Rumble in a wonky jungleA battle royal with 20 candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination played out over two nights this week. And it was a wonky affair, chock-full...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Rumble in a wonky jungle A battle royal with 20 candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination played out over two nights this week. And it was a wonky affair, chock-full of figures and facts on health care, tax rates, immigration. The Fact Checker team combed through both debates and found several falsehoods, exaggerations and statistics lacking context. Here's the first night, and here's the second. One of the worst offenders was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who falsely claimed he had implemented universal health care in the city. Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio got the math all wrong when he said: "The bottom 60 percent haven't seen a raise since 1980. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent control 90 percent of the wealth." The Congressional Budget Office in 2018 indicated that the bottom 60 percent had an increase in income of 32 percent since 1980 — and the increase was over 50 percent if the impact of transfers and taxes was included. According to several economic studies, the richest 1 percent of U.S. residents account for about 40 percent of the country's wealth. Sen. Michael F. Bennet of Colorado claimed to have written the most progressive bill to give legal status to dreamers, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore after the House passed a renewed and more expansive version of the Dream Act this month. Former governor John Hickenlooper said Colorado had the number one economy in the country the last three years, but it's based on a subjective ranking from a magazine, which he never mentions. Former vice president Joe Biden said he did not oppose busing to integrate schools in the 1970s. The issue is complex, but he did oppose busing. |  | | 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. Pence's false claim that most asylum-seekers skip their court hearings Speaking about asylum-seekers during a CNN interview, Vice President Pence said: "Ninety percent of the people never show up for their hearing in the months ahead. ... The overwhelming majority, plus-90 percent, don't show up." We dissected the claim and gave it Four Pinocchios. The statistics measuring how many migrants attend their court hearings after being released into the United States are complex and difficult to verify. But here's a clear distillation: Pence said 90 percent of people don't show up to their asylum hearings. The Justice Department's preferred metric shows that 44 percent of non-detained migrants missed their court dates. Measuring only asylum cases, the rate drops to 6 percent to 11 percent per year, measuring from 2013 to 2017. Independent researchers analyzing immigration court records found that 19 percent of families missed their hearings. | | | How to spot a manipulated video The world needs a common language to talk about fake videos. They spread like wildfire online, with the capacity to dupe millions of people. Remember how Sarah Huckabee Sanders spread a doctored video that made it seem as though CNN's Jim Acosta had karate-chopped a White House intern? Or how Facebook refused to take down a video that was slowed down to make House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem drunk? The Fact Checker teamed up with The Washington Post's video department to create a rating scale of sorts for all the different types of fake videos spreading on the Internet. The goal is to have a common language, so that it's easy for people to quickly understand what type of distortion they're looking at and easy for news organizations and others to debunk deceptive videos. A manipulated video could be a sophisticated deepfake, generated by AI. Or it could be a more rudimentary edit, snipping out some key passage from a politician's speech to change its meaning. | | We came up with three broad categories: "missing context," "deceptive editing" and "malicious transformation." And we ask that readers be on the lookout and send any suspicious videos our way. We'll check them out and rate them. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can also reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @mmkelly22, @rizzoTK or use #FactCheckThis), or Facebook (Fact Checker). Read about our rating scale here, and sign up here for our weekly Fact Checker newsletter. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. — Salvador Rizzo | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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