Absolutely Fascinating - maybe Fabulous
My latest internet obsession is Politifact.com.
From their About page
PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in politics.
Every day, reporters and researchers from the Times examine statements by members of Congress, the president, cabinet secretaries, lobbyists, people who testify before Congress and anyone else who speaks up in Washington. We research their statements and then rate the accuracy on our Truth-O-Meter – True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True and False. The most ridiculous falsehoods get our lowest rating, Pants on Fire.
We also rate the consistency of public officials on our Flip-O-Meter using three ratings: No Flip, Half Flip and Full Flop.
We created the Obameter to help you assess the Obama presidency. Our reporters have compiled a database of more than 500 individual promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign. We research and rate their status as No Action, Stalled or In the Works and then ultimately determine whether it earns a Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.
I've been a fan of fact checkers for a long time, but the first time I clearly remember signing on was after watching Bowling for Columbine, which I thought was a good movie and maybe even made a lot of good points, until I did the fact checking and discovered that Michael Moore dances around the truth like a puppy around a vaccum cleaner. I don't care how much I might agree with your position, if you're going to use half-truths and made up statistics to make your case, I'm not listening anymore.
I love that so many people have access to a platform (these interwebs) to express their ideas and that more and more people every day have access to that information. The drawback to all this information is that we don't have time to read and analyze all of it, so the discourse (if you can call it that) is often reduced to whoever is talking the loudest or whoever comes up with the most conveniently memorable soundbite. It's also true that we're probably going to read whichever publication seems to lean in tandem with our own views. It's more likely that readers of the Drudge Report are the more heavy handed variety of right winger and those people are very unlikely to read the Huffington Post, therefore it follows that a lot of people are only being exposed to ideas that they already agree with - hence, no real discourse.
I just started reading Politifact, so I don't know enough about it yet to determine if it's really just presenting the facts and has no leaning either way. I don't really want to read a presentation of the "facts" that just spoonfeeds me what I already wanted to hear. Just a simple "Obama said blah, blah, blah. Is it true? Yes or no?" On the surface that seems to be exactly what it is.
Politifact will still be unable to escape criticism for one simple reason, though. It can't present, in real time, full disclosure of every single thing that every congressman, senator, cabinet member and executive staffer says, every day, all the time. They have to select what they're going to research and discuss, which opens the door for accusations of bias. For every Sarah Palin comment they flag as False, a bunch of Palin supporters will protest that the coverage is unfair because she said just as many things that are true. See, you really can't win, but I'm going to watch them try and see how it shakes out.
From their About page
PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in politics.
Every day, reporters and researchers from the Times examine statements by members of Congress, the president, cabinet secretaries, lobbyists, people who testify before Congress and anyone else who speaks up in Washington. We research their statements and then rate the accuracy on our Truth-O-Meter – True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True and False. The most ridiculous falsehoods get our lowest rating, Pants on Fire.
We also rate the consistency of public officials on our Flip-O-Meter using three ratings: No Flip, Half Flip and Full Flop.
We created the Obameter to help you assess the Obama presidency. Our reporters have compiled a database of more than 500 individual promises that Barack Obama made during the campaign. We research and rate their status as No Action, Stalled or In the Works and then ultimately determine whether it earns a Promise Kept, Compromise or Promise Broken.
I've been a fan of fact checkers for a long time, but the first time I clearly remember signing on was after watching Bowling for Columbine, which I thought was a good movie and maybe even made a lot of good points, until I did the fact checking and discovered that Michael Moore dances around the truth like a puppy around a vaccum cleaner. I don't care how much I might agree with your position, if you're going to use half-truths and made up statistics to make your case, I'm not listening anymore.
I love that so many people have access to a platform (these interwebs) to express their ideas and that more and more people every day have access to that information. The drawback to all this information is that we don't have time to read and analyze all of it, so the discourse (if you can call it that) is often reduced to whoever is talking the loudest or whoever comes up with the most conveniently memorable soundbite. It's also true that we're probably going to read whichever publication seems to lean in tandem with our own views. It's more likely that readers of the Drudge Report are the more heavy handed variety of right winger and those people are very unlikely to read the Huffington Post, therefore it follows that a lot of people are only being exposed to ideas that they already agree with - hence, no real discourse.
I just started reading Politifact, so I don't know enough about it yet to determine if it's really just presenting the facts and has no leaning either way. I don't really want to read a presentation of the "facts" that just spoonfeeds me what I already wanted to hear. Just a simple "Obama said blah, blah, blah. Is it true? Yes or no?" On the surface that seems to be exactly what it is.
Politifact will still be unable to escape criticism for one simple reason, though. It can't present, in real time, full disclosure of every single thing that every congressman, senator, cabinet member and executive staffer says, every day, all the time. They have to select what they're going to research and discuss, which opens the door for accusations of bias. For every Sarah Palin comment they flag as False, a bunch of Palin supporters will protest that the coverage is unfair because she said just as many things that are true. See, you really can't win, but I'm going to watch them try and see how it shakes out.
posted by LvG at
7:21 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home