A few days ago, I tweeted this:
Apparently, I was right.
Apparently the big mainstream reporters don’t even bother with basic fact-checking any more. Last week, we wrote about how a bogus story was making the rounds, pretending that this last election was a referendum on net neutrality, after a paid consultant to the broadband industry put up a blog post noting that 95 Democratic candidates who had signed a pro-net neutrality pledge had lost. What was not mentioned by all the press who covered this was that (a) that particular list involved challengers, not incumbents, and almost all of them were in districts where they were almost certainly going to lose anyway (b) if you looked at a different list of incumbent Democrats who signed a pledge supporting net neutrality, none of them lost and (c) if you looked at a list of incumbent Democrats who signed an anti-net neutrality pledge, many of them did, in fact, lose their races to challengers. Point being: this race was not at all about net neutrality, but the press seems to have glommed onto that “all 95 who supported net neutrality lost” and simply refuse to fact-check it at all.
You mean the mainstream media printed a PR release as fact without checking it?
Perish the thought!
I knew those numbers sounded utterly ridiculous. Apparently, I was right.