Dan Abrams Calls Out MSNBC for Flimsy Fact Check of Vance: ‘If You’re Gonna Fact-Check, You’d Better Get it Right!’
Mediaite founder Dan Abrams called out MSNBC for conducting a flimsy “fact check” of Vice President JD Vance on Thursday, arguing, “If you’re gonna fact-check a man, you’d better get it right.”
“Exactly what is going on with people in the country illegally, healthcare, and the shutdown?” questioned Abrams on SiriusXM’s The Dan Abrams Show, adding:
Because the way that the fact-checks have been happening from the media would make you think that there is no argument that Republicans can make at all about people in the country illegally getting any additional healthcare as a result of what the Democrats are suggesting, and that’s not true, but it’s also not true what JD Vance is saying.
So here we are in the situation where Republicans led by Vice President Vance are vastly overstating what Democrats are proposing, and yet you still have the media fact-checking in a way that I think leads to more undermining of the media’s credibility because they’re making it so all or nothing, and it’s not.
He continued, “This next comment I’m gonna play from JD Vance is actually not that inaccurate, right? And this is where MSNBC steps in and says, ‘This isn’t accurate,’ and this is where the problem comes in terms of the media.”
VANCE: “If you look at the legislative text that they gave us, they tried to turn on two separate provisions that would give health care benefits to illegal aliens. Number one, if you’re an American citizen, you’ve been to a hospital in the last few years, you probably noticed that wait times are especially large, and very often somebody who’s there in the emergency room waiting is an illegal alien—very often a person who can’t even speak English.
Why do those people get health care benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens? The answer is a decision made by the Biden administration that the Trump administration, working with congressional Republicans, undid. We turned off that money spigot to health care funding for illegal aliens. The Democrats in their legislative text want to turn it back on. That’s one thing. The second thing, Matt, is we all know that there are various ways in which the Biden administration waved away illegal immigration status.
They gave parolees; they gave asylum claims to people who weren’t really claiming asylum. And when they waved the magic wand of amnesty, giving millions of people legal status even though they were in the country illegally, they also gave those people access to health care benefits.
ABRAMS: “You see the conflating of the two issues there? Number one is the emergency room stuff, right? And number two, which is a separate issue, is the ‘How do you define whether someone is here lawfully?’ And they’re basically saying too many people got it.”
Abrams then played a clip of MSNBC anchor Chris Jansing interrupting Vance’s remarks with a fact-check, claiming Vance’s statements about illegal immigrants being able to access healthcare were “not true.”
“You see what she did there, right? She’s telling us correctly, right, that people here illegally can’t get any of these programs, but then she says, ‘For the most part, undocumented immigrants are barred from using federally-funded healthcare programs,'” reacted Abrams. “That’s true, that it’s ‘for the most part,’ but in this particular instance, what JD Vance was saying wasn’t that inaccurate.”
He concluded, “You can question, you know, the way he’s framing it, etcetera, but I think that with the media, if you’re gonna fact check a man, you’d better get it right. If you’re going to call yourself a fact-checker, there’s no room for, ‘Well yeah, well, okay, okay.’ No, no. It’s got to be spot on, which is why I’m trying to be so careful here because I am trying to help fact-check, but I am not claiming to be the expert.”
Watch above via The Dan Abrams Show.
