In a US presidential campaign full of unremitting stupidity, the ‘fact-check’ has claimed the crown of the most tedious journalistic device used during this news cycle. Instead of raising the tone of the presidential debate by defending the truth, the fact-check has become another cudgel to be used in the partisan blame-game.

Originally designed to merely check the accuracy of facts and figures mentioned in speeches, the fact-check has now mutated into a shrill, subjective analysis of what can loosely be called facts, all in an attempt to receive page-views.

While the fact-check has proved its worthlessness for the past few months, the recent Republican and Democratic National Conventions really brought the shallowness of this industry to the forefront. For example, did you know that Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama are liars? They are not even normal liars, but pants-on-fire liars, judged by the number of ‘Pinocchios’ they have received in accordance with ABC’s fact-checking system.

A statement that Paul Ryan made on Mitt Romney’s website last week offers a look at fact-checking at work: “In July of 1980, the unemployment rate was 7.8 per cent. For the past 42 months, it’s been above 8 per cent under Barack Obama’s failed leadership. In 1980, under Jimmy Carter 330,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy. Last year, under President Obama’s failed leadership, 1.4 million businesses filed for bankruptcy.”

This is pretty standard campaign rhetoric, and anyone with less than half a brain can see that Ryan is simply trying to tie Obama to someone commonly thought of as a failed Democratic President. Yet ABC news in all of its wisdom dinged Ryan for failing to mention that when Ronald Reagan was president unemployment was once 9.8 per cent, all but forgetting his accurate statement of what the unemployment rate is under the Obama presidency. ABC further claimed that Ryan fudged his numbers about businesses filing for bankruptcy, because actually 331,264 businesses filed for bankruptcy under Carter, and 1,410,653 filed for bankruptcy under Obama. ABC news is against the practice of rounding. Expect an equally vigourous look into Obama’s claim in his speech last night, that he could create 600 000 jobs—a suspiciously exact number—in the natural gas sector.

Also note that, in fact-checking land, whenever Obama compares the economy under his administration to the economy under Bush, he is omitting the fact that the economy was much worse under FDR; thus, he is a liar for not providing proper context.

Partisan websites can then spin this lacking analysis into ‘gotcha’ headlines. Daily Kos used the ABC article to title a post called ‘Paul Ryan lying again. And again. And again,’ and then claimed that on the basis of these ‘faulty’ numbers that Paul Ryan is a “lying sack of [you-know-what].”

Unfortunately, the above fact-check is not an outlying example. Both campaigns have called the other a liar, using these ‘objective’ facts as evidence of their own chastity and the other side’s wonton neglect of the truth. It’s no surprise that the presidential campaign has morphed into an immature shouting match between two highly polarized sides.

Recently, the Romney campaign said that it would not let fact-checkers dictate the direction of its campaign. To that I say bravo, because what the fact-check websites are checking is nothing you and I would recognize as fact.