A tale of two town halls It was the best of TV, it was the worst of TV. Rather than debating face-to-face this week, as originally planned, President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden held dueling town halls scheduled at the same time by their hosts, ABC for Biden and NBC for Trump. On his management of the coronavirus pandemic, on voting by mail, on his 2016 campaign's numerous contacts with Russia and on a range of other subjects, Trump fired off deceptions at great velocity and grew increasingly sour as NBC moderator Savannah Guthrie swatted away falsehood after falsehood. Biden talked in-depth and at length on a range of policy issues, leaving us with a handful of claims to check. Trump: "Just the other day, they [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] came out with a statement that 85 percent of people who wear masks catch it." False. This CDC study compared 154 people who tested positive for the novel coronavirus with 160 people who tested negative. The top finding was that "close contact with a person with known COVID-19 was more commonly reported among" the positive cases (42 percent) than the negatives (14 percent). Coronavirus-positive patients were more likely to have reported dining at a restaurant in the two weeks before the onset of their illness. In the same two-week period, 71 percent of the positive cases and 74 percent of those who didn't catch the virus "reported always using cloth face coverings or other mask types when in public." Biden: "The boilermakers overwhelmingly endorsed me, okay? So the Boilermakers Union has endorsed me because I sat down with them and went into great detail earlier to show their leadership exactly what I would do." False. The International Brotherhood of Boilermakers has not endorsed him or Trump. The union endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Boilermakers Local 154, an important union chapter in swing-state Pennsylvania, has endorsed Trump. Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. An explainer on Hunter Biden's alleged laptop The New York Post published an article this week based on emails purportedly obtained from a laptop that Hunter Biden, the son of former vice president Joe Biden, had supposedly left behind for repair in a Delaware shop in April 2019. The key thrust of the article is that an April 17, 2015, email suggests Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm to meet with his father, Joe Biden, who was then vice president and in charge of U.S. policy toward Ukraine. We do not know the email is authentic. The New York Post published PDF printouts of several emails allegedly taken from the laptop, but for the April 17 email it claimed was a "smoking gun," the tabloid shows only a photo made the day before the story was posted, according to Thomas Rid, the author of "Active Measures," a book on disinformation. The New York Post repeats the falsehood, advanced by Trump, that the "elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating" the energy firm, Burisma, where Hunter Biden sat on the board of directors. Multiple reports have found no evidence that the probe into Burisma was active at the time — in fact, there's a mountain of evidence to the contrary, which the New York Post ignored. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP, @rizzoTK, @mmkelly22) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. You can order our book, "Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth," in paperback, e-book and audiobook via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent booksellers or directly from the publisher. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | By Salvador Rizzo, Glenn Kessler and Meg Kelly ● Read more » | | | | 
Email 
No comments:
Post a Comment