Re: Rush Limbaugh is on a Mission to Destroy Immigration Reform:
Actually, Limbaugh has an agency that checks the accuracy of his on-air factual statements. He is correct 98.5% of the time according to them. Moreover, his listeners are among the most informed around, according to a Pew poll.
The issue of course is that often times Rush tends to put forward OPINIONS in a way as if to present them as "facts" but those things don't get counted. Though the problem is wide spread, since seemingly the notion that an individuals prediction about the results of an election are decried as a "lie" rather than simply "an incorrect opinion."
Things like Limbaugh's assertion that Romney would win wouldn't be counted on his little agency's "fact checker" because it's an opinion. He'll bloviate a fair bit about it, say "Don't Doubt Me", declare how right he is about things and how it's a lock...but it's not going to get counted in his agencies number because despite him presenting it as if it's a fact, and despite his detractors trying to treat it as him doing such as a means of attacking him, ultimately all he's doing is stating his opinion based on the evidence he's percieved. Same as every other person in the media, on message boards, and walking around were doing when they were making predictions leading up to the election. No one FACTUALLY knew who was going to win until the votes were actually tallied, all other instances were simply guesses...perhaps EDUCATED guesses, but guesses none the less...and thus in the realm of opinion, not fact.
It also means that anytime he goes "I Think that..." or if he says "But the REAL reason the democrats are doing this..." and other such things that he does to muddy up the "original context of any event he is raging about" are again instances that wouldn't be counted as factually wrong because those are instances where he's making statements of opinion, guesses, assumptions, etc instead of facts. They're PRESENTED as factual or truth most of the time, but they wouldn't be countered for the purpose of his agencies check.
Which is why the agency check isn't really a useful counter to what Removable Mind stated.
An example of this is the other day. The bill failed to pass that was pushing to hold off a spike to student loan rates, and Limbaugh got on air talking about how "Democrats" had stopped the bill that would keep interest rates on student loans from hiking. As he continued to talk, he pointed out that Joe Manchin voted "nay" on the cloture vote as his evidence that the "dems" want the interest rate going up.
This is something that would not actually go down as a "factual" problem on his agencies check, but ultimately who IS or ISN'T "responsible" for a bill failing to reach the Senate floor is an
opinoin. There's no actual "factual", provable way that has been devised within the structure of the Congress that determines who is or isn't responsible for a vote being stopped.
In reality,
TWO Democrats and
FOURTY SEVEN Republicans voted "nay". The two Democrats were Manchin and Reid, with Reid doing it for procedural reasons to allow it to be brought up again and is an action done by Republican and Democrat majority leaders alike.
The agency would have to not give Limbaugh a negative mark for his OBVIOUS attempt to "never check for the validity or truthfulness of his comments based on the original context of any event he is raging about" because ulimately believing that
two democrats voting with the Republicans, despite the fact that said Democrats voting "Yay" STILL would have caused the vote to fail, is an "OPINION". It's a stupid, misleading, idiotic, dishonestly present opinion...but it's still an opinion.
But it's exactly the type of thing Removable Mind is talking about.
