A Facebook post promoting the removal of Maine’s Democrat governor just got a nice free ad from the Mills-friendly Portland Press Herald.
Oops.
The 𝕵𝖆𝖓𝖊𝖙 𝕸𝖎𝖑𝖑𝖘 𝕳𝖊𝖗𝖆𝖑𝖉 has been in her corner since Day One so gifting the anti-Mills forces a platform is an instant no-no.
The question is: how did it happen?
The paper’s “fact-checking” team headlined a Facebook post that says the Mills recall petition has received 500,000 signatures.
The fact-checking squad claimed in one of its latest “fact briefs” that the petition hasn’t received that many signatories.
But the problem for the Press Herald is that to do its little fact check it published a big headline thusly:
Did over 500,000 Maine voters sign a petition to recall Gov. Janet Mills?
The problem occurs for an administration-boosting news organ when readers see that and interpret it thusly:
Over 500,000 Maine voters sign a petition to recall Gov. Janet Mills
Introducing an alleged non-existing concept is the same as trumpeting it.
“A petition to recall Maine Democratic Gov. Janet Mills launched in February garnered roughly 30,000 signatures before it was abandoned,” the “fact brief” told readers.
The line that preceded that one said, “Maine has no recall process for elected officials, though the Legislature has proposed it a few times in recent years.”
So which is it, Press Herald?
If Maine has no recall process for elected officials why would the paper go out of its way justifying the existence of a symbolic removal campaign against its good friend the governor?
Here’s how: by trying to downplay a Facebook post its stellar fact-checking team actually did just the opposite.
It gave it cachet.
And why did Janet’s favorite newspaper wait two months to claim the recall campaign is a fraud?
After all, the Facebook post in question has been up since May 15.
The curiosity is that the Press Herald calls the Facebook post a “parody.” But yet it published an entire “fact brief” on it.
If it’s a parody why publicize it?
After all, there’s an old adage in newspapering: when writing a correction don’t repeat the mistake.
The problems with the latest “fact brief” just keep on giving.
To wit, claiming that Maine “has no recall process for elected officials” is simply untrue.
Go to any Maine town or city you want and you’ll find that municipal officials are often subjected to recall petitions that are completely valid, subject only to removal provisions included in a community’s charter or ordinance.
So what the paper apparently meant was that the recall process doesn’t apply to state officials.
To divine whether that’s what the paper meant you’d have to read deeper into the “fact brief” to learn that the paper was referring to state officials.
Or not.
And then there’s this: the paper’s claim that a recall campaign against Mills has been abandoned flies in the face of the fact that the petition remains available online.
Not only is it online but the Press Herald “fact brief” claiming it’s no longer active actually contains a link to it.
As you are beginning to see, the cute “fact-checking” experiment launched last month at the state’s largest daily was doomed from the start.
You can fact-check that.
