Citizen Cartwright

The 'monumental and hugely demoralizing blow' to Hezbollah

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the United Nations on Friday that Israel would continue fighting Iran-allied Hezbollah and Hamas until “total victory.”

 

And not long after Netanyahu's speech, Israeli airstrikes killed Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, in what is a “monumental and hugely demoralizing blow” to the group, according to The Associated Press.

 

Other top Hezbollah commanders also were killed in the airstrike on their underground headquarters in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, the Israel Defense Forces said.

 

Israel has eliminated much of Hezbollah’s most senior leadership in recent weeks, says The Times of Israel. (My thanks to the reader who alerted me to this online newspaper, which seeks to report the news without partisan bias.)

 

“The 64-year-old Nasrallah headed arguably the most powerful paramilitary force in the world — also a U.S.-designated terror organization — that is now left without a clear successor at a critical juncture,”  says AP. “It remains to be seen whether his death will be a trigger for an all-out war between the two sides that could potentially drag in Iran and the United States.” 

 

Tensions are extremely high in Lebanon, which is already drowning under the force of an economic meltdown and multiple other crises, says AP. A humanitarian crisis has developed, with tens of thousands of people displaced, many of them sleeping in parks and makeshift shelters. Lebanon is bankrupt and has been without a president and functioning government for two years. 

 

The Israeli strike that killed Nasrallah again deepened tensions between President Biden’s administration and Netanyahu’s government, says a New York Times analysis.

 

“Israeli officials gave their American counterparts no advance warning of the strike on Friday, according to U.S. officials, who were already peeved that Mr. Netanyahu brushed off a U.S.-French 21-day cease-fire proposal. Now American officials worry that they face a wider war that could engulf the region after nearly a year of effort by Mr. Biden to head off such an escalation,” says the Times.

 

On Sunday, Israel continued its strikes in Lebanon. And Israel said it had bombed Houthi targets in Yemen in response to missile fire from those Iran-aligned militants over the past two days.

 

And on Monday, Hamas says an Israeli strike has killed its leader in Lebanon, as another Palestinian militant group says three of its leaders have been killed in a strike in Beirut — the first attack within the city limits.

 

Here is expert opinion on what’s next for Hezbollah, Israel and Iran, from The Atlantic Council.

 

And here is an obituary of Nasrallah, from The Guardian.

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Former Arizona GOP. Sen. Jeff Flake endorses Harris

 

CBS News says it will be up to Vance and Walz to fact-check each other in Tuesday's debate

New law requires California public schools to teach about historical mistreatment of Native Americans

Interview with FTC Chair Lina Khan as her term ends and factions root for her to stay and go

 

Yuval Noah Harari on whether democracy, AI can coexist

 

Traits of successful late bloomers

 

Medicare Advantage shopping season arrives Oct. 15 with a dose of confusion and some political implications

Tips for shopping for Medicare Advantage plans — and how to make a change if a plan doesn’t work as expected

Good news on indigenous rights, conservation, recycling

We have one issue of Fix the News waiting for us today. Among the items:

 

— The African Union has ruled that the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo should give back parts of Kahuzi-Biéga National Park to its ancestral owners, the Batwa people. The ruling sets a legal precedent among member nations of the African Union recognizing Indigenous people’s rights and their role in protecting the environment and biodiversity, reports Yale Environnment 360, published at the Yale School of the Environment.

 

— Brazil has nearly eliminated an illegal gold rush that led thousands of wildcat miners onto the Yanomami reservation in the Amazon rainforest and caused a humanitarian crisis of disease and malnutrition, Reuters reports.

 

— About 80 percent of aluminum produced in the United States comes from recycled aluminum products, says Canary Media, a nonprofit newsroom covering the transition to clean energy.

Also in the news

Zelensky pleads for more U.S. weapons for Ukraine in meetings with Biden, Harris

 

U.S. says ceasefire plan rejected by Israel's Netanyahu had been coordinated with him

 

U.S. economy grew at 3 percent rate last quarter, boosted by consumer spending, business investment, government says

 

Biden, Harris unveil executive order to combat 3D printed and converted firearms, improve schools' active shooter drills

 

California to apologize for state’s legacy of racism against African Americans under new law

 

GOP-led group sues to block Georgia rule requiring hand count of ballots

ProPublica: Texas rushed to remove millions from Medicaid, costing eligible residents care

 

Utah Supreme Court nixes constitutional amendment deemed ‘counterfactual’ by lower court

Rudy Giuliani disbarred in DC after pursuing Trump’s false 2020 election claims

 

OpenAI looking to shift away from nonprofit roots, convert to for-profit company

FDA approves Bristol Myers Squibb schizophrenia drug, first new type of treatment in decades

Fact checking: Not a tool for all seasons

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

I’m writing this as a disappointed former fan … of fact checking. 

In 2007, it was love at first sight: I was a managing editor at Congressional Quarterly, and the head of the newsroom asked me to meet with Bill Adair, then Washington bureau chief for the St. Petersburg (now Tampa Bay) Times, CQ’s parent company at the time. Bill and a bureau colleague had developed a new product, PolitiFact. He was hoping our newsroom of nearly 200 might help with the fact checking. I enthusiastically recommended to my boss we help out, which we did for a time. 

Bill and the Times ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize for their creation. 

Over time, though, my ardor cooled. I began to see the limits — and misuses — of fact checking as a journalism tool.

Good-faith political speech is an exercise in persuasion. In the many political and legislative statements I wrote for campaigns and in Congress, I was marshaling facts to make our case, to win an argument. The opposition was free to counter and explain.

Those kinds of statements often do not lend themselves to the true-false starting point of fact checking. A good fact checker can and should add context, but declaring a one-sided statement to be false is a disservice to political speech.

Even the “misleading” and “needs context” verdicts involve a lot more judgment than reporters often acknowledge. When, for example, candidates say what they will do if elected, how can we know if a statement about the future is true or false? Should fact checkers assess the plausibility of such statements, or the credibility of the candidate? Should all candidates be shown equal deference? Is that still “fact checking?” 

Those questions were in play during the recent debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

The ABC News moderators’ light-touch fact checks obviously helped: They corrected several egregious misstatements by Trump. But the more detailed fact checks that news organizations posted online — 99 candidate statements I reviewed in all — felt like a murky stew of facts and inconsistent reasoning. (The news organizations I reviewed: ABC News, Associated Press, BBC News, CBS News, CNN, NBC News, The New York Times, NPR, PolitiFact, Reuters, Snopes, USA Today, and The Washington Post.) 

Consider: 

During the debate, Harris said: “If Donald Trump were to be re-elected, he will sign a national abortion ban.” Reuters concluded, “This can’t be predicted,” BBC News said it was misleading, and CBS News called it inconclusive. 

But ABC News called Harris’ statement false, arguing that Trump “repeatedly has promised that if elected, he will not sign a federal abortion ban into law and will leave the issue up to the states.”

Yet, when Trump said Harris would end fracking in Pennsylvania “on Day One,” ABC News concluded the statement “needed context” — despite Harris’ clear denial: “I will not ban fracking.” CBS News and the New York Times called Trump’s statement misleading. 

Neither statement is provable; but ABC News’ “fact check” deemed Harris’ false and Trump’s in need of context.

But if fact checking struggles with the details, it is at sea on the big picture.

News organizations concluded that every statement they checked on immigration by Donald Trump was false. Trump said:

• Democrats are encouraging illegal immigrants to vote. False, according to six fact checkers.

• Haitian migrants are stealing and eating the pets of citizens in Springfield, Ohio. False, according to 13 fact checkers.

• Immigrants are “taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings.” False, according to four fact checkers.

• Countries are emptying their prisons and "insane asylums” and sending those inmates to the United States. False, according to six fact checkers.

• Crime in Venezuela and other countries is down because they are sending their criminals to the United States. False, according to two fact checkers.

• 21 million people are crossing the border monthly. False, according to seven fact checkers.

• Immigrants are dangerous and “at the highest level of criminality.” False, according to four fact checkers.

Fact checking can catalog these misstatements; given that Trump and running mate JD Vance continue to repeat them, I think we can call them lies. But fact checking does not provide a way to frame what, taken together, they represent: a presidential candidate whose core campaign issue is entirely fictional. That’s an inherent short-coming of fact checking — it’s the wrong tool for that job.

Trump and Vance’s egregious use of dangerous lies has received greater scrutiny in the mainstream media since the debate, but it is not how most campaign coverage has been framed. Horserace coverage and breathless reporting of polling remains the preferred approach.

Fact checking may have its weaknesses, but they pale in comparison to the other coverage decisions mainstream journalists are making.

 

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Also in the news

U.S., France, other allies jointly call for an immediate 21-day cease-fire between Israel, Hezbollah

 

Putin: Any nation’s conventional attack on Russia supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack

 

House votes to condemn Biden, Harris, others over 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal

House, Senate pass stopgap spending bill, send it to Biden

Harris' speech on her economic vision in Pittsburgh

 

Overseas voters are latest target in Trump’s false narrative of election fraud

New York City Mayor Eric Adams indicted after federal corruption investigation

 

Judge approves $600 million settlement for residents near East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment

 

KFF: Eclampsia, a sometimes deadly pregnancy complication caused by persistent high blood pressure, is on the rise

Grateful to be with you

This blog is 15 years old today. My special thanks to those of you who’ve been on this ride-along with me the entire time as we pursue being informed citizens. 

 

Back in 2009, we’d just come out of a global financial crisis and Obamacare was moving through Congress. I hope some of the information we’ve come across over the years, particularly on personal finance and health care, has been useful to you and your family.

 

And I hope that some of the techniques that are calming me during this stressful election season are helpful to you, too.

 

It isn’t easy. Here is Never-Trump Republican Bill Kristol on the emotional peril of paying attention to the polls.

 

So let’s reprise some of the most effective emotional-resilience techniques, compiled by the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

Also in the news

AP explainer: Iran-backed Hezbollah is a paramilitary, political and social force in the Mideast

 

Biden says ‘we are stronger than we think,’ urges world to unite, in his final address to the UN

 

Several states making late changes to election rules, even as voting is set to begin

 

Justice Department sues Visa, alleging the card issuer monopolizes debit card markets

 

By the end of the month, Americans again will be able to get free coronavirus test kits in the mail

U.N. General Assembly approves ‘Pact for the Future’

The pact is a consensus pledge among the 193 nations of the General Assembly to do more on issues including sustainable development, climate change, artificial intelligence, elimination of nuclear weapons, and youth participation at the national and international levels.

 

The 42-page pact calls for 56 actions. For example, the pact obligates governments to form an impartial worldwide scientific panel on artificial intelligence and to start an international conversation about AI governance inside the UN.

 

And the pact commits world leaders to overhaul the 15-member Security Council, to make it more reflective of today’s world and “redress the historical injustice against Africa,” which has no permanent seat, and to address the under-representation of the Asia-Pacific region and Latin America, says the Associated Press.

 

The pact was negotiated over eighteen months, led by Germany and Namibia. 

 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says, “The road [to implementing the pact] is rocky. But was that ever any different?”

Also in the news

Switzerland's voters reject plan to better protect the country’s biodiversity

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State senator thwarts GOP effort to lock down all of Nebraska’s electoral votes for Trump

California sues ExxonMobil, alleging it misled consumers into believing that recycling was a viable solution for plastic waste

 

KFF: 'Florida’s new covid booster guidance is straight-up misinformation’

 

KFF: Comparison of Harris, Trump on health care policy