Factcheck.org responds to accusations in a tweetstorm from Senator Sanders re: Mercatus study

[ehrnst]

225. Interesting how people equate a fact check with "attack"

I understand that you are offended at the very idea that someone would consider a statement by Senator Sanders as being possibly mistaken, and that might seem lby it's very nature a "weak-ass attack" that you need to step up and defend him from. That's a very emotional reaction to something that just wasn't an "attack." I try to explain fact check orgs to Trump supporters and they are also emotional, along with calling such orgs "fake."

Yes, he took things out of context, as per more than one fact checking org - and they actually contacted the author of the study cited by the Senator, did the research, and that gives them more credibility than you or Senator Sanders concerning what is and is not supported by the study (that Senator Sanders cited.)

He didn't quote them, he looked at their numbers and said those numbers say something that they either didn't think they were or tried to obfuscate in the framing.

No, he cited a study - a study he said "shows that Medicare for All would save the American people $2 trillion over a 10-year period." If I had put that kind of citation in paper in grad school, I would have been taken to the woodshed by my thesis committee.

Studies aren't movies or plays. There isn't a lot of wiggle room for what a study "shows," like there is for say, the case that Hamlet is Gay and in love with Horatio - really not there in the script, but contemporary entertainment in the post Freud era encourages diagnosis.

No, a study done by an analyst (evil, good or chaotic nuetral) is not ambiguous. Especially when the author puts "what their study shows" right at the beginning in a thing called the "abstract."

To contradict that is to misrepresent what the study "shows." Even Senator Sanders isn't exempt from that.