“Fact-checking” is a feeble, inadequate way to respond to racist, antisemitic incitement

Dan Froomkin writes in Press Watch:

I’m not sure there has ever been a major-media “fact check” that more completely, ludicrously, and appallingly missed the point than the one the New York Times published on Thursday about the vile, scurrilous, racist, antisemitic Republican claims aimed at demonizing and linking a Black district attorney and a prominent Jewish funder.

Appearing under the headline “Explaining the Ties Between Alvin Bragg and George Soros,” the “fact check” by Linda Qiu addressed whether there were, in fact, any links between the Manhattan DA who may be on the verge of indicting Trump for fraud and campaign-finance violations,  and the left-wing philanthropist and noted target of antisemitic slander.

There are, strictly speaking, some things you could call links between the two men. But they are inconsequential.

Concluding that “These claims are exaggerated” is to entirely miss the actual meaning of the claims. It minimizes them. It whitewashes them. It virtually endorses them.

The journalistic issue should not be whether there is some factual basis in there somewhere, but that Trump and congressional Republicans are engaging in deceitful racist incitement.

The article’s acknowledgment that Soros is “a boogeyman on the right” and that attacks on him “often veer into antisemitic tropes” is a criminal understatement. Soros has become well known right-wing shorthand for Jewish cabal.

In a social media missive Friday that elite political reporters utterly failed to explain amounted to incitement and extortion, Trump also referred to Bragg as a “Soros backed animal.”

It’s beyond disgusting.

So here is how a journalist should respond: . . .

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