For example, this whole article just should not exist:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p...
There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form:
"X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong."
i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading.
I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all.
"Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/15/facebook-p...
There is a whole genre of "fact-check" articles of the form:
"X says that Y will cause Z to happen. Here's why experts say that's wrong."
i.e. "fact-checking" a prediction about something that will happen in the future. Unless you're clairvoyant, that isn't a fact-check because the facts literally haven't happened yet! So any rating at all is misleading.
I mean yeah, maybe you could fact-check something that can be predicted with high accuracy, like whether a solar eclipse will happen. But they do it for economic and social and political issues. They just shouldn't, at all.
"Fact-checking" is just clever marketing label for meta-journalism, i.e. journalism-about-journalism. It isn't some category that has magically different standards or incentives than ordinary journalism. It perplexes me that smart, skeptical people think that Snopes or Politifact are somehow free from the exact same bias-producing incentives and motivations of every other news outlet.