When Donald Trump said Hillary Clinton should apologize for "the 33,000 e-mails that you deleted, and that you acid washed," did you think she had put emails into a washing machine with bleach or an acid?
NBC News' fact-checkers apparently thought that was his claim, and they boldly stepped up and declared "NOPE."
All reasonable people realize Trump was using a wrong (but not off-base) word for software, which frankly most of us had never heard of until we found out Hillary used it to permanently delete files she was afraid of federal authorities finding.
Then there was this exchange:
TRUMP: First of all, she was there as secretary of state with the so-called line in the sand, which...
CLINTON: No, I wasn't. I was gone. I hate to interrupt you, but at some point, at some point, we need to do some fact-checking here.
Trump was talking about Aug. 20, 2012, when President Obama said the "Red Line" which Syria's Assad must not cross, is the movement or use of chemical weapons. You may note that Hillary Clinton was, in fact, the secretary of state that day, as NBC notes.
So Hillary Clinton was dead wrong, trying to exculpate herself from a possibly destructive instance of foreign policy incompetence (for what it's worth, I put all the blame on Obama here, because he blurted out the "Red Line" answer). But our media, obsessed with finding false equivalence, needs to find Trump at fault too.
Got that? "Everyone is wrong here" and "Both candidates were wrong," because Trump called Obama's "Red Line" a "line in the sand." Find me a functional difference between those two terms and you may have a point. Otherwise, our fact-checkers have turned into semantic nit-pickers.
Besides these two, NBC posted a few other factchecks on Twitter that night. Trump on Russian hacks, Trump on Hillary's representation of an accused rapist, Trump on his Iraq War position, Trump on "Check out sex tape," Trump on San Bernardino shooters. Notice a pattern?
Every single fact check posted on Twitter by NBC on debate night was of a Trump statement they deemed false or misleading. Of course, this tells us more about NBC's fact checkers than it does about the relative veracity of Trump or Clinton. There were plenty of errors to catch Clinton in, but they didn't rise to tweetable fact checks Sunday night.
Lots of journalists, including myself, worry about what happens when the public broadly loses faith in the media. I think media fact-checkers are a good idea. I think they would be a good reality if they limited themselves to checking checkable and pertinent assertions of fact, and calling out clear misrepresentation — such as Trump saying he wasn't really telling people to check out a sex tape, when he wrote "Check out sex tape."
When fact-checkers try to do more than they ought, like asking questions that begin with "Should," compiling batting averages on their fact checks, and nitpicking, they undermine their credibility. That's not good for anyone, except for the politicians who want to get away with lying.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
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