Trump's industrial-size spin on cars, coal and steelPresident Trump says jobs are surging for coal miners. He says steel is making a comeback. Car companies are "pouring" into the...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Trump's industrial-size spin on cars, coal and steel President Trump says jobs are surging for coal miners. He says steel is making a comeback. Car companies are "pouring" into the United States. And it just so happens that this blue-collar revival is taking place in the swing states that could decide the 2020 presidential election. In Pennsylvania, he said, "We've got steel back, we brought coal back, we brought so many things back, and the state now is doing better than it's ever done," adding later that "miners are going back to work that never thought they'd see that job again." "Many, many [car] companies are coming in," Trump said in Wisconsin. "And they're coming in, frankly, to Michigan, they're coming back, they want to be back to Ohio, to Pennsylvania, to North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and what's the name of this special place? It's called Wisconsin." These claims don't add up when you look at jobs data or company announcements of new investments in these states. Coal-mining and steelworker jobs are flat in Pennsylvania since Trump took office. Automakers have announced new plants or expansions in only three of the seven states Trump mentioned. For his industrial-strength spin, we gave the president Three Pinocchios. |  | | 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. Fact and fiction in the abortion debate Advocates on both sides of the abortion debate have a reservoir of arguments and talking points, but some of the most frequent claims from each side are spotty and worth a look. Our video fact check breaks down what's solid and what's fiction. LiveAction, an anti-abortion group, said, "Abortion is more dangerous now than ever before." But with advances in the field of medicine, the procedure has been considered safe since the 1960s, though it is not risk-free. (The group deleted the tweet after we sent questions.) Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and former HUD secretary Julian Castro (D-Tex.), two presidential candidates, said late-term abortions happen "when a woman's life is being threatened and the viability of the fetus as well is compromised" (Booker) or in "limited circumstances and necessary for the life of the mother or for other reasons" (Castro). But there's not solid data for them to make this claim. Trump claimed that legislative proposals in New York and Virginia would allow for "babies to be ripped from the womb of their mother" or "possible execution of the baby." It's a nuanced issue, but neither proposal comes anywhere close to explicitly allowing infanticide, as the president suggests. | |  | | This face is not real Katie Jones does not exist, the Associated Press reported in a fascinating dispatch from the digital frontier. Jones's photograph and LinkedIn profile made her seem like a real person working in Washington's world of think tanks and government. But her credentials were fake, her connections on LinkedIn never met her, she did not respond to the AP's inquiries, her profile recently vanished ... and her face was a digital fabrication. "Numerous experts interviewed by AP said perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Katie Jones persona was her face, which they say appears to be artificially created ... using a family of dueling computer programs called generative adversarial networks, or GANs, that can create realistic-looking faces of entirely imaginary people," Raphael Satter reported. (Check out this link to see how GANs generate artificial faces.) Readers should keep this in mind as they prepare for the 2020 election. If a foreign spy trying to pry information from U.S. policymakers was behind Jones's fake profile, as the AP theorized, what's to stop spies from creating an army of propaganda bots with realistic but fake profile pictures? | | 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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