Supposed "fact checking" has become a major new weapon in the 2016 presidential fight. It has been horrifically bad. The favored team gets away with sarcasm, hyperbole, fuzzy matters of opinion, "oops I misspoke", jokes, and anything that can't be definitively proven beyond a doubt to be intentionally false. The disfavored team gets none of that leeway. When the favored team wrongly says "X, Y, and Z are so" it's counted as 1 lie, but it's 3 lies if the disfavored team says it.
(Real fact-checks, random Internet image storage.)
And Politifact once vouched for the statement "if you like your health plan, you can keep your health plan", before recanting and calling it the Lie of the Year.
Fact checking for your stories at a paper is the essence of responsibility, but as a publishing genre in its own right it's mostly opinion journalism trying to give itself an imprimatur of impeccability.
Supposed "fact checking" has become a major new weapon in the 2016 presidential fight. It has been horrifically bad. The favored team gets away with sarcasm, hyperbole, fuzzy matters of opinion, "oops I misspoke", jokes, and anything that can't be definitively proven beyond a doubt to be intentionally false. The disfavored team gets none of that leeway. When the favored team wrongly says "X, Y, and Z are so" it's counted as 1 lie, but it's 3 lies if the disfavored team says it.