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There was also the recent example of the fact check "The Democratic party has tried to impeach every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower." Even tho
by gadders 7y ago
There was also the recent example of the fact check "The Democratic party has tried to impeach every Republican president since Dwight D. Eisenhower."
Even though the Democrats have tried to impeach 5 out of 6 presidents, this was labelled as "Mostly False".
- vuln 7y agoLink to article https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-presidents/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dems-impeach-gop-president...
- dkonofalski 7y agoYour criticism here seems intellectually dishonest to me. The claim is mostly false. Democrats != The Democratic Party. Based on that, the handful of Democrats that attempted to file articles without the support of the rest of the party don't really support the claim that "The Democratic party has tried to impeach" and, as mentioned in the article, one of those was a bipartisan attempt but still counts. That means that, at best, 2 of the 6 examples count as "The Democratic party" and, at worst, 3 of the 6 if you count Nixon.
- gadders 7y agoIf you read the article, the original claim was "Democrats" have tried to impeach every republican president since Eisenhower. It was Snopes that changed it to "The Democratic Party".
- dkonofalski 7y agoEven without that change, the claim is false, though. The claim says that Democrats have attempted to impeach every Republican President. That's false. Additionally, by the criteria you're suggesting, I would wonder then, by extension, if Republicans have attempted to impeach every Democratic President if the only criteria is that some Republican filed for it as opposed to it being a party decision.
- beerandt 7y agoBut this is exactly the tactic Snopes uses to be able to flip a fact check answer. In this case, the original claim could have been "most" or "5 out of 6", and changing it to "all" is an easy way to post that big red x.
- dkonofalski 7y agoExcept that's not true. The article links to the image in question which shows the word "every" used in it. Unless you have evidence (like a link from archive.org) that shows that they changed that image, they're not using any tactics. They're using the claim that was sent to them.
- beerandt 7y agoI meant it only as an illustrative example, in this case, of how easy it is to flip the answer. I don't know the specifics of this particular claim. They are not always using the claim sent to them, and they've been busted dozens of times for changing a claim, instead of changing the result. It's selectively choosing which "original" to use. For actual cases I've already posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21516762
- dkonofalski 7y ago>they've been busted dozens of times for changing a claim You keep repeating this claim over and over without any evidence whatsoever that this is happening. Even the cases you've posted have no indication that anything was changed to re-frame a result and yet you keep arguing that they're selectively choosing the question and, on top of that, all of them include an image of the original claim, irrespective of what they chose as the title of their page.
- beerandt 7y agoIf only Snopes didn't ask archive. org to scrub the entire site. I wonder why a trusted, transparent site would do that...
- conorh 7y agoEr, I read through the article and I'd agree with Snopes on this one. They present a pretty good argument. If you change the claim to 5/6 it becomes technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but the nuance that Snopes presents in the article is extremely compelling for why it is mostly false. Three of those 5 impeachments didn't even make it out of committee to go in front of the house, they were only introduced (and any rep can introduce anything crazy they'd like, including articles of impeachment) and one of the impeachments was Nixon which had bipartisan support.
- beerandt 7y agoThe problem is, you can no longer trust Snopes to ask the "original" question. They've been caught changing the question at least dozens of times to be able to not change a wrong answer. That's not as much of an issue anymore, since they just change the question from the start now.