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This is where the distinction between fact and opinion is important. Whether a person was convicted of a specific crime is a fact. It's true or false. People c
by Zak 5y ago
This is where the distinction between fact and opinion is important.
Whether a person was convicted of a specific crime is a fact. It's true or false. People can disagree about whether the trial was fair, the law was just, etc... but there is an objective truth as to whether the conviction occurred or it did not.
The Snopes article lists the crimes Rosenberg was convicted of, which do not include "terrorism" or anything equivalent to that. She was convicted of multiple offenses involving weapons possession and identity fraud. The article goes on to list numerous other offenses involving a prison break, several armed robberies, and planting bombs for which she was charged, but not tried or convicted. It is therefore correct to say that she is not a convicted terrorist.
The article provides more than enough background for a reader to form the opinion that her activities constituted terrorism, and indeed that is my opinion.
- Jensson 5y agoThe problem is that fact checkers doesn't have the same standards for every side. If this was about some right wing group that had a member with such a background in a leadership position they would absolutely have marked it as "true, this person is definitely a terrorist, just look at all this evidence!".
- Zak 5y agoCan you provide a pair of examples in which Snopes, Politifact, or a similar mainstream US-based fact checker used clearly different standards for what constitutes a question of fact based on the political orientation of the subject?
- Jensson 5y agoThey wouldn't even write an article about anything like this if it was the other side. She did work directly with convicted terrorists, she was charged with terrorism but that charge was dropped as a plea deal with those convicted, she was convicted with helping those terrorists. And if they wrote one article because it became a big deal they wouldn't have picked the "convicted terrorist" phrase to fact check, rather they would have fact checked "was X a terrorist" or similar and it would have gotten a clear yes, everything points towards this person was a terrorist. Choosing what statements or what formulations of statements to fact check is also a part of the bias. People just read the headline, if they read "fact check, X was not a 'convicted terrorist'", they will read that as "X was not a terrorist", the fact checkers knows this and uses that to their advantage when picking the sentence to check and the verdict that will follow.
- johncena33 5y agoSnopes have made lot of dubious and misleading claims on lab leak [1][2]. Politifact literally retracted their claims on calling lab leak a conspiracy theory [3]. Reality is all these mainstream media is trying to control the narrative with rhetorical tricks. [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cruz-wuhan-tweet/ [2] https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/ https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/07/16/lab-leak-evidence/ [3] https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/ https://www.politifact.com/li-meng-yan-fact-check/