“There was truth and there was untruth,” George Orwell wrote in his classic novel, 1984, “and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
In the Age of Trump and Fake News, way past 1984, I’m hanging on for dear sanity.
Earlier this week, I commented on the brouhaha between the president and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D‑Mass.). Today, I have a bone to pick with Snopes, the faux-fact-checking site, which found this statement to be TRUE: “President Donald Trump offered to donate $1 million to a charity of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s choice if she would take a DNA test to demonstrate that she had Native American ancestry.”
Not “Mostly True” with some explanation, but just “True.” Problem is, that statement is false.
Mr. Trump did not make that offer; he promised people at a Montana rally that he would make such an offer in the future, if he found himself “in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she is of Indian [sic] heritage.”
Splitting hairs? Where is the split? Here is President Trump’s full statement.
Snopes was hardly alone in misreporting Trump. The Hill titled its story, “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.” The Washington Post parroted The Hill’s “fact-checked headline.” Other major outlets from CNN to the Miami Herald declared, falsely, that Trump had made the offer.
Look, I don’t blame Warren for goading Trump to pay up. That’s the political game.
But the media, especially fact-checkers, should be diligent about what precisely the president has said — not playing that game.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
7 replies on “Fakes & Facts”
Maybe you can cover the 5,000+ lies Drumpf has told?
Yeah, you’re really splitting hairs, Paul. He said it, and the fact that there were preconditions alters neither the comment nor the intent, it just gives him an out when she does it herself. Of far more importance is the fact that she may in fact have less native American blood than the average American. She has made herself a laughingstock and killed her presidential ambitions, if she ever had any.…
Sounds like some of your commenters are in the Snopes camp big time.
I guess that is to be expected. You have to be able to read and comprehend.
This is a moot academic discussion, since the test that Lizzie Fauxcahontus took involved no comparisons with Native American DNA, whatsoever.
Moot point… No test comparison was made with Native American DNA.
It’s not just what the President said…The main point is that the test that she tried to pass off as proof was not a comparison to Native Americans, She still has not been tested but she has continued to lie…
The very concept of truth is alien to many people. Instead, there is conformance or non-conformance to an embraced meta-narrative, the ultimate goal of which narrative is to vindicate a set of social patterns or objectives. In some cases, the underlying goal is simply power.