David Harsanyi explains at National Review Online his concerns about mainstream media outlets’ fact-checking operations.
For me, at least, the most grating aspect of contemporary “fact-checking” isn’t the dubious journalistic nature of the project, or the endlessly nitpicking of every Republican utterance, whether it’s particularly misleading or not. It’s the increasingly popular effort to try to credit Barack Obama for everything good that’s happened during Donald Trump’s presidency. …
… The [Washington] Post takes issue, for example, with Trump’s boast that, thanks to a “bold regulatory-reduction campaign, the United States has become the number-one producer of oil and natural gas in the world, by far.” In truth, the fact checkers declare, “the energy revolution he takes credit for began under Obama.”
So Trump, who has attempted to roll back Obama-era restrictions on gas and oil drilling, and who opposes the effort of Democrats — including Obama’s former vice president — to institute federal fracking bans, can’t boast about the booming energy markets, but Obama, whose efforts to undermine production were first repelled by a Republican Congress in 2009 and then by the Supreme Court in 2016, can?
It’s quite the trick to not only censure Trump for bragging about oil and gas production but then, in the same fact check, confer on all the credit on Obama, who did everything in his power — including banning drilling on most public lands — to inhibit exploration and production.
