactBias.com a long time ago. And he, you know as part of being accredited by the International Fact Checking Network, which is based out of the Poynter Organization in Florida and PolitiFact. There's a huge kind of incestuous, scandalous relationship between PolitiFact and the IFCN, since the IFCN, you know, licenses PolitiFact and they are in the same building. But, you know, he would regularly point out to them, hey, you've made an error here. You've made a logical error. Something like I've pointed out with the abortion and up to the moment of conception. But he would point out to them lots of just mundane errors. There was a fact check that they did of then Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. Youngkin was up in New York campaigning for Lee Zeldin when Lee Zeldin, who's now the EPA administrator, was running for governor of New York. And Youngkin said, hey, when I ran in Virginia, we won cities. No Republican has won in 50 years or something along those lines. And he said it pretty much the way I phrased it, cities. PolitiFact goes and looks at that and says, well, there are. We looked at all of the. I forget what the phrase is, but it's these cities that are unto themselves. So Virginia has like 41 cities in it that are not part of the county that they are in.
- [24:34]
Matt Kittle
Oh, sure, yeah. The way their charters are structured.
- [24:37]
Matthew Hoy
Exactly. So they've got like 41 of them. There's three others in the country, I believe Carson City, Nevada, St. Louis, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland are the only three others that are not in Virginia. And so he didn't say this specialized kind of city, he just said cities. And so the fact checker, PolitiFact goes and says that's false. And they got lazy for a couple reasons. First off, they assumed he was meant, you know, these special cities and not just cities in general, and found that that was not true. But again, that's not what he said. And it's unclear whether he's saying this in New York City, which doesn't have any cities like this. That. And I wasn't aware that this was a thing until I read this either. So they assume that. But one of the things that's. So Brian White goes and sends him a note saying, hey, there's no evidence, you know, you're reading that into what he said. He never said that. And the fact checkers like to make a big deal about what a politician says matters, what his words are. His or her words are matter. Well, they obviously didn't in this case. And the kicker on this is if you go to PolitiFact today, they made a mistake up in the summary they said there's like 41 cities of this type in the nation. And down in the text they say there's 43. So is it 41 or 43? So he goes and sends them a correction request, basically saying, hey, you shouldn't have analyzed it this way because it's dishonest. But also you've got a typo because the heading is wrong, the story is correct.
- [26:28]
Matt Kittle
Got inconsistencies here. Yeah, yeah.
- [26:30]
Matthew Hoy
You can go to PolitiFact today, search for Glenn Youngkin. You'll find this fact check there. The error is still there. The typo is still there because they don't like him and so they just, anything he sends them goes directly into the circular folder.
- [26:49]
Matt Kittle
I think that is a critical point here. What you have with modern day newspapers in general, the, the usual suspects. But they will do what you, you just talked about. They'll refuse to correct something when they know it is wrong, I think out of arrogance in particular. But they will not report on something that you know, is well documented and it shows, generally speaking, it shows some liberal involved in some sort of corrupt deal or some, some level of corruption. They will not report on that because it comes from what they view to be a source that is not part of their brethren. And so the other part of all of this is not just the, the sins of what they include in the story or how they report the story. It is the sin of omission. And I think a lot of that comes out, doesn't it? In fact, so called the fact checkers of the world.
- [28:03]
Matthew Hoy
Yes, because what they'll do is, and here's the thing with fact checkers and I make a distinction between fact checking 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, because that existed. But it wasn't called fact checking. It was just normal journalism. And it was often done by a
- [28:25]
Matt Kittle
beat reporter and it was often, it was often done before the article was
- [28:29]
Matthew Hoy
published A lot on, on the longer, more in depth ones, certainly magazines, certainly daily newspapers. You know, you had to do a certain amount of that. But you know, you've got a, you've got a deadline, so maybe you revisit it if you're, if you're writing for a daily newspaper or you omit it until you can verify it.
- [28:49]
ZipRecruiter Announcer 2
Right.
- [28:50]
Matthew Hoy
But what they, what they were, what they did was. So the fact checking that is a beat reporter would do I think is in and of itself usually better because They've covered that subject, they know it in depth, they know who to speak to on each side. Now whether they do do that and give equal credit to each side is another question. But the fact checkers we have nowadays are jack of all trades, master of none. They fly into a subject and they're a journalist, they're a generalist, they don't usually have expertise on the subject. So they will go and find, okay, who has expertise on this and they'll interview them and ask them. But they end up usually adopting some expert's view and the experts often are on one side. One of the cases I point out was politifact went and fact checked somebody on the subject of global warming and whether this or that was affected because of global warming. And he interviews a bunch of people and he made a mistake. This was I think like 2017 or so. He goes and interview, does an email interview with Judith Curry. Judith Curry is a long time and accomplished climate scientist. She knows her stuff. But in the past decade plus she has become skeptical of the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming narrative. She and she's deep in the science. And so they interviewed her for this piece and then nothing she said made it into the piece. And the only reason, there's two reasons we know they interviewed her. And this is something that you should watch out for when you're reading a fact check, especially Politifacts where they list their sources at the end is if they list somebody as a source and then they aren't quoted in the piece, that's usually a red flag.
- [31:11]
Matt Kittle
Yeah.
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Matthew Hoy
What did that person say that didn't fit the narrative? And thankfully Judith Curry at the time went and published the questions and her answers on her own blog. So she knew we knew what she would have said. And again, it doesn't fit the narrative so they dropped her. I have a feeling at this point people know enough not to contact her in the first place because they're not going to get what they want.
- [31:39]
Matt Kittle
That is so sad. That is so sad. And I think about it in today's context of you've seen this play out with the Southern Poverty Law center and it's exactly what you just referenced. When there is a politifact story on race, racism, all of those kinds of hot button issues. They immediately turned to the disgraced Southern Poverty Law center, an organization that is facing some very significant charges about on involving fraud. An organization that is accused of paying couple clucks clan members, including paying for the wood to construct the crosses they burn to try to stir up not only to it to incite violence that they can use to fundraise. I mean, and there are, there are so many different of these kinds of spurious sources, and yet they keep going to them over and over again.
- [32:58]
Matthew Hoy
Yeah. And, and when they are, and when they're finally shamed into or, or when it's so big they can't ignore it, what they'll do is they'll write a. It's like you're a fact checker, you know, at the Washington Post. I joke, you've got a pocket full of Pinocchios, right. That you could use. PolitiFact has their truth O meter, which, which is trademarked and no one else can use it, but they've got it. And then something happens where it's, it's kind of out of line where, you know, and I'm thinking specifically of the Georgia, you know, Jim Crow 2.0.
- [33:41]
Matt Kittle
Yeah.
- [33:41]
Matthew Hoy
Incident. And PolitiFact goes, it's like, well, is this Jim Crow 2.0? You can look at the legislation and you can tell, look, this ain't, isn't anything like Jim Crow. Not, it doesn't exist in the same universe. But then they won't apply their truth o meter to it. They'll just say, oh, well, some people say this and some people say that and we won't touch it. And Glenn Kessler did the same thing with the claim that, that firearms, gun violence is the leading killer of children and teens. He goes, and it's utter. He comes to it a year later, after most other fact checkers have addressed it and covered over it would probably be a better description. And he comes to it a year later and says, well, the facts are it's not really true. You know, they're playing with numbers, they're playing with definitions. In reality, it's not really true. But. And I've got this pocket full of Pinocchios, but I'm not going to issue a rating on this because it's just a difficult subject.
- [34:53]
Matt Kittle
It's complicated.
- [34:55]
Matthew Hoy
It's comp, it's, it's, it's, you don't, you don't want to kind of put yourself out there. And the thing is, and I joke, well, that'll get you uninvited from, you know, the D.C. cocktail circuit. And I'm not sure if that's really a thing, but that's something we often kind of joke about. But if you looked at the comments on the piece, you could tell he didn't want to deal with the backlash of saying that it wasn't true when the vast majority of the Washington Post readers and paying subscribers desperately want and need it to be true.
- [35:36]
Matt Kittle
Yeah. So how much of this is driven by fear? Because we have seen so very little courage in the so called mainstream media.
- [35:49]
Matthew Hoy
I think very little of it's driven by fear. It's ideology. We're in the same boat as the other side. We are not the other side. But with the Democrats, with the progressive left, we agree with them. We are. There are, there are some times where you read some of these and it's like, how would the Democrats rapid response team respond to this?
- [36:19]
Matt Kittle
Or Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy.
- [36:23]
Matthew Hoy
The DNC rapid response team would do a better, more intelligent job than Jimmy Kimmel because that's a low. Jimmy Kimmel's a low bar. But I mean, there was a fact check of Mitt Romney back when he was running for president and he pointed out that women in the Obama recovery, which wasn't much of a recovery, that women had suffered more from the recession and were not being helped as much as by the recovery. And PolitiFact, their fact check of that, which starts out being a dishonest, but the fact check, the first paragraph is something along the lines of Mitt Romney would have you believe that the man who is President Obama, who is for women's reproductive rights and this, that and the other thing, doesn't care as much about women when it comes to work or jobs.
- [37:23]
Matt Kittle
Well, that's an editorial. That's a column.
- [37:27]
Matthew Hoy
That's the first paragraph of the fact check.
- [37:30]
Matt Kittle
Wow.
- [37:31]
Matthew Hoy
That's what it was. I'm sitting there reading, I'm like, my jaw just drops.
- [37:36]
Matt Kittle
I can understand.
- [37:38]
Matthew Hoy
So yeah, it's one of the things that I point out and I point out near the end of it. And John Stossel, former ABC News guy, former Fox News guy, now runs his own kind of little media organization. He sued a couple fact checkers, he sued Facebook and he sued this fact checker called Science Feedback for labeling a couple of his videos as false, basically.
- [38:12]
Matt Kittle
Oh yes, I remember that.
- [38:14]
Matthew Hoy
And he lost. But he lost because the judge said that fact checking isn't about facts, it's opinion. That's why he lost. Not because the fact checkers.
- [38:31]
Matt Kittle
But it's not being presented that way. No, it's not presented as we are the arbiters of fact and we will decide what is fact. This is not opinion. And they spend a lot of money and time telling you how deeply their reporters have gone into investigating these statements.
- [38:54]
Matthew Hoy
If if only there were a word for that. I think I've got it. It's. It's fraud.
- [38:58]
Matt Kittle
Yes, it is.
- [39:00]
Matthew Hoy
These are fact checking frauds. So. Yeah, no, you're right. Back 15, 20 years ago, the, the founder of PolitiFact is Bill Adair, ran this piece in the Columbia Journalism Review and he had this continuation, continuation of journal journalism. And at one extreme was opinion pieces and at the other extreme was hard news, factual news reporting. And somewhere in the middle is fact checking. It's a little closer to the hard news reporting than an analysis piece. But here's this continuation of journalism and what that judge said in that case was if you want to adopt one of Kamala Harrison, Kamala Harris's favorite little things, a Venn diagram. A Venn diagram between fact checking and opinion is a single circle. And when you come to realize that, you're gonna understand more and you're going to be properly skeptical about what you're reading.
- [40:14]
Matt Kittle
And I hope that with books like yours, it, it finally gets through to people. I have my misgivings because I see some things coming up that are very alarming now that we should have seen a long time ago that J schools are filled with leftist professors who will continue to support and reinforce the problems that we've had in journalism in general. Fact checking in particular. Let me ask you then this one final question because we've seen everything from failed fact checks on the Russia collusion hoax that ended up propping up the Russia collusion hoax to what we saw in. In Covid and it becomes not only disingenuous, it's. It's not only leaving the public uninformed, it is leaving them uninformed at a very dangerous level. So what is the future of fact checking given all of those things, all of those circumstances?
- [41:22]
Matthew Hoy
I think what Elon Musk is doing with X and the community notes is what we are going to have to really rely on. It's a good, I think it's a good thing that Meta has gotten rid of its fact checking alliance with the international fact checking network. At least in the United States they still use fact checkers overseas for their overseas sites. The. And the thing is is is his over oversight board at Meta has identified some issues with, with community notes that they need to work on more before they roll it out. But that's caused the international fact checking network to say no, you need to leave it. Let us back in. There are too many things on social media platforms that are false that we need to be able to address and we need to be able to reduce the reach of. I will note that, that the fact checkers spent a lot of time when
- [42:35]
ZipRecruiter Announcer 1
they were
- [42:38]
Matthew Hoy
part of the META organization fact checking important things like is Queen Elizabeth II a lizard person? Is Gavin Newsom a lizard person? Is Hillary Clinton a lizard person? And they did that because they're all.
- [42:59]
Matt Kittle
The two of them are snakes. I know, but.
- [43:01]
Matthew Hoy
But the thing is they did that stuff because META paid them for it. They are not that valuable. They want back in. They shouldn't be allowed back in, I think. And one thing I've kind of made the case for is I think fact checking would be better if it were like our politics of old and debates and discussions, the Oxford debates, the Intelligence Squared debates they have where if we're going to fact check something, it'd be nice if we had some conservatives and it's nice if we have some liberals and we could debate it back and forth, we could have a discussion, we could bring up counterpoints and whatnot. And I as a conservative wouldn't always be happy. You as a liberal always wouldn't be happy. But we could come to some agreement that something somewhere in the middle, or maybe we both agree it's ridiculous, but if you've got that kind of back and forth, I think you come out to a better end product and a better solution.
- [44:12]
Matt Kittle
I agree. And at least we don't have it. Yeah, at least you would have of the information. At least the information would be presented to you from both sides. I think I, I've mentioned this before on a number of Federalist Radio, our podcast. I think that over the last 20 years, certainly 15 years, the reporting world, the mainstream reporting world has become Aaron Sorkinized. And I mean that by a show that Aar Sorkin wrote and was behind back in what, 2011, 2012, I think it was called the Newsroom. And they laid out in that show that aired, the streaming show that aired on, I don't know, it was hbo. Yes, hbo, exactly. And, and that the concept that Aaron Sorkin pushed is exactly what newsrooms across the country either had started to do or, or have, have now been doing. We decide what people should know. We will be the moral arbiters. And when a conservative said something that isn't reflective of the society that we believe we should have, then we don't include that perspective. Or at the very least in the fact checking world, we absolutely destroy that. And I think that is exactly what has happened. We've turned this fictional show into the reality of journalism that is happening in America today, and it is problematic. Your book, though, takes that all straight on. Thanks to my guest TODAY journalist Matthew Hoy, author of Fact Checking Fraud, How Fact Checkers Distract, Deceive, and Distort Our Politics. We'll be back soon with more of the Federalist Radio Hour. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray.
- [46:34]
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Matthew Hoy
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