Leer en Español
After spending four full years tracking the Trump administration with fact-checking statements, the Washington Post has now admitted that it will not do any fact-checking over the claims of members of the Biden Administration.
During Trump’s presidency, WaPo noted that most of the former president’s claims were lies. However, now the newspaper assumes that Biden will not make any false claims, as it will not monitor whether or not official statements are true.
Glenn Kessler, editor-in-chief of the WaPo’s fact-checking team, asserted to The Daily Caller that he has “no current plans” to start a new database for President Joe Biden.
The Post claims Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims. At the time, Kessler tweeted that he “never would have believed this number was possible” when they “started four years ago,” a month after Trump took office.
But apparently, the new president will have the advantage that at least by that means he will not be scrutinized.
“I assume that the Biden presidency will be very similar to the Obama presidency and that they will respond and be able to respond quickly,” Kessler told CNN.
The editor alleged that when he asked the Biden administration to back up five statements in a recent speech, they responded promptly. However, as Newsbusters notes, the documents Kessler received were from left-wing think tanks.
“He received documents from liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and poverty analysts at Columbia University backed by liberal foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,” he notes.
When the Trump Administration provided Kessler with quotes from the National Federation of Independent Business for a 2018 small business confidence survey, Kessler dismissed it as a ‘conservative group’ “whose survey didn’t get enough responses to impress him.”
While the Washington Post chose not to verify Biden’s claims, The Federalist did its homework and compiled a list of lies Biden has told in the early days of his presidency.
Media’s credibility plummets
According to data from Edelman’s annual trust barometer, shared by Axios, trust in the media has reached a new all-time low of 27%. In other words, almost two-thirds of Americans do not trust the media.
Meanwhile, Axios found that “56 % of Americans agree with the statement that “journalists and reporters purposely try to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.””
At the same time, “58% think that “most news organizations are more concerned about supporting an ideology or political position than informing the public.”
Fact-checking remains neccessary
According to The Federalist, Joe Biden’s administration had lied eight times within hours of taking office. On the issue of travel bans: “Biden criticized Trump’s China travel ban as xenophobic before signing his own,” notes the media outlet now scrutinizing official statements.
“When Trump implemented a travel ban to China in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, then-candidate Joe Biden criticized the executive action (…) Less than a year later, Biden implemented his own travel bans in South Africa, Brazil, Britain and 26 other European countries in the second week of his presidency,” it reviews.
Biden also spent his entire campaign claiming he would end the coronavirus pandemic; yet he now claims that “the pandemic will get worse. “There is nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the coming months,” Biden said on January 22nd.
On the question of vaccination, Biden’s team told CNN that Trump offered no plan for vaccine delivery, but on the same day, Dr. Anthony Fauci contradicted the claim by asserting that “we’re not starting from scratch because there is activity on delivery,” referring to Operation Warp Speed.
Sabrina Martín Rondon is a Venezuelan journalist. Her source is politics and economics. She is a specialist in corporate communications and is committed to the task of dismantling the supposed benefits of socialism // Sabrina Martín Rondon es periodista venezolana. Su fuente es la política y economía. Es especialista en comunicaciones corporativas y se ha comprometido con la tarea de desmontar las supuestas bondades del socialismo