Fans of Fox News and various pro-Trump and pro-GOP pundits/media reject Snopes, PolitiFact, and various other fact checking sources as a reliable source. They say those sources are “biased,” since those sites make more corrections of pro-GOP/pro-Trump popular claims than of Dems, critics of Trump, or what they call “liberals.”
Here’s the important point: they don’t refute the fact checking. They don’t go into the data and show that the facts were actually correct, or that Trump (or whoever) didn’t actually say it, or that it was misrepresented, or in any way respond to the assertion.
Their only evidence is that those sources find more falsehoods among pro-GOP and pro-Trump pundits and politicians, and, therefore, those sources are biased.
Their only argument is “more cases”—that is, preponderance equals bias. Yet, that is a way of arguing that they themselves reject.
By that logic, Fox is biased, since it spends more time showing what’s wrong with “liberals” than with the politicians and party they support.
By that logic, every pundit, talk show, news source, video that doesn’t spend equal time correcting or condemning both parties is biased. By that logic, the police are biased, since they pull over a disproportionate number of people of color. They would conclude that all instances of disproportionate representation are instances of bias–arrest rates, gender in C-level positions, application of the death penalty. But they don’t.
People who trust media like Fox, and who reject sources like Snopes, aren’t applying the same standards of evidence for what constitutes a “biased source.” They don’t have a consistent way of assessing “bias.” They’re using motivated reasoning to dismiss information they are too threatened or too irrationally partisan to consider.
Motivated reasoning is when you “reason” that this evidence is objective, and that evidence is biased, purely on the basis of what supports what you already believe. What makes clear that it’s motivated reasoning, and not some actually reasonable position, is when people reject the conclusions that the same reasoning process offers if it means a conclusion they don’t like. For instance, were the “Snopes is biased because they mostly show pro-GOP lies” a reasonable position, and not just motivated reasoning, then that person would hold all media to the same standards. And would conclude that a disproportionate representation was a sign of bias.
In other words, either the argument that Snopes and so on are biased is an illogical argument, based on a way of reasoning even they themselves reject, or they have to accept that their own sources of information are biased, as are various systems such as policing.
They can’t play it both ways while claiming to be reasonable.
And, if anyone responds to this by refuting the argument that policing is biased by explaining why police pulling over more people of color with data or arguments, they’re proving my point that the rejection of Snopes and so on simply on the basis of numbers is a thoroughly indefensible. Why not respond that way to the specific instance Snopes et al. are describing?
When I point this out to someone who dismisses Snopes as “biased” on the basis of the numbers argument, they then retreat to “Well, the people who run it are liberals, so they’re biased.”
Okay, so that’s a new criterion for “bias”—that the source has a policy agenda. And, let me just say, this is one of the signs of a position that is not grounded in reason (and we all have some positions like that). If we say, “A is good because A is B” (all bunnies are good because they have floppy ears), and someone points out that not all bunnies have floppy ears, or that some floppy-eared bunnies are not good, they’re pointing out that we haven’t really thought out something we’re claiming is a principle. If we suddenly move the goalposts, it’s a sign of motivated reasoning.
And, again, an inconsistently applied criterion. If information from Snopes should be dismissed as biased because its owners are liberal, then everything from Fox should be dismissed as biased because its owners openly support the GOP and Trump. They are biased. When I’ve pointed this out to people, suddenly the meaning of “biased” changes. (I first learned this arguing with Stalinists when I was living in Berkeley.)
Suddenly, “biased” means perspectives with which I don’t agree, and that’s an unreasonable position. Saying that “anything that isn’t my viewpoint is biased” is biased–it’s refusing to consider potentially important information. It’s reassuring to maintain the pretense of having a political stance grounded in principle, but if the principle is abandoned on a regular basis, it isn’t really a principle. It’s just a handy thing to swat away uncomfortable information.
One of the qualities of train wrecks in public deliberation is that people attach themselves to a principle, and try to claim the moral highground because of that attachment, and then, when a contradiction is pointed out, they refuse to acknowledge the contradiction. Nazi ideology was comforting to people who could think of themselves as Aryan, but it was internally wildly inconsistent, and now groups that would not have been considered Aryan are pro-Nazi. Various forms of Social Darwinism (which is just an old wine in a new bottle—the basic principle predates Darwin, and it’s a philosophy he never endorsed) say that the triumph of a group is proof of its superiority, unless another group triumphs. And then… cue whining.
And that’s what’s going on with the claim that they reject Snopes without consideration as they have a principled objection to bias. They don’t. They like bias. They just don’t want to have their political commitment complicated.
They deflect uncomfortable information by rejecting the source (often a fallacy) purely on the basis of preponderance (always a fallacy, as they themselves recognize at other moments). What they’re saying is an interesting statement about them—that they’re incapable of responding reasonably to criticism, and so they deflect it. Maybe instead think about why it doesn’t seem possible to refute the claims reasonably? Maybe that’s a sign your position is unreasonable?