Conservative politicians and pundits lie and distort far more than liberals do. At the same time, conservatives have a well-known persecution complex, frequently accusing the mainstream media of having some secret anti-conservative agenda. This puts mainstream media fact-checkers in an unenviable situation, trying to seem balanced in an environment where one side simply has more enthusiasm for lying than the other. Now the pressure to overemphasis or even exaggerate claims of liberal mendacity, in an attempt to seem more balanced, has infected Glenn Kessler’s coverage of the gun debate in the Washington Post.

Our tale begins with a speech by President Obama where he said, “We know that states with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths. So the notion that gun laws don’t work, or just will make it harder for law-abiding citizens and criminals will still get their guns is not borne out by the evidence.” This is, as Kessler’s investigation demonstrated, a true statement. The statistics are complicated by demographic and social factors, but overall, the data shows a direct correlation between how easy it is to get a gun and how many people die from gunshot wounds. But Kessler gave Obama two “Pinocchios”—out of four Pinocchio scale—to this claim.

“Many readers requested a fact check of this statement, believing it to be untrue,” Kessler writes. I’ll bet they did! Conservative fetishization of guns is at a point where even suggesting that guns might be unsafe is treated like you’re insulting their mother, so of course they’re going to be outraged that Obama dare suggest that objects created for the sole purpose of killing might be very good at making people dead. It’s understandable that, deluged by all that conservative outrage, one might give into the urge to show that you’re not biased by giving them what they want. But unfortunately, Kessler, despite being a fact-checker, ends up heavily massaging the statistics to give conservative readers those Pinocchios they desperately want.

To get to the conclusion that Obama fudged the facts, Kessler starts by manipulating the data that Obama used for his claim, by removing suicides from the number of overall gun deaths. He justifies this by arguing “the president’s policy proposals are aimed at mass shootings, not suicides.” But that is, in and of itself, a false statement. While Obama did focus heavily on mass shooting in his speech, it’s clear that he was making a larger point about how the proliferation of guns in our society leads to more gun deaths. “There is a gun for roughly every man, woman, and child in America,” Obama said right before the sentences in question. “So how can you, with a straight face, make the argument that more guns will make us safer?” It’s clear that he was speaking about how a gun-fanatical society is one where people get shot to death a lot, and not just in the context of mass shootings.

Link