Fact-checking fact-checkers and the president

Let’s examine some reporting and a statement from President Donald J. Trump.

We start with a Monday night report on NBC Nightly News, from usually reliable chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel. He was reporting on Sweden’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which was, basically, to ignore it and hope herd immunity protects its 10 million citizens.

Regular readers know I did that subject a few days ago and the facts and stats were fresh and on hand. Why did I zero in on Sweden? Because there could be something important to learn from measuring its experience against ours.

“So far, Sweden has seen over 2,000 COVID deaths in a population of 10 million, similar to the mortality rate, per capita, as the U.S.,” he reported.

Stop the tape.

The actual numbers, easily found online, show Sweden’s death per capita to be .21 to our .09. Would you call double “similar”? Not in my universe. Why would he characterize it that way?

“Sweden has more deaths than its neighbors,” Engel continued, “but says its is a long-term solution, with little economic impact.”

Not just “more deaths” than its neighbors, which sounds insignificant. Sweden has six times more deaths than Denmark and almost 10 times that of Finland. Those are huge multiples and I can’t imagine why Engel would so minimize them. Is this soft advocacy of Sweden’s policy? That is not his job. Engel didn’t lie, but he mislead.

I emailed my questions to him Tuesday morning to see if he still supports how he framed the story. I got no reply by late Tuesday night.

A few days earlier on MSNBC’s 9 a.m. show, host Stephanie Ruhle wanted to fact-check a statement repeatedly made by Trump that the U.S. has “done more testing than any other nation.”

She brought in numbers-cruncher Steve Kornacki, whose speciality is analyzing political polls for the cable network.

He didn’t fact-check the president’s statement at all. He immediately turned to examining how many tests the U.S. had done per capita. Now, it is as fair to examine per capita numbers here as it is to examine Sweden’s mortality rate, but not when you were trotted out to be checking raw numbers. That was the president’s claim and it is a fact.

What is not a fact is Trump’s oft-repeated claim that the U.S. economy before the pandemic was “the best economy in U.S. history” or “the best economy in the history of the world.” It did have record low unemployment, and it may have been the best this century, but no more than that and it’s hard to believe Trump doesn’t know it.