Sorting truth from falsehood is tough at any time. It’s far harder in this digital age with a bedlam of personal opinions published on Facebook or Twitter or personal blogs. Add an election year to the mix — in the midst of the Republican primary campaign charges fly back and forth — and distinguishing fact from fiction seems close to impossible
Fortunately, a helping hand has appeared with the advent of an industry devoted to fact-checking.
A leader in the field is FactCheck.org, which played a role in the 2004 vice-presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. Mr. Cheney said that the website had defended his actions as CEO of the troubled defense contractor, Halliburton. In reality, the website had said that “Edwards was mostly right.”
Another is PolitiFact.com, operated by the St. Petersburg Times. Its reporters and editors fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups. They give each statement a “Truth-O-Meter” rating ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” The site also tracks President Barack Obama’s record on keeping his campaign promises and House Republicans’ promise-keeping with regard to their “Pledge to America.”
The Bangor Daily News sometimes features its meters on our Opinion pages.
Mark Matthew, a political reporter for ABC7 in San Francisco, lists his own “Whoppers of the Year.” For 2011, the worst was congressional Republicans’ reference to the president’s health care law as “job-killing.” He said the charge was “just not accurate.” He cited the Congressional Budget Office estimate that there would be a loss of a few low-paying jobs starting in 2014 because workers will be better off financially and won’t stay in jobs just to keep their health care coverage.
Among his other 2011 whoppers: Democrats’ charge that the Republicans propose to “end” Medicare, since they just plan to privatize it, and Republican statements that most of the “millionaires” who would pay higher tax rates under a Democratic proposal are job-creating small-business owners. He quoted a study that showed that only 13 percent of those reporting incomes of $1 million or more got even a quarter of their income from small-business sources.
Other fact checkers include FactCheckEd.org for high school teachers and students, the Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker” with its one to four “Pinocchios” to grade politicians’ statements, and Bama Fact Check, a project of Alabama newsgathering organizations.
Despite all these efforts, the lies and deception keep piling on. Among the worst offenders are the bloggers, often anonyomous. Unlike newspapers, bloggers don’t use editors to help verify accuracy. ABC7’s Matthews tells of questioning someone at the Hoover Institution about a report that Nancy Pelosi had nonunion workers picking her grapes. The person said, “I don’t have to fact-check my allegation; it’s up to her to deny it.”
Speaking of whoppers, probably the biggest is the frequent charge by Rick Perry and other Republicans that President Obama is a socialist. The Huffington Post nailed that one a few days ago. It got an e-mail from the Socialist Party USA that said: “The notion that Barack Obama is a socialist ranks among the greatest fairy tails in American society — right up there with the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the idea that if you work hard enough your children will lead a better life than you. Socialists know that Obama is another corporate-funded politician placed in the White House to protect the wealth and status of the 1 percent.”
We are doomed—- Doomed, its either going to be Romney or Obama
Obama or Romney, they are both bad
Either way we are shrewed
I think Matt Stone and Trey Parker best describe the difference between our future leadership
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-karel-bouley/turd-sandwich-or-giant-do_b_45240.html
It just doesn’t matter
You’re clueless MeForest!
oooh name calling
I learned a phrase out at Ft. McCoy a few years ago. BOHICA. Bend over here it comes again.
Bernie Sanders for President
At least he is honest about being a socialist.
His honesty is unprecedented.
If the truth where made known, the word socialist need not be a dirty word disassociated with democracy as the framers of the US constitution in many ways embraced it.
The congress was given the right to regulate commerce and the constitution endorsed the Post Office as a government owned entity.
Even Thomas Jefferson and John Adams endorsed a government mandated health care system in the Act for Disabled Seamen.
Com on, Obama aint so bad, It could have been the Grinch!
The best thing that can happen FOR Obama is all the dopes running on the republican ticket. It is a sure thing for Obama. Everyone of the republicans are a bunch of liers, cheeters, greedy pants, etc, etc etc etc . Their all blabbing and showing their true colors. Just what we need, Not.
Obama is the most rational of them all however,
American Voters are not Rational!
Great column. I’m going to check out some of these sources directly.
Even more of a challenge to sort truth from fiction when reading this paper.
Of course, for the most part the writers here usually only lie through omission.
” Republicans propose to “end” Medicare, since they just plan to privatize it.”
Privatizing Medicare WOULD end it. Yes, the name would stay the same. But retirees’ money would be passing through the hands of Wall Street types, each claiming a share in the name of free enterprise and profit-making, and they would be investing it with their great wisdom (which led this country to an economic meltdown a few years ago)–the risk would be all ours, the profit all theirs.
If these financiers made wrong guesses about the stock market, we would be left without healthcare. To me, the Republican proposal would indeed be the end of Medicare, since Medicare was created to be a kind of health insurance elderly people could trust, that would not be at risk of vanishing in a bad market.
One cannot read an article about political BS artists without immediately thinking of the Maine Heritage Policy Post Office Box. I say “Post Office Box” instead of Center, because there is no Center. This group of five or six chuckleheads has no actual address. They call themselves “Directors” when they direct nothing and no one. They usually can’t explain the method by which they arrived at their sensational conclusions and consistently refuse to divulge their funding source or sources.
A recent expansion of the MHPPOB into the field of Journalism resulted in the near immediate outing of their senior (and only) journalist as a committed and unapologetic racist who frequents Nazi websites.
Let’s stop dressing this collection of boobs up as a “think tank”. Sure, when they come out with one of their inflammatory white papers (WHITE papers, get it?) sell some newsprint by quoting them. But call them what they are, a bunch of shadow society, secret handshake, fringe kooks.
You dont suppose that The Maine Heritage Center is just an extension of the Heritage Foundation do you?
Of course the far right has already started circulating chain e-mails that claim all these fact check outfits are tools of the far left. I have received two claiming that snopes.com spins everything to please the far left.
I do try and check every one of these e-mails that claim anything that is designed to get your dander up. Most are either total BS to half truths. I reply to the sender with the source they can read on snopes.
I don’t need a chain email to tell me that “fact” checking entities have their own agenda, it’s pretty clear they do with all the lies of omission they commit.
Who’s checking the checkers who are checking the checkers who are checking the checkers …….?
in the words of Loudon Wainwright III, ” A committee decides which committee decides which committee decides which committee decides.”
Truthiness. It’s all truthiness.
There aren’t going to be enough fact checkers out there to keep up with the spin we’re going to be subjected to from both sides in this election.
Come on, there are many leaders out there, they are just leading us down the garden path or off to slaughter.
What is truth in 2012? Nothing that comes from the mouth of politicians.
This is really an amazing statement:
Despite all these efforts, the lies and deception keep piling on. Among the worst offenders are the bloggers, often anonyomous. Unlike newspapers, bloggers don’t use editors to help verify accuracy. ABC7’s Matthews tells of questioning someone at the Hoover Institution about a report that Nancy Pelosi had nonunion workers picking her grapes. The person said, “I don’t have to fact-check my allegation; it’s up to her to deny it.”
First, journalism today has most often become “he said/she said” reporting, with the journalist relying on a statement from an opponent to provide balance, rather than doing even cursory research to prove the veracity of claims made. If a reporter knows what a politician or other knows is not true or a lie, there is no need to find someone else to say so – the reporter, and their editor, can simply print the evidence that the statement is false.
Read the quote from the fellow at the Hoover Institution again – he said/she said reporting is so prevalent that some will knowingly lie with the faith that a reporter will not check out their claim.
Second, not all bloggers are anonymous, and many do take the time to do the research required.
And third, when did the very conservative Hoover Institution (located at Stanford) become a “blogger”?
This piece on the twisted psychology of bloggers vs. journalists by Jay Rosen is of interest (h/t Lyle):
http://pressthink.org/2011/03/the-psychology-of-bloggers-vs-journalists-my-talk-at-south-by-southwest/
No one will ever live long enough to get “Truth” from any modern politician.
Ballots ought to have a box that reads “None of the above” as nobody in the race is anbody but a shill for the monied interests.
True “leadership” went out the window a long time ago. Now it is only a matter of who is going to get the “spoils”.
Yet the BDN dutifully parrots these lies.
I’m glad to see that there is someone checking the veracity of statements that Republicans make, but what about the lies told daily by Democrats and the liberal media..
Well, it’s certainly true that Obama isn’t a socialist, Marxist, communist or any other kind of ‘ist’; he’s just the front man for a corrupt political party that’s intent on expanding government so it has more ‘product’ to sell. Something similar can probably be said about Republican presidents, although the Democrats are arguably more flagrant.
But ‘the biggest whopper’? How about ‘the Tea Party is a White racist organisation’ or ‘Gabrielle Giffords was shot because of Republican rhetoric’ or ‘the Right are uneducated boors’ or ‘the Obama administration is remarkably scandal-free’? Not that these are the biggest lies, but somehow the ‘fact checkers’ you cite never quite get around to finding fault with them, or other statements useful to the Left. That makes the notion that your ‘fact checkers’ are anything more than progressive propagandists ‘the biggest whopper’.
“I’m not a socialist. Really. Just ask me!”
I’m not buying it, BDN. The guy is actually doing the Cloward and Pivon orchestrated crisis by spending us into oblivion. But what’s another 1 trillion to the debt ceiling? Oh don’t worry, the well-funded and well-trained “militia” that Obama wanted is here for your protection in these perilous times! I hear DHS/FEMA has some nice “residential facilities” they want populated, too.
Truth? Ain’t gonna get it from American corporate lamestream media.
RT The Alyona Show. Great news program!
http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4ozmbjs9n&reload=3#/profile?user=TheAlyonaShow&v=r7ubYfue1so&view=videos