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Wednesday, February 6, 2019

The Spin Never Stops

I just saw an article on Yahoo News that says it is a "fact check" of the President's State of the Union speech.  It wasn't so much fact checking as it was pure spin.

Here's an example:  Trump said that the USA is now the largest oil and gas producing country in the world.  Yahoo says that this "lacks context" so they can't rate it true or false.  The Yahoo report then goes on to admit that indeed, America produces more oil and gas than any other country (which, by the way, makes Trump's statement true), but Yahoo then tries to give credit for that to president Obama who fought against expanded drilling on land, barred off shore drilling, delayed and then denied permits for pipelines to carry the expanded production and the like.  Yahoo ignores this and points to the Act of Congress that ended the ban on the export of oil and gas.  Of course, Yahoo doesn't mention that the legislation ending the ban was passed by a Congress controlled by the GOP and that Obama reluctantly signed it into law.

How can it be that a true statement is not rated true?  For Yahoo News, truth is not absolute, but rather is in the eye of the beholder.  If the President said it, a true fact just has to be spun.

It's truly a sad situation. 

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