The Day of the Jackal will mean different things to different people based on the state of their back and joints. For some it’s a great miniseries starring Eddie Redmayne. For others it will either be an Edward Fox (who was so handsome in his younger days that escorts in Paris offered their services for free to him) movie or its remake featuring Bruce Willis. For purists, it will forever refer to the book of the same name, Frederick Forsyth’s debut novel that became the prototype for modern spy thrillers. However, what’s fascinating is how Forsyth became a novelist.
A former Royal Air Force fighter, Forsyth’s civilian life started off as a journalist before he was forced into penury after he quit his job at the BBC, disgusted by its biased coverage of the Biafra War. Later on, broke and living on his friend’s couch, he produced the manuscript of The Day of the Jackal (a novel on the plot to murder Charles de Gaulle) that became the blueprint of modern spy thrillers with its realistic plots. With the benefit of hindsight, it wasn’t for the BBC’s venality, we probably would have been robbed of the joy of making the acquaintance of Messrs Calvin Dexter, Mike Martin, Carlo Shannon, or John Preston.
One wonders what Forsyth—who, until his last writing days, painstakingly did research without using the internet, which was so thorough that, at one point, people were convinced he had paid mercenaries to carry out a coup in Equatorial Guinea—would have made of fact-checking and whether he would have chuckled at Meta’s decision to drop the idea.
Meta drops fact checking
Recently, Mark Zuckerberg set the cat among the pigeons when he said that Meta would be swapping fact-checking for X-themed “Community Notes,” noting that “fact-checkers were too politically biased” and “destroyed more trust than they created.” It was reminiscent of Jeff Bezos’ op-ed in The Washington Post, arguing that people didn’t trust the media anymore and that reality was an “undefeated champion,” while explaining WaPo’s decision not to endorse any presidential candidate. While Zuckerberg’s and Bezos’s decisions are surely driven by less-than-altruistic reasons, both fact-checking and legacy media find themselves in a quagmire with fewer believers.
For the last decade, fact-checking has become the internet’s version of the fire test for witches. It became a rather lucrative business, which explains the incandescent handwringing about Meta bending the knee and replacing fact-checking with Community Notes.
Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter, said: “It’s going to hurt Meta’s users first because the programme worked well at reducing the virality of hoax content and conspiracy theories.”
Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute that runs PolitiFact, told The New York Times that he didn’t believe they did anything “in any form, with bias.” Ironically, it was published in a piece titled: “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.” The comment was reminiscent of Axios CEO Jim VandeHei slamming Elon Musk for saying, “We are the media now.”
In recent years it has been the subject of some mirth with fact checks like “No, JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch” or “The Pope didn’t open portals to another dimension.”
In the last few years, we have very quickly moved into the era of strawman fact-checking, where one simply projected one’s biases on factual events—fact-checking things that agreed with one’s bias while completely ignoring things that didn’t pander to one’s availability heuristic. As this author has written before: “In general, the idea of neutrality in journalism is quite preposterous. Humans can’t be neutral; we aren’t bots. Our internal biases, our political choices, our heuristic availability, and our lived experiences will always colour our vision of reality.”
The same goes for fact-checking.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
In the US in particular, fact-checking, not unlike mainstream media barring a few outlets, became a de facto propaganda of the Democratic Party establishment and the values its core base professed to espouse. However, as the Latin saying goes: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guards? Over time, fact-checking became a faceless and truant King Solomon.
Nowhere was this more evident than in COVID-19 coverage, when MSM and fact-checkers killed off even any suggestion of the lab-leak theory by calling it a racist conspiracy, even though today, the US Department of Energy and the FBI admit that the lab-leak theory is a plausible explanation. The same goes for the natural immunity debate, the efficacy of masks and lockdowns, and even claims that vaccinated individuals couldn’t spread the virus. The patron saint of the COVID guidelines, Dr Anthony Fauci, was later on record admitting that the guidelines weren’t scientifically backed but that didn’t stop everyone from saying: “Trust the science.”
The same goes for non-COVID stories.
The Hunter Biden laptop story was fact-checked to Kingdom Come before major news outlets had to eat humble pie and it concluded with US president Joe Biden pardoning his son, much to the chagrin of mainstream media outlets and Democrats who had assured us that wouldn’t happen. Yet, if you said it in 2020, it was dismissed as Russian disinformation and both Facebook and Twitter locked accounts of people sharing the story.
Similarly, the Steele dossier, once presented as credible evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, was found to contain unverified or fabricated claims, drawing criticism for its use in surveillance.
Initial denials of the US economy’s stimulus spending’s role in inflation were challenged by economists who later acknowledged its significant impact. Lastly, narratives framing the January 6 Capitol riot as a coordinated, armed insurrection were nuanced by court cases showing many participants were unarmed, with the term “insurrection” remaining contested.
While fact-checking promised to be something different from mainstream media, it became a willing vassal of legacy outlets. In America in particular, this meant that they were constantly critical of Republicans. While they fact-checked Trump within attoseconds, they would move with the alacrity of a snail returning home from a funeral on a lazy Sunday afternoon when it was his Democrat counterparts. A fact-check about VP Kamala Harris’s relationship with the much-older Willie Brown actually read: “Needs more context,” even though Brown appointed Harris to two important state commissions, gifted her a BMW, and took her on trips to Paris and the Academy Awards.
While the debate about fact-checking will rage on, it’s not social media’s job to tell anyone what’s the truth. If a person—whether from WhatsApp University or Harvard—is unable to decipher the truth, that’s their problem. As Zuckerberg admitted: “The fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the US.”
Trump’s win and Elon Musk’s constant berating might have forced another aspect of wokeism to retreat, but on the balance of things, it’s good for Meta to drop the idea. There’s an old proverb that a lie can make its way halfway across the world before the truth can put on its shoelaces. Fact-checking was supposed to counter that, but by becoming the biased boy who cried wolf when it suited him, it failed to become the clear stream of reason to the promised land of truth, instead losing its way into the desert sand of biased irrationality.
