Legacy media want us to believe their crap because it has been “fact-checked”
From O’Leary for News: I dove out the window of the media bus on “fact-checking” many years ago when a “fact check” revealed that late-aborted babies would have died anyway if no one did anything to help them so abortion of viable babies and leaving them to die in soiled utility rooms wasn’t really any big deal…
(I had met a nurse for whom dying babies were the last contact with fellow humans. No one else would touch them in the “soiled utility room” in which — as “medical waste” — they were left to die. She risked her career to hold them while they were dying. She refused to treat them like the garbage they were consigned to.)
Oh, and much later the Babylon Bee got “fact-checked” for an obviously satirical story in which socialist US representative in Congress was supposed to have claimed on The Price Is Right that “everything is free.” Everyone knew it was satire so why fact check it?
That twigged me: Fact-checking merely amounts to ensuring that media are toeing the Correct line. Nothing to do with facts as such, like the nurse risking her career to hold the dying baby.
We are Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, editors of The BMJ, one of the world’s oldest and most influential general medical journals. We are writing to raise serious concerns about the “fact checking” being undertaken by third party providers on behalf of Facebook/Meta.
In September, a former employee of Ventavia, a contract research company helping carry out the main Pfizer covid-19 vaccine trial, began providing The BMJ with dozens of internal company documents, photos, audio recordings, and emails. These materials revealed a host of poor clinical trial research practices occurring at Ventavia that could impact data integrity and patient safety. We also discovered that, despite receiving a direct complaint about these problems over a year ago, the FDA did not inspect Ventavia’s trial sites.
The BMJ commissioned an investigative reporter to write up the story for our journal. The article was published on 2 November, following legal review, external peer review and subject to The BMJ’s usual high level editorial oversight and review.[1]
But from November 10, readers began reporting a variety of problems when trying to share our article. Some reported being unable to share it. Many others reported having their posts flagged with a warning about “Missing context … Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people.” Those trying to post the article were informed by Facebook that people who repeatedly share “false information” might have their posts moved lower in Facebook’s News Feed. Group administrators where the article was shared received messages from Facebook informing them that such posts were “partly false.”
Readers were directed to a “fact check” performed by a Facebook contractor named Lead Stories.[2]
Hey, guys, trust the Science !