First, a few home truths:
In every court case, there are at least two lawyers, and, at least one, of them is wrong.
Alfred North Whitehead reminds us that people usually have honed their arguments, so it is best to attack their assumptions.
In our courts of law, which are ponderous, and expensive, machines to mete out justice, the jury is commonly referred to as the “trier of fact”. The Propaganda Chorus would have you believe that we could dispense with all that time and expense by deploying a fact checker to announce the law and the facts, and pronounce the verdict.
Recently fact checkers have come to prominence in public discourse as a way to silence discussion and win debates with no argument. If you disagree with someone’s opinion, you marshal a pod of fact checkers to pronounce it out of bounds. It is important to repeat the same pronouncement through many sources to add a simulacrum of weight to an empty thought. Fortunately there exists an organization for this purpose called the Propaganda Chorus, or MSM. Some history:
From whence did fact checkers arise? Were they always here? Did they always determine the content of public discourse?
Fact checkers were, only a few years back, poorly paid interns at news papers whose job it was to supply real reporters with tidbits of information to supplement the substance of the article the reporter was composing. If the reporter wanted to know the date of a Supreme Court ruling, the size of last night’s baseball crowed, the population of Albania, he would assign a fact checker to discover it, and return with the fact, and documentation of its source. (Editors could use them to verify such bits of information in a reporters work before publishing it.) In no case was the fact checker the arbitrator of veracity, nor the judge of the substance of the article. The reporter was responsible to develop his own ideas, argue them, justify them, and stand behind them. Nobody, including the reporter, though his work was beyond question.
A few years back, someone came up with the idea that if you disputed your opponent’s ideas, not by engaging them, but by quibbling about bits of data, and did it in the name of “fact checker”, uneducated readers would assume that the fact checker was unquestionably correct, and unquestionably relieved the critic of the need to have any ideas, or knowledge of his own.