Fact-checking is important, particularly during election campaigns. But much of what’s labeled as “fact-checking” these days is an effort to put a partisan spin on negative information. A clear case-in-point is NPR’s recent piece on whether Dr. Ben Carson’s claims about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger were true.

What NPR actually did, however, was provide cover for Planned Parenthood and try to explain away the vile eugenics movement.

“Maybe I am not objective when it comes to Planned Parenthood, but, you know, I know who Margaret Sanger is, and I know that she believed in eugenics, and that she was not particularly enamored with black people.

“And one of the reasons you find most of their clinics in black neighborhoods is so that you can find a way to control that population,” Carson said in an interview last week. “I think people should go back and read about Margaret Sanger who founded this place – a woman Hillary Clinton by the way says that she admires. Look and see what many people in Nazi Germany thought about her.”

Now, instead of going first to Margaret Sanger’s statements, as Carson recommended, NPR first went to Planned Parenthood for comment.

“It’s a shame that a doctor, who should understand the barriers black women face accessing high-quality preventive and reproductive health care services, would pander so clearly to anti-abortion extremists on the right,” that organization said.

Next, NPR did touch on eugenics, a pseudoscience that devalued human life if it didn’t fit the eugenicists’ concept of perfection.

“Did Margaret Sanger believe in eugenics?” NPR asked. “Yes, but not in the way Carson implied.”

That’s not true, but more on that later. For now, let’s look at how NPR tries to explain away and excuse the Master Race theorists.

“Eugenics was a discipline, championed by prominent scientists but now widely debunked, that promoted ‘good’ breeding and aimed to prevent ‘poor’ breeding,” NPR said. “The idea was that the human race could be bettered through encouraging people with traits like intelligence, hard work, cleanliness (thought to be genetic) to reproduce.”

Actually, it was more than that – it advocated sterilization (often involuntary) and birth control and abortion to reduce the number of “undesirables.”

NPR suggests there’s some question about how much Sanger “bought into” eugenics. But the record is clear. Margaret Sanger was a racist and a eugenicist.

“Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral,” she wrote. “Its general, though prudent, practice must lead to a higher individuality and ultimately to a cleaner race. Birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defective.”

NPR failed, if its intention was to actually fact-check Ben Carson’s statement. What’s more important here, though, is something NPR doesn’t try to address: why eugenics is wrong.

We are all made in the image of God. Margaret Sanger didn’t believe that, but Ben Carson does. That’s why his is a legacy of healing.