Covid was not mentioned once in this piece - that was a big contributor to downfall of fact checking. And the Trump/Russia nonsense. Not to mention that fact checking can be accurate most of the time but all it takes is one glaringly obvious biased fact check (or for instance, fact checking the Babylon Bee) and the whole enterprise is undermined. That there is more misinformation on the right than the left (wouldve been nice to have a link to whatever source/proof you have of this) can be blamed on on the left: journalists are left and news is no longer "just the facts." And there is a heavy dose of whatever (left) bias the writer has; there is also the fact that the media doesnt give quite the same coverage of democrat malfeasance as the right. As a result, conservative readers are likely pushed to less reliable sources. If news and coverage were more balanced, this might not be the case.
The elephant in the fact checking room is, of course, religion. Christian fundamentalists are taught that their Bible is literally true. Usually they are taught other things as well, which are claimed to come from that Bible, though the traces are hard to find. To remain "good people" they must ignore any evidence that these Truths are inaccurate, let alone that they contradict other Truths from the same source.
Some manage a kind of doublethink, where they believe questionable parts of their Bible only while in church, but ignore them when making decisions outside the religious sphere.
Most do not. Moreover, they expand their wishful thinking to cover many other topics.
And Americans with these beliefs also tend to be conservative. No wonder they are afraid of fact checking, certain its results would be overall false. They've all been exposed to evil liberals who either claim their Holy Bible is untrue, or say that they don't care whether or not it's true; they won't sign up for a faith which insists that they are personally inferior, or evil, for being female, queer, trans, or similar.
No wonder many of them find it easy to believe everything Trump says, contradictions and all. They learned how to believe nonsense in Sunday School.
I dont think there are enough Christian fundamentalists to qualify as an elephant. The bigger elephant is Biden - the lack of curiousity of his mental state (and for example, labeling Robert Hur's view that he was not mentally fit to stand trial) blew up fact checking too.
Covid was not mentioned once in this piece - that was a big contributor to downfall of fact checking. And the Trump/Russia nonsense. Not to mention that fact checking can be accurate most of the time but all it takes is one glaringly obvious biased fact check (or for instance, fact checking the Babylon Bee) and the whole enterprise is undermined. That there is more misinformation on the right than the left (wouldve been nice to have a link to whatever source/proof you have of this) can be blamed on on the left: journalists are left and news is no longer "just the facts." And there is a heavy dose of whatever (left) bias the writer has; there is also the fact that the media doesnt give quite the same coverage of democrat malfeasance as the right. As a result, conservative readers are likely pushed to less reliable sources. If news and coverage were more balanced, this might not be the case.
You're right that a few bad calls can destroy trust in the whole system.
The piece includes three links substantiating the claim that there is more misinfo on the right. Unfortunately, there is a lot more such evidence.
You're also right that conservatives will go to low quality sources if most of the high quality sources are left leaning. I've been arguing this literally for years, e.g. https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/12/a-boom-in-responsible-conservative-media/
Am I the only one who recalls a certain reptile-lidded-eyed CEO at a Senate hearing once stating that this would scale with AI?
Please come to bluesky!
The elephant in the fact checking room is, of course, religion. Christian fundamentalists are taught that their Bible is literally true. Usually they are taught other things as well, which are claimed to come from that Bible, though the traces are hard to find. To remain "good people" they must ignore any evidence that these Truths are inaccurate, let alone that they contradict other Truths from the same source.
Some manage a kind of doublethink, where they believe questionable parts of their Bible only while in church, but ignore them when making decisions outside the religious sphere.
Most do not. Moreover, they expand their wishful thinking to cover many other topics.
And Americans with these beliefs also tend to be conservative. No wonder they are afraid of fact checking, certain its results would be overall false. They've all been exposed to evil liberals who either claim their Holy Bible is untrue, or say that they don't care whether or not it's true; they won't sign up for a faith which insists that they are personally inferior, or evil, for being female, queer, trans, or similar.
No wonder many of them find it easy to believe everything Trump says, contradictions and all. They learned how to believe nonsense in Sunday School.
I dont think there are enough Christian fundamentalists to qualify as an elephant. The bigger elephant is Biden - the lack of curiousity of his mental state (and for example, labeling Robert Hur's view that he was not mentally fit to stand trial) blew up fact checking too.