‘At CNN, We Start With Facts First’: How Media Fact-Checkers Mislead About Facts

While legacy news outlets continue to pride themselves on their reputation as “the most trusted name in news,” they have often fallen short of the facts in the one department most pivotal to maintaining journalistic credibility: their fact-checkers.

“Facts are facts. They aren’t colored by emotion or bias. They are indisputable. There is no alternative to a fact,” wrote CNN’s Creative Marketing department. “That’s why, at CNN, we start with the facts first.”

CNN’s purported commitment to truth goes so far that prime time host Don Lemon said that U.S. internet users should only be able to express their opinion if it is “true,” because social media outlets should only print “opinions based in fact.”

The use of “fact-checking” to silence others long ago escaped CNN and metastasized throughout all media, traditional and online.

As Mark Hemingway recently wrote in a Reader’s Pass article for The Daily Wire, the great social media purge of all things conservative began with its decision to ban Infowars founder Alex Jones. Jones’ ouster “came shortly after a pressure campaign launched by CNN, a network that, ironically enough, had spent the last few years indulging in nonstop Trump-Russia reporting that wasn’t any less conspiratorial than many of Jones’ rantings,” Hemingway writes.

Hemingway worked at The Weekly Standard, which hired a fact-checker in cooperation with Facebook. This person would issue official proclamations about stories’ truth or falsehood, which would influence whether social media suppressed shares of certain stories on that basis.

The Weekly Standard announced it would close in December 2018.

“[A]fter we all lost our jobs, The Weekly Standard’s former fact-checker, the one who dared to express concern about Facebook becoming an engine of global censorship, got a job as a fact checker for CNN – the very news outlet that instigated Facebook’s Alex Jones ban,” Hemingway wrote. More from Hemingway:

The editor-in-chief of The Weekly Standard who signed off on our Facebook partnership has since gone on to start a new publication called The Dispatch that still participates in Facebook’s fact checking program. Last year, just before the election, a fact check from The Dispatch got a pro-life group’s ads banned from Facebook. Their fact check said it was unfair to claim Joe Biden supports late-term abortion. The Dispatch would later admit their fact check was “published in error.” 

As Hemingway’s article shows, fact-checkers often walk through the revolving door between traditional journalism and social media, with each influencing the other.

Perhaps the most

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