Perpetual pretenders proclaiming possession of Truth ... (fact check the fat cheque)

Samizdata.net have pointed me to an article in Public entitled "Nacissism of the Fact Checkers".

It's a sobering though disturbingly unsurprising read. 

It adds to the litany of distressingly wrong facts that have been endorsed and perpetuated by the "official narrative" and with the reciprocal suppression or censorship of correct "falsehoods". 

Here's a list of such behaviours by fact checkers from the article:

- calling out a self avowed parody site for misinformation on the Paris riots for posting a typically over the top clip from the action movie "Fast & Furious";

-  that claim by the New York Times, AP and the BBC that fake news travels 6 times faster than the factual news, turns out to be fake news itself. The claim is based on a single MIT study on small number of tweets, not news.

- Facebook removing 20 million posts, and labeling 190 million posts about Covid-19 as "content moderation" because those posts did not conform to the official narrative on the pandemic, including removing references to the virus emanating from a lab-leak.  

 - the false debunking by FactCheck.org of the claim that north Atlantic right whales being threatened by off shore wind farms, even when such a threat is affirmed by the US NOAA.

 - the BBC falsely asserting that Nigel Farage was not de-banked by Coutts for political reasons, when it transpired that the bank had prepared a personal dossier on his alleged behaviours not consistent with the bank's beliefs.

 - Snopes saying claims that president Macron had called for shutting down the internet during the Paris riots was disinformation, even though Macron had said that the French government may have to cut social networks off if it got out of hand.

The article concludes:

Despite the terrible track record of fact-checkers getting the facts wrong, spreading misinformation, and demanding censorship, the fact-checking industry has shown no remorse, humility, or self-awareness. 

Around the world, fact-checkers engage in biased fact-checking and demand censorship of others while displaying no apparent concern that they themselves may be guilty of the exact thing for which they are criticizing others. 

Why is that? Can anything be done to make fact-checking more… factual? Or is fact-checking doomed to be biased, hypocritical, and authoritarian? 

Yes. It seems to be so doomed.

And maybe it's because, with the collapse of mainstream religion in the West, the resulting power vacuum has opened up the space for a fierce contest between the noisiest power seekers to be the new high priests of Truthiness. 

Let them battle it out I say, just let's not pretend that all of them are not pretenders.