Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regim…
Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regime. Bin Laden was an Islamist zealot who preached the overthrow of secular rulers, the suppression of Arab nationalism and other national identities among Muslims in favour of a single borderless Muslim loyalty, and quite specifically the destruction of the Baath Party and of Saddam Hussein"
I typed that in to get a word-count: 78. If those 78 words had been appended to most of Bush's claims, as a fact-check, in 2002 and 2003, the war would not have happened. It was journalism's job to do that. Gwynne Dyer was doing it at the time, and a whole movie, "Shock and Awe", A-list cast, was made about the Knight-Ridder journalists who got a series of stories out about how the "Iraqi A-bomb program" was just not there.
But larger papers and all the networks (yes, even MSNBC) were just amplifying the Bush messages and not providing the fact-check.
I'm just not worried about lack of fact-checking of minor political figures that are clearly not mainstream, have little following. Fact-checking rants from Tamara Lich accomplishes nothing. It's the lies from those in power that get the least fact-checking.
Oh, you want fact-check tangents? This one haunts me. Gwynne Dyer's "Future Tense" gave the fact-check to six months of GW Bush propaganda:
"Saddam was a secular dictator, leader of the pan-Arab nationalist and socialist Baath Party, and an accomplished killer and torturer of Islamist radicals, whom he rightly saw as a threat to his regime. Bin Laden was an Islamist zealot who preached the overthrow of secular rulers, the suppression of Arab nationalism and other national identities among Muslims in favour of a single borderless Muslim loyalty, and quite specifically the destruction of the Baath Party and of Saddam Hussein"
I typed that in to get a word-count: 78. If those 78 words had been appended to most of Bush's claims, as a fact-check, in 2002 and 2003, the war would not have happened. It was journalism's job to do that. Gwynne Dyer was doing it at the time, and a whole movie, "Shock and Awe", A-list cast, was made about the Knight-Ridder journalists who got a series of stories out about how the "Iraqi A-bomb program" was just not there.
But larger papers and all the networks (yes, even MSNBC) were just amplifying the Bush messages and not providing the fact-check.
I'm just not worried about lack of fact-checking of minor political figures that are clearly not mainstream, have little following. Fact-checking rants from Tamara Lich accomplishes nothing. It's the lies from those in power that get the least fact-checking.