Republican US presidential hopeful Donald Trump’s claim that Arab Americans cheered during the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks is just the latest in a string of claims from across party lines that fact checkers dispute.
Carly Fiorina said the US was preparing to accept 250,000 Syrian refugees; former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton said that her handling of e-mails through a private server was “permitted” by the US Department of State; US Senator Marco Rubio said that welders earn more than philosophers; US Senator Bernie Sanders said “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism”; and Ben Carson said that no signatories of the Declaration of Independence had elected office experience.
Such claims, which fact checkers have said are not true, are part of political life.
The Republican campaign for next year’s election has been notable for incendiary claims, most notably by Trump.
“There is no rigorous way to quantify deception being better or worse over time, but I do think it’s fair to say Donald Trump is on the verge of melting down the fact-checking sites with what he is saying,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who follows fact-checking and campaigns.
Trump earlier this year said the US unemployment rate was as high as 42 percent.
More recently, he tweeted a graphic showing that 81 percent of white people killed in homicides were killed by black people.
The Web site PolitiFact said the correct figure from US Department of Justice statistics was 15 percent.
Asked by Fox News about the mistake, Trump said: “I didn’t tweet, I retweeted somebody that was supposedly an expert... Am I going to check every statistic?”
The New York Times on Tuesday said in an editorial that the past week of the campaign had been “dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies.”
Politicians in many cases have stood by their claims — including Trump arguing that he saw thousands cheering the 2001 attacks.
Trump even fired back at the Washington Post, which disputed his claims about the attacks, tweeting: “I want an apology! Many people have tweeted that I am right!”
“There have definitely been times when I scratch my head wondering how could they say something when it is so obviously false and then not acknowledge that it is false, but I’m not a psychologist and don’t try to figure out why people say these things,” said Bill Adair, a founder and contributing editor of PolitiFact and a journalism professor at Duke University.
Republican candidate Jeb Bush claimed for example that “Florida led the nation in job creation” while he was governor — a statement given a “four Pinocchios” rating as false by the Washington Post’s fact-checker.
US Senator Ted Cruz maintained that Hispanic unemployment and teen unemployment has gone up under US President Barack Obama, while FactCheck.org found statistics showing the contrary.
Carson — who repeated Trump’s claim about people cheering on Sept. 11, 2001 — also said that US border patrols released many people attempting to enter the nation who were from Iraq, and Somalia and Russia.
FactCheck said that people arriving from those countries were less than 1 percent of the total.
Boston College political scientist Emily Thorson said that “misinformation” can often have lingering effects even if a falsehood is quickly corrected.
For example, if people are told a restaurant has an infestation, they might feel squeamish about the place even if they learn it was a mistake, she said.
“It’s hard to undo the initial effects,” she told reporters. “Misinformation gets out there and gets repeated.”
Thorson’s research on the topic showed that when people hear negative things about a candidate that turn out to be false, a correction only “mutes” the impact.
Researchers also say that backers of candidates are rarely swayed by fact-checkers.
“There is a group of people who won’t believe a correction if you have a subject that ties into their partisan identities,” Thorson said.
Nyhan said that fact-checking “can often be ineffective or counterproductive when it comes to the most controversial political issues.”
When confronted with facts about such hot issues, “people tend to resist information that runs counter to their pre-existing beliefs and attitudes,” he said.
Nonetheless, Nyhan said it would be wrong to diminish the value of fact-checking political candidates.
“The threat of fact-checking can help constrain politicians from making misleading statements,” he said. “And so it’s reasonable to assume that if we didn’t have fact checking, things would be worse.”
EVOLVING SITUATION: Of the latest cases, 23 percent were found to be asymptomatic, but the coronavirus strain in Da Nang is more contagious, authorities said A COVID-19 outbreak that began in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang more than a week ago has spread to at least four city factories with a combined workforce of about 3,700, state media reported yesterday. Four cases were found at the plants in different industrial parks in the central city that collectively employ 77,000 people, the Lao Dong newspaper said. Vietnam, praised widely for its decisive measures to combat the novel coronavirus since it first appeared in late January, is battling new clusters of infection having gone for more than three months without detecting any domestic transmissions. Authorities yesterday reported one new
‘COVIDIOTS’: Politicians condemned the protest that came amid surging infections in the country, while a marcher said government-induced fear weakened the body Loudly chanting their opposition to masks and vaccines, thousands of people on Saturday gathered in Berlin to protest against COVID-19 restrictions before being dispersed by police. Police put turnout at about 20,000 — well below the 500,000 organizers had announced as they urged a “day of freedom” from months of virus curbs. Despite Germany’s comparatively low toll, authorities are concerned at a rise in infections over the past few weeks and politicians took to social media to criticize the rally as irresponsible. “We are the second wave,” shouted the crowd, a mixture of hard left and right and conspiracy theorists, as they converged
A cat that went missing on a family holiday on the shores of Loch Lomond, Scotland, has been identified 12 years later. Tortoiseshell-and-white Georgie spent October half term in 2008 with her owners at the Rowardennan campsite, but vanished as they were due to return home to Greater Manchester, England. After a search of the site the Davies family departed without Georgie, hoping the three-year-old microchipped feline would be located by someone. Over the intervening 12 years, she remained close to the Queen Elizabeth Forest Park site, being fed and cared for by campsite staff and holidaymakers. After the COVID-19 pandemic hit and lockdown
Three Micronesian sailors stranded on a remote Pacific island have been found alive and well after a rescue team spotted their giant SOS message written into the sand on a beach. Australian and US military aircraft found the three men on tiny Pikelot island, nearly 200km west of where they had set off. Rescuers said that the men were “in good condition” with no significant injuries. The men had been missing for three days after their 7m skiff ran out of fuel and strayed off course. Authorities in the US territory of Guam raised the alarm on Saturday after the men failed to complete
RSS