| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | |
Happy holidays! Here's to 2018.
We had thought the election year of 2016 would be impossible to beat, but we had 20 percent more unique visitors in 2017 than in 2016, proving yet again that although President Trump may be bad at sticking to the facts, he is certainly good for fact-checking. In compiling the top-10 list, we focused on full fact checks of specific claims. But roundups of claims, which were all about Trump, also ranked among the most widely read columns. We also added video fact checks this year — these (along with the updated list cataloguing the president's most frequent false claims) were the most popular. On that note, this will be our last newsletter of 2017. We'll be back to business in the new year. Here's to 2018! | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. | | We doled out many, many Pinocchios. Below is our list of the 10 most popular fact-checks of 2017: | | | 1. Trump's facile claim that his refugee policy is similar to Obama's in 2011 In January, President Trump justified his original executive order halting travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries by claiming that President Barack Obama did the same thing in 2011. But the comparison is a bit facile. Obama responded to an actual threat, and then under congressional pressure, officials decided to reexamine all previous refugees and impose new screening procedures, which led to a slowdown in processing new applications — not a ban. Trump, by contrast, issued his executive order without any known triggering threat. (Three Pinocchios. This is the most popular fact check in The Fact Checker's 10-year history.) | | 2. President Trump's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Twitter day The president claimed (and continues to claim) that Russian tampering in the 2016 election was "fake news" produced by the Democrats. On March 20, while testifying before the House Intelligence Committee, then-FBI Director James B. Comey confirmed that a criminal investigation into possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign was active. The president's Twitter account went into spin mode — trying to turn lemons into lemonade. But the tweets in response to testimony from Comey — and later from National Security Agency Director Michael S. Rogers — were misleading, inaccurate or simply false. (Four Pinocchios) | | 3. President Trump and accusations of sexual misconduct: The complete list More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. While the White House has dismissed all of the women as liars, many have produced witnesses who say they heard about these incidents when they happened — long before Trump's political aspirations were known. Such contemporaneous accounts are essential to establishing the credibility of allegations because they reduce the chance that a person is making up a story for political purposes. The Fact Checker provided a list of 13 women who have publicly come forward with claims that Trump had physically touched them inappropriately in some way, and the witnesses they provided. (No rating.) | | | 4. Trump's 'evidence' for Obama wiretap claims relies on sketchy, anonymously sourced reports In March, Trump fired off a series of tweets, accusing Obama of "wire tapping" phones in his New York office during the "very sacred election process." Trump called his predecessor a "bad (or sick) guy," but his explosive accusation seemed to be very thinly sourced. Furthermore, James R. Clapper Jr., Obama's director of national intelligence, who presumably would be aware of a FISA court order, issued an on-the-record denial. And Comey asked the Justice Department to issue a statement refuting Trump's claim and later testified before Congress, again denying the president's claim. (Four Pinocchios. This claim was also on our list of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.) | | 5. Ted Cruz's claim that two-thirds of the Hurricane Sandy bill 'had nothing to do with Sandy'
After Houston and much of southeastern Texas were swamped by Hurricane Harvey, critics complained that Texas senators and members of Congress sought emergency federal aid but refused to back relief for the victims of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The defense from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was that the Sandy legislation was a bad bill filled with pork-barrel projects. But we found that the vast majority of the spending was for Hurricane Sandy. (Three Pinocchios) | | 6. Here's what you need to know about preexisting conditions in the GOP health plan
Much of the debate in May over the House GOP health-care bill focused on whether Obamacare's popular prohibition against denying coverage based on preexisting medical conditions would remain in place. There are always winners and losers in a bill of this size. In this case, if the House bill ever became law, much would depend on unknown policy decisions by individual states — and then how those decisions are implemented. (No rating.) | | | 7. Did President Trump add $33 million to Puerto Rico's debt by bankrupting a golf course there? After Category 4 Hurricane Maria tore through the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, left-leaning media reports and social-media posts made a startling claim: Trump had contributed to the island's debt because he declared bankruptcy on a Trump golf course there and left Puerto Ricans with the bill. But it turned out that Trump's role in the Puerto Rican economic crisis is limited, in the larger context of the recession and the history of this property, which was flailing even before he came into the picture.He didn't make it any better for the golf course, but he didn't make it any worse. (Three Pinocchios) | | 8. Kellyanne Conway's claim of a 'Bowling Green massacre' In defending the president's initial executive order temporarily banning refugees, immigrants and citizens from Iraq and six other Muslim-majority countries, White House aide Kellyanne Conway blamed two Iraqis for a massacre that didn't happen. Later, Conway did note that her use of "massacre" was an "honest mistake," tweeting that she meant to say "Bowling Green terrorists." We don't play gotcha at The Fact Checker. Uncorrected, this would have been worth Four Pinocchios. (Not rated.) | | 9. The 'dossier' and the uranium deal: A guide to the latest allegations
As a service to readers bound to be confused by an increasingly complex story, The Fact Checker provided a brief guide to the latest developments in the tangled allegations involving Russia, President Trump and Hillary Clinton. For both "the dossier" — a collection of 17 memos concerning Trump and Russia written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — and the sale of a U.S. uranium company to a Russian entity, we provided the necessary background and an explanation of what was new and what was controversial about the allegations. (No rating.) | | | 10. Stephen Miller's bushels of Pinocchios for false voter-fraud claims
In February, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller appeared across Sunday talk shows, spouting the White House's go-to false claims about voter fraud. Miller repeated that 14 percent of noncitizens are registered to vote — yet the authors of the study he was citing disputed such use of their research. He mentioned other examples that also failed to support the White House's allegations of voter fraud. These claims have now morphed into a commission to investigate their veracity. Many months later, we still have not seen evidence to support these bogus talking points that have been repeatedly shown to be false. (Four Pinocchios) | | | |  | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
Twitter
Facebook
No comments:
Post a Comment