Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle ripped the community of fact-checkers who have tried to hold former President Trump accountable during his political career, admitting they’ve ultimately failed to hamper his support and have hurt their own institutions.
The author, a staunch critic of Trump, accused those of trying to prevent the spread of Trump’s "disinformation" of being arrogant and mistaking their own opinion with objective fact. She even accused them of censorship. All of this, she wrote, has ultimately led to voters questioning them and other institutions more than they’ve ever questioned the former president.
"After eight years of all-out disinformation warfare, Trump’s approval ratings are holding up better than public trust in academia and journalism," McArdle lamented.
STEPHEN COLBERT'S NEW YORK CITY AUDIENCE LAUGHS AFTER HE PRAISES CNN'S OBJECTIVITY
The columnist began her piece by describing the idealized mission of the Trump era fact-checkers, saying they "devote themselves to checking the internet for bad facts and bad actors — and especially for the malevolent impulses of Trump."
However, they didn’t save the world in her estimation. At best, they dinged Trump on some of his bragging and, at worst, they censored true facts in their thirst to correct him.
"Some of their efforts have been useful, including their fact-checking of Trump’s more frenetic flights of fancy," she said, adding, "But the larger effort has been repeatedly marred when the disinformation experts have acted as censors, suppressing information that turned out to be true and spreading information that was false."
McArdle provided some of the major examples of this suppression, examples that most of the media participated in at the behest of these fact-checkers.
"Recall when it was ‘misinformation’ to suggest the pandemic might have started in a Wuhan lab. Recollect how a bevy of putative experts assured us that Hunter Biden’s laptop was probably a ‘Russian information operation’ rather than … Hunter Biden’s laptop."
STEPHEN COLBERT'S NEW YORK CITY AUDIENCE LAUGHS AFTER HE PRAISES CNN'S OBJECTIVITY
She added a more recent one, stating, "If these memories have faded, remember that just a couple months ago, we were hearing that videos of President Joe Biden’s obvious decline were actually expert-certified ‘cheap fakes.’"
The author even noted that after each of these fact-checks blew up in the experts’ faces, they would learn some "humility." "And each time, they have reemerged, unchastened," she said.
McArdle also brought up how European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton stepped in it when he tried to slam Elon Musk with a "huffily worded and, as it turned out, unapproved letter" after the X owner allowed Trump’s so-called misinformation to spread on X during their lengthy interview on Monday night.
"For Breton’s interference made no difference; Musk quite rightly went ahead with his show, and what followed was more dangerous to the Trump campaign than it was to democracy," the columnist said.
She concluded, "The episode sums up all the ways in which the ‘disinformation’ specialty has gone wrong with Trump: the arrogance, the confusion of opinion with legal or empirical fact, the destroy-the-village-in-order-to-save-it attempts to shore up democracy by clamping down on political speech. Not to mention the ineffectiveness of it all."
