David Strom is at it again

 David Strom is very good at quoting statistics and drawing bad conclusions.

I have already covered his "conclusion" on temperatures in Arizona.

But this is a good opportunity to look at what facts really are.  Webster's definition is: "something that has actual existence : a matter of objective reality."  Now you can play with semantics and say is reality only in our heads or we are living in a matrix.  But reality is a shared experience and usually something that can be scientifically or historically proven.  How gravity acts on us on Earth is a fact - until someone jumps off a house and floats to the sky.  We treat George Washington as our first President as a fact since we have a continuous paper trail historically and have not found any document that proves the story was made up.

Then why do people dispute or try to make up facts?  True, not everyone can experience space flight and I would not believe my neighbor if he said he had been to the moon.  There is no pattern around him; training, education, talent, third party documentation etc., for me to believe him.  On the other hand - if he said he had spoken at a school board meeting, then there would have been other people there and minutes if not video of the meeting, and logically it is withing the realm of possibility.  

However, conspiracy theories are not based on facts.  They may use facts to weave a conclusion that is not logical.  There was a space mission.  My neighbor was away from home during the mission.  Therefore it is possible he was on the mission.  Sorry - no dice. The conclusion is wrong.

In Science or History, facts are independent agents.  Abe Lincoln was President, He was the Commander of the Army of the North, and he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.  Those are the accepted facts.  You could not draw from those facts whether in his heart he was pro or anti-slavery.  That would take more research and investigation.  Superficial facts, as true as they might be, may not support a conclusion.

David cites a study by Harvard University that proports that says that fact checkers tend to be center or left of center.  He then draws a conclusion that because of this that all these fact checkers are biased.  He gives no proof of this.  In fact, I can come to a different conclusion.  The statistics and reality of virtually no right wing fact checkers, leads me to the hypothesis that facts don't mean much to people on the right.  Those pesky facts, like Trump has contributed more to the National Debt than he claims, and the policies he put in place (the tax cuts) may be still contributing to the deficient, in spite of Joe Biden being President.   Now this will not be a conclusion until after many years of study and evaluation.

Or maybe it is that people left of center value truth over convenience.  Maybe the phrase "The first casualty of War is Truth" is true, no matter who said it, since it seems to be a constant through many generations.  Maybe, like basketball players who are tall tend to score more that players who are short (on average);  maybe things that are false, offended people who are more liberal.  So you take the study (and of course it itself may be be 100% correct.) and now have to dig deeper to look for more facts to support your conclusion.  To be a fact you must not have information that contradicts the fact.  

*BTW  the chart shown in the X tweet does not seem to exist in the study itself.  So now we have to look where that information comes from.

So the statistic - if true - that most fact checkers are center to left, does not prove that their fact checking is wrong.  It might prove just the opposite.  But that does not occur to David Strom.

So take the time to read the actual study- it is much deeper that the casual glance.