Of course the truth matters. My argument is that fact checkers won't (can't) have a central role (they have a supporting one, sure) in working out the truth, as

Of course the truth matters. My argument is that fact checkers won't (can't) have a central role (they have a supporting one, sure) in working out the truth, as the GP posited. A statement like "Washington has gotten rich off the backs of the rest of the country" can be both true and false, depending on which interpretations and assumptions you apply when evaluating it. WaPo decided on a (fairly lazy, IMO) false evaluation, but you can easily do the opposite: The federal government has grown, it's financed by taxes predominantly collected in the rest of the country and directly or indirectly, the federal government dominates employment in DC. There - 100% correct, verifiable facts that support the original statement. But why is this true of DC? Perhaps it's a good thing that we have highly paid professional management of the federal government, and that this is geographically concentrated? Perhaps everything is more effective, with better services and ultimately cheaper than if the same agencies had been geographically spread out, devolved to states or cities, or didn't exist at all? How do you decide that? There are decades of argument (roughly 25, to be exact) about the proper size and organisation of the federal government -- these are fundamental areas of disagreement between reasonable people and the best fact checker in the world won't get you closer to settling that.