Why is Mail Online going after the fact checkers?
Applying the idea of &quot;fact checking&quot; to politically charged topics inherently raises problems. Snopes was a good site to find out if there were really alligators in the sewers. The Forbes article cited by rokosbasilisk here seems to demand a high standard of quality from fact checkers - but who is to pay for it?<p>Now, The Guardian chose some headlines to illustrate this story with. Presumably the Guardian considers them good examples of &quot;fake news&quot;. One of them is about the Clintons &quot;stealing $200K worth of furniture&quot; etc. Politifact has a surprisingly detailed page on this allegation. The result is, typically, gray. It wasn&#x27;t $200K (suspiciously round number);  closer to $190K. And the Clintons paid for or returned the &quot;stolen&quot; items; which either makes them &quot;not stolen&quot; or &quot;stolen and returned&quot;.<p>But the whole claim of &quot;theft&quot; rests on the items&#x27; designation as national property, which may not have been clear at the time.<p>Given that this headline is an example of what the media (including Facebook) wants to shield the masses from - what then do they want the masses to hear? Is it (a) nothing, (b) inoculation&#x2F;discrediting by labelling the meme as &quot;fake news&quot;; (c) a less sensationalized headlines?