The Post ran a live “fact check” during Friday’s debate. You can start to pick up that, perhaps, this isn’t going to be the most substantive, even-handed reporting when the first fact they decide to check is McCain’s “wild exaggeration” that the Normandy invasion was the “greatest” ever. Aside from arguing semantics over the meaning of “greatest” (perhaps he meant morally greatest, you nitwits; greatest in the sense of “had the best, most lasting impact on history;” there are several meanings of “greatest” that would apply to Normandy, none of which the “fact checker” seems inclined to credit), is it really the purpose of supposed fact checkers to tweak candidates for rhetorical comments like that?
Anyhow, the point where I stopped reading was the 10:12 “fact check.”
McCain accused Obama of wanting to stage “military strikes” inside Pakistan, which is a misleading account of what Obama famously said in 2007: That he would be willing to go after Al Qaeda targets inside that country with or without the approval of the Pakistani authorities.
“If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will,” Obama said.
You got that? Obama wasn’t saying we’d launch military strikes into Pakistan. He was saying we’d pay the local constable to serve warrants inside Pakistan, I guess. Or maybe we’d launch “love strikes” inside Pakistan to capture al Qaedas. But don’t you dare say he was advocating “military strikes”: That’s misleading!
The media performance this year is shameful and shameless. The whole lot of them ought to lose their jobs.
Posted by Apollo in Audacity of Hype, Journalism