The fact-checkers of the media are quick to tell others how wrong they are, how they got their facts, wrong, etc. What they don’t do is the requisite work for their own stories and therefore can botch things worse than others do. It’s all in the name of the Almighty Narrative that such mistakes are made, and the case of the Oregon shooter (I won’t be sharing his name) and his alleged party affiliation.

One website points out the shooter’s party affiliation on his dating profile is Republican. That’s good enough for them, so CBS, Daily Beast, and several others report it. It took RedAlertPolitics using a simple search feature on the Oregon Secretary of State’s website to determine that, contrary to media narrative, the guy is registered as an Independent. To confirm, I went to the same website, typed in the same information, and got the following:

This is vital information for the media to have because Oregon is a closed primary state. This means you can’t vote in another party’s primary. Meaning that he couldn’t vote Republican in primary races. Now, that doesn’t mean he has never voted for a Republican in his life, which I will fully acknowledge, but to say he was a conservative Republican crazy guy based information on a dating profile he used at some point in his life.

But, doing the actual research into publicly available data might ruin that narrative they’re building: Crazy, gun-loving Republicans are crazy, gun-shooting Republicans who are violent and no good and totally need to have their (and also every other person’s) gun taken away.