Checking out Tucker Carlson's vanity website "The Daily Caller" this morning, you'll "learn" that liberals have been "triggered" by Russians giving birth in the US, and that Dianne Feinstein's mental capacity may be diminished by a head cold.
No link here, sorry.
They're also freaked out that Google is attempting to provide an evaluation tool for web searches, that will allow people searching for news articles to have a sidebar that notes whether the website listed has a problem with reliable information.
.
Guess which side of the political spectrum has more problem with fact-checking?
.
Erik Wemple of Wapo noted last summer that even when covering fact-checkers themselves, conservative websites get downright nasty, noting "bias" and putting the term "fact-check" in satiric quotation marks.
Stupid "fact" checkers.
But let's set aside our own well-known liberal bias and talk tech for a minute. The tech site Gizmodo acknowledges that Google's implementation of a "reliability screen" for web searches is imperfect and might even be problematic for someone just looking for stories on a given topic:
...this fact-checking module isn’t really all that useful—finding it requires clicking through to a submenu in a sidebar, and once the user’s there the module’s crowded with cut-off sentences and poorly contextualized information. ...Displaying semi-random, individual “reviewed claims” doesn’t do anything to show a user whether a site is generally reliable.
But the real problem with adding "fact checking" to a Google search, is, of course, that right-wing websites don't give a rat's ass about facts!
As to the meat of the thing good conservatives are supposed to get angry about: Is Google flagging more right-leaning sites for review than left-leaning ones? Probably. But, uh, that’s also probably because a massive segment of the conservative media, particularly newer digital ventures like the Caller, are completely fine with brazen distortion and aren’t interested in the same journalistic standards as most parts of the mainstream media.
What's more to the point and ignored even by Gizmodo?
.
Conservative website readers don't fact-check the stories they read. Liberals do.
.
If someone here at Crooks and Liars gets a semi-colon wrong, we hear about it from our readers and commenters (and are happy for the correction, thanks!). And one Facebook "fake news" entrepreneur noted that if you want to make money on Facebook with fake news, you have to target conservative Republicans. Direct quote (and go ahead, fact-check me) "They don't fact-check."
There's a reason why Facebook is under fire for helping the Russians get Trump elected. Fake news on Facebook attracted Republican votes.
So here's an idea for Tucker Carlson. If you want better Google results from a reliability truth teller search? Don't fricking lie so much.
Oh, I guess that goes against your "business model."
