Fact-Checker' fallacies

In November of last year Israeli news outlet Real Time News reported a five-fold increase in deaths of FIFA players.  You can read the results of the investigation in English in Frontline News  here.  This report has been ridiculed and lambasted by so-called “fact-checkers” as patently false.  One example can be found here.  

Fact-check:

• The claim: A Facebook post published Nov. 27, 2021, claims 108 soccer players have died in the last six months, a fivefold increase when compared to the average death rate in previous years.

I do not know what the Facebook post says since the article provides no link to it.  However, I have read the article. The article does not say that 108 soccer players have died within the last six months.  It also never claimed that this number of deaths is a fivefold increase compared to the average death rate in previous years.

The fact check article is building a straw man.  “A straw man fallacy occurs when someone takes another person’s argument, distorts it or exaggerates it in some kind of extreme way, and then attacks the extreme distortion, as if that is really the claim the first person is making.”

It is easy to confute a position that you have created out of whole cloth.  

The fact-check quotes a study according to which 617 players from 67 countries collapsed during the five years from 2014 through 2018.  Of those, 142 survived and 475 died.  Removing the 6% that represent traumatic deaths, we are left with 447 deaths from sudden collapse, an average of 89.4 per year.

Based on this report, the fact-checker reaches the conclusion that the article’s claim is false since 108 is not five times greater than 89.4.

However, as I mentioned earlier, the Real-Time News article never claimed that the 108 dead was five times greater than normal.

Rather, the article makes the case that five times more FIFA players died in 2021 than the average for the preceding two decades.

The article uses a Wikipedia list to establish that between 2001 and 2020, an average of 4.2 FIFA soccer players died suddenly each year.  This number is backed up by numerous articles.  For example, a 2014 study published in the journal, The Physician and Sports Medicine establishes that 54 soccer players died from sudden cardiac arrest from 2000 until 2013.  This comes to an average of 3.9 deaths per year.

FIFA data corroborate these numbers.  The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, reported from FIFA data in 2012, that 36 soccer players died on the field in the previous decade.  

The Real-Time News article compared this to the number of FIFA deaths in 2021 listed in the Wikipedia entry.  This number is 21 which is 5 times the average.

Here are the facts.  FIFA player deaths in 2021 were 500% higher than the yearly average since 2001, and all player deaths was at least 20% higher (108 vs 89.4).

What happened here?  How did the fact-checkers get it so wrong?

Many have written about the shortcomings of “fact-checkers”.  One problem is that fact-checkers are limited to checking facts.  Many times, possibly most of the time, the facts are not in dispute.  Interpretation is everything.  The oldest example I can think of is the Biblical story of the spies that Moses sent into the land of Canaan.  Ten reported back that the land devours its inhabitants.  Two said that it is a very good land.  We can assume that all twelve saw the same land.  Yet, they arrived at opposite conclusions.

This doesn’t explain our example, though.  Here, the fact-checkers simply got their facts embarrassingly wrong.  And based on their incorrect understanding of the data, declared the Real-Time News article to be false.

There is something else going on here.  

According to an article published in Columbia Journalism Review the problem is that, “… the morally freighted language invoked by full-time fact-checkers—true and false, fact and lie—is a weapon, to be wielded by journalists with authority against other, presumably less trustworthy types who make political claims.”

To drive the point home, an article published in Capital Research Center states that, “One only has to look at the fact-checking statistics over [the 2016] election year … PolitiFact gave its “Pants on Fire” label, the most severe rank for a lie, to Donald Trump 57 times. Hillary Clinton earned that distinction just seven times.”

Fact-checking may have begun with noble aims, but it has since degenerated into another tool to promote “official” narratives and progressive agendas.  This has led to sloppiness as well.  It’s inexcusable to get the facts so wrong but when your starting position is that you are going to debunk, you debunk regardless of the facts, the real ones.

This is why a Reuters Fact Check article can claim in a classic example of beating down a straw man, “There is no evidence currently that COVID-19 vaccines are linked to an increase in sportspeople collapsing or dying due to heart issues such as myocarditis.”

The Reuters Fact Check team is obviously promoting an agenda because at this point no one knows if these players’ deaths were caused by the vaccines.   

The Israeli article states clearly, “Even though the vaccine status of the athletes who were injured is not known in all the cases, and it’s important to point out that it’s not possible to establish that the injuries were caused by the vaccines …”

Responsible actors are not claiming a causal relationship between vaccines and sudden player deaths.  

Responsible actors are peeling alarm bells. Something is wrong and needs to be investigated.  As the article continues, “… it’s surprising and certainly raises a red flag that requires comprehensive and extensive investigation.  It definitely should not be scoffed off with superficial claims.”

Caryn Lipson, Frontline News Senior Reporter contributed to this article