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Cheap Seats 2021The Fact Checking Pretension - 06/16 
By Rich Trzupek
Turns out that the COVID-19 was more than likely engineered by the Red Chinese in Wuhan and, through their incompetence, released into the world. The Red Chinese government then launched a disinformation campaign which the mainstream media in the US pretty much latched onto hook, line and sinker.
A certain president, whose name escapes me, pretty much nailed the situation at the time, but was dismissed by the MSM, the opposition party and some members of his own party as a racist conspiracy theorist. Leading us to the question: Why is the MSM covering stories based on whom their coverage helps or hurts, rather than attempting to accurately glean the truth of the story and letting the dust settle?
Turns out that the president whose name escapes my mind did not order Lafayette Square cleared before he strolled to St. John’s Church last June. Despite the hysterical attempts of useful media idiots like Jim Acosta and Anderson Cooper to cling to the official “martial law” narrative, Inspector General Mark Greenblatt’s report concluded that: "...the evidence established that relevant (Park Police) officials had made those decisions and had begun implementing the operational plan several hours before they knew of a potential presidential visit to the park, which occurred later that day."
Now that their guy is in office, an increasing number of left-leaning MSM journalists are publicly wondering whether the best way to cover the issues of the day is to succumb to knee-jerk reactions that involve winning and losing rather than soberly presenting facts without regard to what ideologies those facts may or may not support in the public sphere.
As a scientist and an expert in my particular field, I think I’m in a position to explain this phenomenon more than most. Believe it or not, I have a number of liberal friends, many of whom are members of the Democrat party. We often disagree about issues of course, but we almost always disagree respectfully. For the most part I think they believe I am improperly informed or lack understanding. I basically feel the same way about them.
What distinguishes my liberal friends from those anonymous liberal correspondents who write to me from within the protection of the interwebs is that my friends are almost never disrespectful or insulting, while my anonymous correspondents almost always are. I think the supposedly absolute but really nebulous concept of “fact checking” is the source of the difference.
We have some people – right, left and middle – who understand that the great issues of the day are complex enough that it’s irresponsible to trust our perception of reality to journalists whose personal understanding of those complexities is practically non-existent and whose ability to identify neutral experts to rely upon is equally abysmal. We have another group of people – again, left, right and middle – who believe that journalists belonging to the MSM are multi-skilled enough to personally evaluate today’s highly technical topics or to personally vet self-proclaimed experts in a particular field.
The talking point on the left admonishes us to “follow the science.” The reality is that we should “follow where the science came from” before we act upon it. That does not mean that we ought to focus on the motivations of those who make this argument or that, but rather that we do our level best to personally understand as much as the science as we can. More than that, we should insist that those advocating for a particular policy personally understand as much of the science and as much of what qualifies as expertise as is humanly possible.
Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com
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