The problems aren't facts. The problems are what completely distorted pictures of reality you can implicitly paint with completely solid and true facts.
If 45 states that "the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo." that's absolutely and objectively true - except that Obama inherited the financial meltdown of the Bush era and Trump years of hard financial consolidation (while any legislation has a lag of at least a year to trickle down into any kind of reporting at government scale).
Fact-checking won't change a thing about spin-doctoring. At least not in the positive sense.
One great example of this from the New York Times:
'Last year, 35% of colleges saw international student numbers go up, 26% saw no change, and 39% saw them go down. New York Times publishes this with the headline “Amid Trump Effect Fear, 40% of Colleges See Dip in Foreign Applicants”.'
Source: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/03/one...
This. I see far more fake headlines than fake news. Sure some are just pure click-bait, but often times the headline takes a far more biased angle than the actual text of the story. Combine that with the frequency with which people (re)share without taking time to RTFA and you have plenty of non-fake news distorting peoples view of the reality.
> Fact-checking won't change a thing about spin-doctoring.
That's like saying padlocks won't change a thing about burglaries.
Of course padlocks cannot prevent burglaries 100%. But the salient point here is to make the burglary harder, to raise the entry level to where the frequency of the undesirable event decreases markedly. And of course you should not rely exclusively on padlocks - you also need cops, alarm systems, etc.
Same with fact checking. It's become very trivial to spew bullshit on the Internet, it's as easy as email spam in the past decade. We need to make it more expensive to conduct such activities, ideally orders of magnitude more expensive.
True facts can be used to make invalid arguments. But many pundits are also basing valid arguments on incorrect facts. Both of these are problems. It's not an either or situation.
Well, it would not eliminate spin, of course. It may make spinsters limit themselves to spinning true facts - as opposed to spinning invented ones. "Fact checking" has inherent limits - and one must recognize them and not turn fact checking into opinion. But, it serves it purpose. It's not a magic formula to win every argument - it's just a way to keep arguments from turning completely insane.
> The problems aren't facts. The problems are what completely distorted pictures of reality you can implicitly paint with completely solid and true facts.
If 45 states that "the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo." that's absolutely and objectively true - except that Obama inherited the financial meltdown of the Bush era and Trump years of hard financial consolidation (while any legislation has a lag of at least a year to trickle down into any kind of reporting at government scale).
Fact-checking won't change a thing about spin-doctoring. At least not in the positive sense.