In an Oct. 12 CNSNews.com article, Patrick Goodenough offered up a strange, biased fact-check of the vice presidential debate.
Biased because, well, it’s CNS. Seven statements from Joe Biden were cited, versus two from Paul Ryan. Strange because it focused on foreign policy questions (CNS published no other fact-check on the rest of the debate) and because of Goodenough’s approach to fact-checking.
Responding to a pair of Biden statements highlighting how Iran is “more isolated today than when we took office” and that “the world for the first time totally united in opposition” to Iran getting a nuclear weapon, Goodenough responded by … referencing a meeting of non-aligned organizations that was recently held in Iran.
How does that disprove Biden’s claim that Iran is isolated in the international community? Goodenough doesn’t explain. No other fact-checker we could find addressed the claim, which means it must be true.
Meanwhile, Goodenough served as an apologist for Ryan on his statement that “It took the president two weeks to acknowledge that” the attack on the U.S. consulate “was a terrorist attack”:
On September 18, one week after the attack, Obama used the words “extremists and terrorists” to describe those who attacked the consulate and other U.S. missions. It would have been easy to miss, however: The president did not use the phrase in an Oval Office statement or at a White House press conference, but on CBS’ “The Late Show.”
Goodenough shows his anti-Democrat bias in responding to Biden’s claim that President Obama has met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a dozen times”:
Obama has met with Netanyahu nine times since taking office. The Israeli leader reportedly requested a tenth meeting on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York last month, but no meeting was scheduled. Instead Obama made his fifth appearance on the daytime television show, “The View.”
It’s a strange, nitpicky and lazy fact-check — just the kind of thing you’d expect CNS to churn out.