A belated defense of Brit Hume

How "fact checkers" distort reality

Here's a story that aged worse than President Biden.

It's a PolitiFact "fact check" of Brit Hume from four years ago. In retrospect, it's a masterclass in how the media gaslights their readers while pretending to hold a torch for truth.

I worked with Brit Hume for nearly twenty years at Fox News. Between hundreds of staff meetings and countless hours on air, I discovered Brit has a rare, almost annoying quality: he is virtually always right. He’s a man who speaks with precision, choosing his words carefully.

Before the first 2020 Trump versus Biden debate, Brit had this to say: "Elderly people experiencing memory loss and other problems associated with age can go for periods, for hours at a time and be just fine.” He added, “I don’t think there’s any doubt Biden’s senile, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to show up tonight.”

Brit was, once again, quite right. Biden was indeed senile, and it wasn’t apparent at the bruising interrupt-a-thon debate with Trump. ​​

Correct or not, however, Brit Hume had committed the sin of calling the man-who-must-defeat-Trump "senile," and that didn't sit well with a press corps dedicated to Biden’s victory.

Enter PolitiFact, a fact-checking site widely accepted by the legacy media as an arbiter of truth. It’s run by The Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism training and research group. Their motto? “Democracy needs journalism. Journalism needs Poynter.”

It’s not just a few high-sounding liberals, but a multi-million-dollar organization, bankrolled by donors such as Google, Facebook, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

PolitiFact is what some might call part of the swamp, a “trusted” Washington outlet that is anything but. Their write ups aren’t always wildly biased, but enough so that the following is no surprise. With that said, here’s how they distort reality.

Twist what someone says, then debunk the twisted version

Brit used the word "senile," a common term for describing an older person showing signs of mental decline. It's not a medical diagnosis; it's everyday language. Webster defines it as: “relating to, exhibiting, or characteristic of old age; exhibiting a decline of cognitive abilities (such as memory) associated with old age.” It was a word that quite perfectly described Joe Biden four years ago.

PolitiFact acknowledged this, saying, “Broadly, the term senile is defined as pertaining to old age,” and “often used by some people” in association with memory loss or diseases. Then they threw in a sneaky twist: “Senility is not a precise medical term, but is often used in place of the more precise and accepted medical term of “dementia.”

Now that they've magically transformed “senile” into “dementia” in Brit's mouth, the article goes on to debunk what he never said.

Find experts who agree

An honest journalist should do her best to consult with experts, then give readers insight into where those experts stand. A dishonest one, like PolitiFact’s Miriam Valverde, instead uses them to disguise her opinion piece as an honest fact-checking article. To be clear, though, her assignment wasn’t actually to check facts, but to ‘prove’ Brit wrong. 

She found two geriatrics experts to bolster her case. One, Donald Jurivich, was so impressive that his title takes 22 words: The Eva Gilbertson Distinguished Professor of Geriatrics and Chairman of Geriatrics at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Both experts assured us Biden didn’t have dementia.

She then also quoted Biden’s personal physician as saying, “Vice president Biden is a healthy, vigorous, 77-year-old male, who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency.” It’d be four years until the White House revealed Biden has never been given a cognitive test. Remember, you can’t fail a test you didn’t take.

Of course, had she or PolitiFact had a shred of objectivity, they could have easily found an expert who noticed what was painfully obvious to a casual observer four years ago: Joe Biden was mentally slipping. Nope, all the experts agreed that up was down.

One of the professors even defended Biden saying he sometimes paused to “compensate for his stutter.” Can we stick a fork in this one as well? I’ve watched and listened to Joe Biden since the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, and I never once heard him stutter. If he did so his youth, it’s been behind him for at least 33 years. The “experts” knew this too, of course; they were just playing their role in hiding Biden’s cognitive decline.

Call him racist, sexist, ageist!

If you’re pretending to be an honest reporter, you can’t just go about calling people “ageist.” No, you find someone else to do it for you, like a ventriloquist with a particularly judgmental dummy.

Valverde used the professor with the long title who said Brit’s comments were a “shameful display of ageism and ignorance.” And, in case you missed it the first time, she quoted him a second time, reminding us “the use of ‘senile’ is a pejorative descriptor and reflects unmitigated ageism.”

It’s a pretty rich claim, especially considering that Brit is both the same age as President Biden and readily admitted that he has “traces of this myself, I know what it feels like.” Fortunately for Brit, Joe Biden is a white male, so the experts were stuck with merely calling him a shameful ageist.

I rate PolitiFact’s article as Propaganda.

But this isn’t just a history lesson; they’re still with us and still up to the same shenanigans.  Here’s the latest:

Their case? In her full-throated defense (great video here) of healthcare for everyone residing in the United States—including illegal aliens—she didn’t specifically use the word “free”.

The gaslighting continues.

— Ken