I have a question I’d like to put on the floor. Should political speeches be fact-checked? I don’t think they should or, at least, I think it’s very difficult to do so. How do you separate hyperbole and aspirations from falsehoods? Isn’t that completely subjective?
I’m asking this in reaction to a fact-check of Michelle Obama’s DNC speech. I don’t much care for President Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. Like a Japanese nobleman before the 20th century he seems to live in a reality that exists only in his own mind. He says what he wants to be true rather than what is necessarily objectively true.
And I wish that presidents always told us the unvarnished truth but I don’t know that has ever been true. Still, I think I would hold presidents’ public pronouncements to a higher standard than speeches given in the context of a political convention.
I think the biggest fact check everybody needs to make are the constant accusations and assertions of racism. Too many people are getting away with calling something or someone else racist without a shred of evidence, and worse too many people are either agreeing or pretending to agree that the accusations are 100% true. WTF appointed the accusers God? Who gave them the right to slander others? It absolutely infuriates me that they can without consequences.
‘How do you separate hyperbole and aspirations from falsehoods? Isn’t that completely subjective?’
I don’t think it’s completely subjective, but these days it might as well be. The political halves of the country as Scott Adams says are watching completely different movies. I guess I’m a little more tolerant of bullshitting because I grew up with a father who was a salesman and worked for decades with salesmen, who had to tailor their messages towards the truth because in my business you need repeat business to stay alive, and not delivering on your promises will lose you customers. But on the other hand growing up with salesmen IMO made me more attentive to actual lies and slander.
IMO hyperbole and exaggeration do not fall into the same category as telling a bold-faced lie. For instance, most of Trump’s speech missteps are due to stylistic flourishes of numbers and “greatness“ of what he has done, how big his own fortune is, crowd size, and so on. These, however, are all grouped as “lies,†putting his “lie tally“ into the thousands – a number often repeated by Dems as a major talking point.
Such verbal exaggerations, though, are less deceptive and harmful than saying something that absolutely has no merit, and is the opposite of the truth. Biden, for example, deliberately has taken Trump’s Charlottesville’s comments out of context, to continue the narrative that he is a racist because he didn’t condemn white supremacy and neo-Nazis, which he did do, when his comments were relayed in a full paragraph. This kind of inflammatory accusation, I think, should be fact-checked each time it’s made, so it will lose it’s usefulness as a targeted falsehood.
I think fact checking would be detrimental to the very best candidates.
Do you really think factual honesty could ever beat out a charismatic bullshitter? But honesty can be fun, as when Jimmy Carter admitted publicly he had lusted after women not his wife, in his heart.
For……SHAME!
And then, who would fact check the fact checkers? Think they don’t have agendas?
“Isn’t that completely subjective?”
Seriously? Read Jan’s distinction. Trump as Russian stooge? A traitor? Republicans want to throw grandma’s wheelchair over the cliff? Romney as dog killer? Every Republican who disagrees with a policy position is a racist, homophobe, xenophobe, fascist……
I heard an interview with James Clyburn this morning and was told that since I’m a Republican I was basically a lawless racist trying to suppress the black vote.
This isn’t just garden variety subjective differences.
I think everything is fair game for fact checking. Presidential speeches or ones made by candidates should just be weighed more seriously. I also agree that we should not as a rule take single lines out of context. Nor should we take just a single paragraph. If a president or candidate addresses an issue you should look at the entirety of their statement. When you do that then Trump’s statement about Charlottesville comes across poorly. In his zeal to also blame the left he avoided making a clear, unequivocal condemnation of the neo-Nazis. He tells the reporter he should have known what was going on the night before, yet Trump is ignoring that the night before was the tiki torch march recreating the famous Nazi march. Link to interview which also has link to his first statement. (Note that the neo-Nazi sites were happy with his statement.)
https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/
“Every Republican who disagrees with a policy position is a racist, homophobe, xenophobe, fascist……”
See, this is hyperbole. Wrong, and in the right context a lie, bu tin this case hyperbole.
Steve