After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts....Kessler announced that the Post will continue tracking Biden's statements and reporting on their truthfulness, but won't catalog them.
Through April 26, Biden has made 67 false or misleading statements, according to a Washington Post Fact Checker analysis of every speech, interview, tweet or public statement made by the president. That compares to 511 such statements in Trump’s first 100 days.
We've been comparing Biden (67 false or misleading claims) to Trump's first 100 days (511 claims.) But past is no prologue. In the last 100 days before the 2020 election, we counted 8,859 claims made by Trump. It was a wild ride.
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) April 27, 2021
“Learned my lesson” means that who knows what the next four years will bring. We have fact-checked Biden rigorously and will continue to do so. Trump at 500 claims/100 days was manageable; 8,000+ was not.
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) April 27, 2021
Maintaining the Trump database over four years required about 400 additional 8-hour days over four years beyond our regular jobs for three people. Biden is off to a relatively slow start but who knows what will happen. We will keep doing fact checks, just not a database.
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) April 27, 2021
Cataloging all the Trump lies must have been extraordinarily difficult at the end, but it was a service to America. Biden didn't lie in the early days of his presidency the way Trump did, and he absolutely won't lie four years in the way Trump did, so America doesn't really need a Biden database.
But do you know who will lie like Trump over the next four years?
Right-wing media, most prominently Fox News, has promoted three major false stories in just the last few days.It would require a great deal of labor, but the Post or some other civic-minded media outlet should maintain a full database of Murdoch-media falsehoods. With Trump mostly silent, Fox News is once again the leading source of lies in American politics, despite competition from Newsmax, OANN, and the online right. It was probably the leading source of lies even during the Trump presidency, because it's where Trump got most of his ideas.
Last Friday, The New York Post published a cover story claiming that copies of Vice President Kamala Harris' 2019 children's book, "Superheroes Are Everywhere," was being gifted to migrant children at a Department of Health and Human Services shelter in Long Beach, California.
... the Post's story was quickly debunked. The Washington Post fact-checker, which gave the Post story "four Pinocchios" on Tuesday, reported that The Post based its entire story on a photo of one copy of the book donated to the shelter by a community member....
Also last Friday, Fox News ran multiple segments falsely claiming that President Joe Biden's administration would require Americans to radically reduce their red meat consumption under Biden's climate policy....
In reality, Biden has no plan to require Americans eat less red meat....
Fox and other right-wing media also ran with a story that Virginia's public schools were moving to eliminate accelerated high school math courses to improve racial equity....
The stories, which were amplified by Fox's opinion side, were false and overblown. Virginia's superintendent of public instruction, James Lane, told The Washington Post that the state's department of education is beginning a regular evaluation of its math curriculum and is not eliminating any advanced classes.
The Murdoch media has been the messaging arm of the Republican Party for decades. Its lies should be tracked the way politicians' lies are tracked. We need a database.
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