Snopes Posts Bogus Pro-AOC ‘Fact Check,’ Ends Up Exposing Its Left-Wing Bias
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🌏 Planet B Media 🐝
Fact checkers, you have lost all your credibility. No one takes you seriously outside your echo chamber. You are not the arbiter of truth nor do you hold the gateway to all facts. Snopes, facts don’t care about your feelings.
Fact-checking site Snopes published a supposed report on Feb. 3 titled “Did AOC Exaggerate the Danger She Was in During Capitol Riot?” This title was immediately followed by the heading “AOC was targeted with another round of bad-faith smears after giving an emotional, firsthand account of her experiences during the Capitol riot,” clearly indicating the tone and premise of the “fact check,” which quickly demonstrates its overt left-wing bias.
Bethania Palma of Snopes begins by presenting the claim to be investigated:
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez exaggerated the danger she was in during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, in that she “wasn’t even in the Capitol building” when the rioting occurred”.
This claim — Ocasio-Cortez’s alleged “exaggeration” of the danger based on her distance from the rioting — Palma concluded, deserves a “Mostly False” rating. Palma sums up her conclusions about “what’s true” and “what’s false” (formatting adjusted):
As its rationale for calling the claim “Mostly False,” Snopes points to the irrelevant fact that her nearby building was evacuated by police. In other words, the “exaggeration” element of the claim was left unanswered, and the location element of the claim was manipulated in order to achieve the “Mostly False” rating.
Throughout the piece, Palma repeatedly exposes her own bias in favor of Ocasio-Cortez and against her critics on the right. After presenting a straightforward account of the events — Ocasio-Cortez using Instagram Live to “relay her personal account of how the events of that day had traumatized her,” and the various themes of assault, survival and trauma raised by the Congresswoman — Palma suddenly invokes “the right-wing disinformation machine”:
“It took less than 48 hours for the right-wing disinformation machine to contrive a way to minimize what Ocasio-Cortez said she had experienced”.
Palma then manipulates the claim in question to slander those who pointed out counter-evidence that she was not actually in the Capitol building, as the “fact-checker” has already admitted was true.
“In a circus of cyberbullying that began on Feb. 3, 2021, conservative news outlets and social media conspiracy trolls latched on to the misleading claim that Ocasio-Cortez ‘wasn’t in the Capitol building’ and therefore was not in harm’s way, as she had described in the Instagram video,” Palma continued.
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