For an organization that’s running a “Tell the Truth!” campaign, the Media Research Center sure hates it when that actually happens (to conservatives) — to the point where it’s arguing with fact-checkers.
A Sept. 25 NewsBusters post by Matt Vespa illustrates the MRC’s war on facts. In it, Vespa complains that the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, gave three Pinocchios to an American Crossroads television spot claiming that President Obama skipped almost half of his in-person intelligence briefings. Vespa chooses to ignore the larger truth that Kessler was trying to impart — that the lack of an in-person briefing doesn’t mean that Obama didn’t get briefed on national security, and that President Reagan got even fewer in-person briefings than Obama has — in order to keep his blinders on and narrowly insist that the ad’s claim was true:
Kessler may think it’s “misguided” to argue “process,” but the fact remains that Kessler cannot dispute that the gist of the ad is true: President Obama has the opportunity every weekday to receive in-person intelligence briefings, and yet he chooses to, the majority of the time, elect to simply read them rather than avail himself the opportunity to be briefed by an intelligence expert (or experts) in person. Kessler may protest the verb “skips” to describe Obama’s relation to his daily briefings, but that reveals more about Kessler’s biases than it does the truthfulness of the claim.
That’s just desperate nit-picking that serves the larger right-wing narrative that fact-checkers must be discredited because they catch conservative politicians in falsehoods.