The death of the fact-checking profession, it turns out, has been greatly exaggerated.
Sure, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced this week that it’s doing away with its fact-checking operation. And yes, Donald Trump’s re-election has essentially rendered much of the profession’s work moot.
Fact-checking suddenly looks inadequate and practically irrelevant. Whole realities — the supposed culprits for the LA fires, a new MAGA world map, a child sex-abuse scandal in Britain — now sweep the internet overnight.
We no longer need fact-checkers. We need reality-checkers.
— Axios (@axios) January 10, 2025
But some professionals in that field continue to plug away, and that includes CNN’s Daniel Dale. Dale appeared on CNN Thursday night, to pick apart of the things Trump had to say about the fires in Southern California that continue to rage.
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Dale described Trump’s claims about the fires as “a staggering quantity of wrongness,” adding that he had shown Trump’s claims to an expert in California water policy named Jeffrey Mount, who claimed “not of it is true.”
‘A Staggering Quantity of Wrongness’: CNN’s Daniel Dale Dismantles Trump’s False Wildfire Claims https://t.co/nsWU8ualKd
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) January 10, 2025
“There have been some small specific examples. Like, he keeps saying that Governor Newsom refused to sign a so-called water restoration declaration. In fact, no such declaration even exists, as Newsom’s office has pointed out,” Dale said. “He also said yesterday that they’re not using firefighting planes. We’ve seen those planes. They’re there.”
He went on to accuse Trump of pushing what he called “an overarching false narrative.”
” You heard a bit of it there, that the challenges we’re seeing in the firefighting effort have something to do with a long-running policy battle about how much water should be kept in the north of the state to protect fish species like the delta smelt and other environmental ecosystems…
“Now, two water policy experts in California told me emphatically yesterday, none of this has anything to do with each other. There is simply no connection between the protection of that smelt fish in that estuary in the delta in the north. And what we’re seeing in the south for a number of reasons.”
Dale added that Trump is wrong about there being a “water shortage” in Los Angeles, when in fact, the hydrants that ran dry in some parts of the region were part of “technical, logistical infrastructure issues related to the hilly mountainous terrain and the location where water tanks have been situated.”
And the fact-checker also disputed Trump’s notion that President Biden was leaving the new administration with no funding for FEMA. This is also not how it works; FEMA’s funds were recently replenished by a bill Biden signed last month.
Featured image via screengrab
