Count Bobulescu
23-12-2011, 12:58 AM
Ok, this is all US related, but I’ll park it in Global Politics to see if or how it develops. Mods can move if necessary. I’m sure yiz can all find some Irish and maybe even other appropriate stuff. I vaguely remember a political party whose initials were FF. They should provide source material. Contributions welcomed.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/12/22/144136535/with-lie-of-the-year-controversy-fact-checking-comes-under-scrutiny
The fact-checking movement has been gaining momentum and gaining fans. Journalistic fact checkers serve as referees by calling foul — and fair — on various assertions by politicians, public figures and pundits with heavily documented analyses. But a slow-burn backlash flared into the open this past week.
Much of it centered on Bill Adair, the editor-in-chief of the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact project from the St. Petersburg Times.
"We have disrupted the protocol in a lot of ways. We have come in and said we're not just going to pass along what the politicians are saying anymore," he says. "We're going to fact-check them, and we're going to go even farther and we're going to rate them."
PolitiFact does so with ratings on a "Truth-O-Meter" ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire."
"That has shaken the establishment," Adair says. "I think people are not accustomed to the press doing this, and I think that's a reflection that the press has ... fallen down on the job. This is what we should have been doing all along."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-biggest-pinocchios-of-2011/2011/12/21/gIQAzbzFAP_blog.html?hpid=z3
Fact checkers are under assault!
Before we present our list of the biggest Pinocchios of the year, we would like to address the torrent of criticism addressed at fact checkers (primarily PolitiFact, Factcheck.org and The Fact Checker) in recent weeks. The Weekly Standard last week had a cover story (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/lies-damned-lies-and-fact-checking_611854.html?page=1) denouncing fact checkers as a liberal plot to control the political discourse. This week, PolitiFact’s decision to award its “Lie of the Year (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/20/lie-year-democrats-claims-republicans-voted-end-me/)” trophy to Democratic claims that the GOP “killed” Medicare has earned it and its fact checking brethren additional (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/politifact-r-i-p/) scorn (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/politifact-lie-of-the-year_n_1160576.html) from (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/dems-brush-off-politifact-finding/2011/12/20/gIQA1zkg7O_blog.html) the (http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/12/20/the_lie_of_the_year_continued.html) left (http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=2553).
As a writer at Gawker (http://gawker.com/5869817/politifact-is-bad-for-you) put it: “Politifact is dangerous. Stop reading it. Stop reading the ‘four Pinocchios’ guy too. Stop using some huckster company's stupid little phrases or codes or number systems when it's convenient, and read the actual arguments instead. You're building a monster.”
Ouch.
My colleague Ezra Klein even opined (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-problem-for-the-fact-checkers/2011/08/25/gIQAMXxi7O_blog.html) that “the ‘fact checker’ model is probably unsustainable,” based on the questionable belief that “half of the public leans towards one party and about half of the public leans toward the other” and thus will tune out commentary with which they disagree. That’s a pretty depressing commentary on the state of our politics. Thankfully, it bears little relationship to the reality we experience every day at The Fact Checker.
http://factcheck.org/2011/12/the-whoppers-of-2011/
Summary
Despite what you may have heard in 2011:
The new health care law won’t cost many jobs (and they’ll be poorly paying jobs at that).
Republicans aren’t proposing to “end” Medicare (and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden has signed onto a modified version of the GOP plan).
Most of the “millionaires” who would pay higher tax rates under a Democratic proposal aren’t job-creating small-business owners.
President Obama’s mother didn’t really fight to get health insurance coverage as she was dying.
And there was plenty more spin and deception in 2011. Obama claimed he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher. Michele Bachmann endorsed a claim that HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Joe Biden claimed rapes quadrupled in Flint, Mich., after police layoffs. And that’s just some of the nonsense we debunked.
For our full run-down of the worst political whoppers we encountered during the year, please read on to the Analysis section. And get ready for more in the presidential election year that is about to begin.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/20/lie-year-2011-readers-poll-results/
(http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/20/lie-year-2011-readers-poll-results/)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/12/22/144136535/with-lie-of-the-year-controversy-fact-checking-comes-under-scrutiny
The fact-checking movement has been gaining momentum and gaining fans. Journalistic fact checkers serve as referees by calling foul — and fair — on various assertions by politicians, public figures and pundits with heavily documented analyses. But a slow-burn backlash flared into the open this past week.
Much of it centered on Bill Adair, the editor-in-chief of the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact project from the St. Petersburg Times.
"We have disrupted the protocol in a lot of ways. We have come in and said we're not just going to pass along what the politicians are saying anymore," he says. "We're going to fact-check them, and we're going to go even farther and we're going to rate them."
PolitiFact does so with ratings on a "Truth-O-Meter" ranging from "True" to "Pants on Fire."
"That has shaken the establishment," Adair says. "I think people are not accustomed to the press doing this, and I think that's a reflection that the press has ... fallen down on the job. This is what we should have been doing all along."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/the-biggest-pinocchios-of-2011/2011/12/21/gIQAzbzFAP_blog.html?hpid=z3
Fact checkers are under assault!
Before we present our list of the biggest Pinocchios of the year, we would like to address the torrent of criticism addressed at fact checkers (primarily PolitiFact, Factcheck.org and The Fact Checker) in recent weeks. The Weekly Standard last week had a cover story (http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/lies-damned-lies-and-fact-checking_611854.html?page=1) denouncing fact checkers as a liberal plot to control the political discourse. This week, PolitiFact’s decision to award its “Lie of the Year (http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/20/lie-year-democrats-claims-republicans-voted-end-me/)” trophy to Democratic claims that the GOP “killed” Medicare has earned it and its fact checking brethren additional (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/politifact-r-i-p/) scorn (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/politifact-lie-of-the-year_n_1160576.html) from (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/dems-brush-off-politifact-finding/2011/12/20/gIQA1zkg7O_blog.html) the (http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/12/20/the_lie_of_the_year_continued.html) left (http://blog.niemanwatchdog.org/?p=2553).
As a writer at Gawker (http://gawker.com/5869817/politifact-is-bad-for-you) put it: “Politifact is dangerous. Stop reading it. Stop reading the ‘four Pinocchios’ guy too. Stop using some huckster company's stupid little phrases or codes or number systems when it's convenient, and read the actual arguments instead. You're building a monster.”
Ouch.
My colleague Ezra Klein even opined (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-problem-for-the-fact-checkers/2011/08/25/gIQAMXxi7O_blog.html) that “the ‘fact checker’ model is probably unsustainable,” based on the questionable belief that “half of the public leans towards one party and about half of the public leans toward the other” and thus will tune out commentary with which they disagree. That’s a pretty depressing commentary on the state of our politics. Thankfully, it bears little relationship to the reality we experience every day at The Fact Checker.
http://factcheck.org/2011/12/the-whoppers-of-2011/
Summary
Despite what you may have heard in 2011:
The new health care law won’t cost many jobs (and they’ll be poorly paying jobs at that).
Republicans aren’t proposing to “end” Medicare (and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden has signed onto a modified version of the GOP plan).
Most of the “millionaires” who would pay higher tax rates under a Democratic proposal aren’t job-creating small-business owners.
President Obama’s mother didn’t really fight to get health insurance coverage as she was dying.
And there was plenty more spin and deception in 2011. Obama claimed he pays a lower tax rate than a teacher. Michele Bachmann endorsed a claim that HPV vaccine causes mental retardation. Joe Biden claimed rapes quadrupled in Flint, Mich., after police layoffs. And that’s just some of the nonsense we debunked.
For our full run-down of the worst political whoppers we encountered during the year, please read on to the Analysis section. And get ready for more in the presidential election year that is about to begin.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/20/lie-year-2011-readers-poll-results/
(http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/20/lie-year-2011-readers-poll-results/)
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/