[bleepblorp]

What do you do when the Republican fact checker repeats what the leader of his party tells him to say even though it is fact-free?

A majority of Republicans believe Trump won the election (!) because that's what Trump is saying. There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.

Partisan fact checkers would only give the Republican party a safe space to continue to lie about matters of objective fact, such as who won the last election.

Frankly, the fact that 'what is truth' can be framed as a partisan issue in America speaks to much, much deeper societal problems than organized fact checking can fix. This is an attitude that is much more in keeping with that found in countries like Albania or North Korea rather than in another advanced democracy.

[forgotmypw17]

Please see my comment where I addressed this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25248383

[AnimalMuppet]

> There is little reason to think a Republican fact checker would contradict Trump. Indeed, any fact checker who did would be ostracized as a RINO, much as has happened with Fox News since they acknowledged the outcome of the vote.

Those two sentences contradict each other. And the second makes my point. When Fox News says that Trump lost, you can probably trust that particular fact-check. ("Confirming testimony from a hostile witness", in law-speak.)

[bleepblorp]

Since Fox News started fact-checking Trump, Trump's followers have stopped treating Fox News as a reliable source and are voting with their feet towards OANN another very far right sources. They're clinging to lies (politely: disinformation) even in the face of evidence to the contrary from a source that they formerly considered reliable.

That is my point.

Conservatives (or, at least, Trump followers) will turn their backs on sources of information that they considered trustworthy if those sources contradict the leader de jour.