Let’s be clear (by saying that, like Biden, you know that what I’m about to say is the absolute truth.) So called fact checking is not fact checking. It’s political activism.
From thenationalpulse.com we get this story on the status of “fact checking” in the U.S.
From the article:
The Politifact “reporter” – a job which includes no actual reporting – has a history of pro-Democrat and anti-Trump tweets. Naturally, she took umbrage with The National Pulse’s story on masks and deaths, derived from two separate stories of May 16th and May 26th.
In the first, Natalie Winters reveals how Beny Spira, Associate Professor at the University of São Paulo, published an April 19th 2022 study “analyz[ing] the correlation between mask usage against morbidity and mortality rates in the 2020-2021 winter in Europe.”
The data came from 35 European countries, and concluded:
“The findings presented in this short communication suggest that countries with high levels of mask compliance did not perform better than those with low mask usage in the six-month period that encompassed the second European wave of COVID-19…”
The study also found:
“Moreover, the moderate positive correlation between mask usage and deaths in Western Europe also suggests that the universal use of masks may have had harmful unintended consequences…”
But Settles found this particular science to be “False” and as a result, the National Pulse story is now being censored on social media. Settles’s source appears to be a singular professor from the corporate-backed Milken Institute for Public Health at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her name is Emily Smith.
But Smith didn’t even tell Settles that Spira’s study was incorrect. She is quoted as saying:
“I think we can just use common sense to say that when cases are rising, people are more likely to do protective things… You’re more likely to wear a mask when you go out and your city or your country might also have made recommendations or requirements to do those things.”
In other words, Smith is claiming that the mask usage and deaths is an inverse correlation, though she offers no evidence, nor science, nor refutation of the science offered. Instead, Smith suggests using “common sense” – a phrase oft-derided when used by anti-authoritarian activists at the beginning of the pandemic.
Smith, for what it is worth, is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as revealedon her university biography.
This tells you everything you need to know about the status of “fact checking” in the U.S.
IT’S NOT FACT CHECKING. IT’S POLITICAL THEATER/ACTIVISM DRESSED UP AS FACT CHECKING.