Fact check has become just another word for censorship

“Fact-checking” is like “fake news”: Something that is now entirely in the eye of the beholder.At the vice presidential debate this week, the CBS moderators once again tried to show that they were the fair and impartial people in the roomExcept that — as with the Trump-Harris debate — they only seemed interested in fact-checking in one direction.Against the Republican.On Tuesday night the subject of Springfield, Ohio, once again came up.

And once again Springfield revealed one of the big problems of this media era.CBS’s Margaret Brennan decided to fact check something that JD Vance said and immediately relayed a piece of false information herself.Following Vance’s point about the number of illegal migrants Brennan announced authoritatively that Springfield does in fact have “a large number of Haitian migrants” but that they have “legal status [and] Temporary Protected Status.”It was then down to Vance to fact-check the fact-checker by pointing out — correctly — that what Brennan had just described was actually a “pathway” opened up by Kamala Harris explicitly to fudge the true levels of illegal immigration.Without his correction viewers could easily have come away with the idea that there are no problems in places like Springfield because the stories of illegal migrants are untrue and what Ohio actually has is just a large collection of people with “legal status” in the United States.At least Vance got a chance (albeit very interrupted) to correct his interviewer.When Kamala Harris used the Presidential debate to make a set of verifiably claims, her ABC hosts repeatedly let her get away with it.For instance, they must have known that the big Democrat boogey-man “Project 2025” has nothing to do with Donald Trump or his campaign.But they let Harris make her claims anyway, safe in the knowledge that her ABC hosts would let her get away with it.Yet this is such a counter-productive way to operate.

It is one thing to show that Do...