The fact checkers dishonest search for nits to criticize in the State of the Union speech

David Harsanyi:

If media wants to challenge the context and politics of Republican arguments, that’s their prerogative. There are plenty of legitimately misleading statement’s worthy of fact-checkers’ attention. Yet, with a veneer of impartiality, fact-checkers often engage in a uniquely dishonest style of partisanship. And State of Union coverage gave us an abundance of examples of how they do it:

Hyper-precision fact-checking that creates the impression that a Republican is misleading the public: For this, take Politico’s insinuation that Donald Trump was lying to the public about abuse of women at the border. During the State of the Union, Trump claimed “one in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.” This contention is only “partly true,” according to Politico, because a “2017 report by Doctors Without Borders” found that only 31 percent of female migrants and 17 percent of male migrants said they had been actually abused while traveling through Mexico.

Whether Doctors Without Borders’ scary statistic is accurate or not, is one thing. Trump, however, was being called out for asserting that “one in every three” illegal immigrants has been abused attempting to cross the border rather than “33.333 percent of women”––probably a rounding error in the poll. It is almost surely the case that every past president and every politician has used “one-third” or “one-half” rather than a specific fraction, and walked away without being fact-checked.

Fact-checking subjective political assertions: The New York Times provided a masterclass in bad faith fact-checking by taking political contentions offered by the president and subjecting them to a supposed impartial test of accuracy. In his speech, Trump called the illegal border crossing “an urgent national crisis.” The New York Times says “this is false.” Why? Because illegal border crossing have been declining for two decades, they say. Customs and Border Protection agents, they go on to explain, had arrested around 50,000 people trying to illegally cross the southwestern border each of the last three months, which was only half of the arrests they had made in comparable months in the mid-2000s.

Even if those numbers correct, there is no way to factcheck urgency. After all, a lessening crisis doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a pressing one. We’ve seen a steep decline in gun violence over the past 30 years. Would The New York Times ever “fact-check” a Democrat who argued that gun violence was an “urgent crisis” of public safety? Of course not. But this fluctuating standard allows journalists to “fact-check” any subjective political contention they desire.

If I claim that socialism is the greatest threat to American freedom and prosperity, I may well be right. I may have a lots of historical and economic evidence to back up my assertion. You can argue that I’m wrong. You can lay out statistics that attempt to prove me wrong. You can call me crazy. But you can’t produce an unbiased “fact-check” to establishing that my opinion is conclusively false. You’re just writing an op-ed piece.
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There is more.

Too many of these so-called fact checks are just briefs for liberalism masquerading as a fact check   Others are nitpicking in an attempt to challenge the President's credibility.  I am reminded of an inexperienced lawyer in a case I was arbitrating who spent an hour getting a witness to admit that an immaterial factual assertion in a letter was a mistake.  While he had a triumphal look on his face once he got the admission he still did not win the case.  Smart lawyers do not waste time on immaterial matters.  The differences that the fact checkers are working with are pretty clearly immaterial and they make the fact checker look silly.