Search our website and you’ll find that the term comes up hundreds of times in our fact-checks. In our decade-plus of fact-checking, PolitiFact has seen cherry-picking repeatedly, and from representatives of both parties. High-profile examples of cherry-picking today Criminal justice works okay as an adversarial system.
"What they didn’t anticipate was the party system, which turned democracy into an adversarial system in which people put party above country and advocate for their party in the way a defense lawyer does for a client. The framers "anticipated the possibility of corruption," said Kermit Roosevelt, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. What makes the court system different from the political system, however, is that a judge with relatively unfettered powers keeps the process and the evidence as fair as possible to all parties. In the justice system, a defense attorney argues the best, and usually incomplete, case for their client, while the prosecutor (with some legal limitations) emphasizes the evidence that makes the defendant seem most guilty. It’s worth noting the existence of more justifiable uses of cherry-picking. So while I don't think what we are witnessing is anything dramatically different in kind, it seems to be greater in degree." Going back farther in time, we had the party-run press. "There was Joe McCarthy, after all, and Richard Nixon. "There has always been a lot of lying, fabricating, and general bull- in politics," said Bert Rockman, an emeritus political science professor at Purdue University and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutions and Presidential Leadership: The Vortex of Power. "Instead, the opposing sides just pick out what they like or what supports their separate stance."Ĭherry-picking - the origin of the phrase is unclear but likely is connected to the fact that actual cherries are picked by hand - may have entered a new era of importance, but it also has been around a long time. "Polarization makes each of the two opposing sides in Congress uninterested in finding middle or common ground, or objective truth about a situation," agreed Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and author of The Polarized Congress: The Post-Traditional Struggles of its Current Procedure. The memo is emblematic of an era in which politicians have relied to an increasing degree on cherry-picking as a rhetorical weapon. If and when a Democratic response comes out, Republicans will likely accuse it of using cherry-picked evidence as well. Democrats are now seeking to release their own memo, but are prevented from releasing classified information without the support of the Republican majority. The Nunes memo offers an unusual example of alleged political cherry-picking, since it involves classified information. The GOP memo claimed that federal officials selectively withheld information when they obtained a warrant to monitor Carter Page, a former Trump campaign associate suspected of working as a Russian agent.Ĭritics - including Democrats, current and former national security officials, and many commentators from both parties - argued that the authors chose to include only the pieces of evidence that fit their narrative, leaving out any intelligence that told a different story. Nunes, President Donald Trump, conservative commentators, and many Republican officials wanted the memo released. Still, several historical guardrails that prevented cherry-picking from overtaking politics have weakened in recent years, including the collapse of the political center, the weakening of media neutrality, and the politicization of previously independent congressional committees.Ī harder-edged use of cherry-picking is the recent debate over whether to release a memo authored by the staff of House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif. Advocacy groups understandably put the most sympathetic personalities out front when making arguments, rather than relying on dry, faceless numbers. These days, politicians use the tactic to appeal directly to their base while dropping the pretense that they are reaching out to anyone on the other side.Ĭherry-picking doesn’t necessarily have to be problematic: In a debate, no one expects politicians to provide both their own perspective and that of their opponents. What is cherry-picking? It’s the tactic of harnessing an incomplete and unrepresentative set of evidence to misleadingly make a broader argument. Increasingly, politicians on either side are cherry-picking evidence to support their version of reality. These days, it isn’t just that Republicans are from Mars and Democrats are from Venus.
0 kommentar(er)
