Maybe I'm a johnny come lately to this new site, but I just came across Politifact.com. Its a sort of public-official-statement-fact-checker thingy. Really kind of interesting. It's a project founded and sponsored by the St. Petersburg Times. I'm still scanning through it to see if its got a liberal or conservative bias, but it seems to be on the up and up.
It includes an "Obameter" which tracks President Obama's campaign promises by whether they've been fulfilled, in-progress, broken, stalled, or no action. Also, if you look at the site you'll see that a lot of the statements that fall into the "Liar Liar Pants on Fire" category tend to come from the far right when they are criticizing the Obama Administration on the health care issue. But there are a few from the far left in there as well.
It's an interesting premise that I think the Internet facilitates really well. The key to something like this working has to be its credibility and lack of bias. Its kind of fun to see the various spin-miesters (including Utah's own adopted son - Glen Beck - gasp!) being taken to task for stretching the truth. In a world of who do you really believe, its nice to have another resource to use to verify the accuracy of the dialogue and debate.
So - for example, they take former House Minority Whip Representative Roy Blunt's (R-Mo) statement: "I'm 59. In either Canada or Great Britain, if I broke my hip, I couldn’t get it replaced" and break it down citing sources then ultimately assigning it a "Pants on Fire" label. Come to find out people even older than the Congressman often get hip replacement surgeries in both Canada and Great Britain.
For another "Pants on Fire" statement: Joe Biden talking about the Swine Flu on the Today Show: ""When one person sneezes, it goes all the way through the aircraft." Turns out a sneeze would just go a couple of rows.
It's these sort of off the cuff exagerations and in some cases out and out lies that dialute the facts from the honest debate. So whether this site is perfect or not I still applaud the concept and hope to see more of these sites pop up in the future.
I like this site, for the most part, but I am also very suspicious of them and consume it cautiously. I have caught them contradicting themselves and they do not always provide equal voice to both sides - which helps sway people's opinions, and that bothers me. I want the facts and if they're going to give opinions, then I want opinions from both sides so I can draw my own conclusions. I do like that they provide links to the right so you can sort of fact check their facts for yourself, at least to some degree. They have the power to pick and choose which things to fact-check, and which things not to fact-check (and they decide the truth rating), and this in itself can reflect a bias.
ReplyDeleteFor example, I asked them to fact-check a statement on "This Week" by Donna Brazil when she said under "GW Bush no new jobs were created" (I already knew that her statement was false). They responded and said that they were working on fact checking that episode and would include that statement by Donna. But when they came out with their fact check of that episode, they had fact checked a meaningless statement by her that provided her with a "true" rating. They did not fact check her jobs statement that was clearly false.
Also, I wrote to them about some contradictions that I found and they said they only had 3 national level researchers and they do not have time to look back at their past reports for consistency. I told them that they shouldn't have to, if it were really just facts they were reporting.
Here are the contradictions I found with them:
"During the 1980s, Reagan cut taxes, and tax revenues did go up almost every year."
From that same politifact report:
"The laws that reduced tax rates produced declines in revenues, and the laws that increased tax rates produced increases in tax revenues."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/nov/09/mike-pence/mike-pence-says-raising-taxes-lowers-tax-revenues/
If Reagan cut taxes and revenues still went up (all but one year), then at the very least their statement "The laws that reduced tax rates produced declines in revenues" is misleading. At worst, it is just incorrect.
And
"So if Gillespie's point is that Bush's tax cuts led to record revenues, they did -- for 2007 at least - but that was a record aided by a the largest, non-recession economy in American history."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/jul/13/ed-gillespie/gillespie-touts-bush-record-taxes-job-creation/
From a later report they said of the Bush tax cuts:
"when taxes were cut in 2001, collections dropped."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/nov/09/mike-pence/mike-pence-says-raising-taxes-lowers-tax-revenues/
My problem with their reports here is that they attributed the 2007 record tax receipts to the record size economy, deflecting readers away from the notion that the tax cuts prompted the growth in the economy and its subsequent record tax receipts (which is a fine opinion). However, what is telling of bias is that later they would only attribute the revenue drop after the 2001 tax cuts to the tax cuts, and not even mention the 2001 recession, 9/11, recent dot com bubble, as possibilities. So between those two reports they are really saying the record tax receipts are not from a tax cut, but from a big economy - but the drop in tax receipts for the government are not from the slower economy and only from the tax cut. Seems to reflect bias.
I do wish we could get a real, unbiased, place that presents facts and opinions from BOTH sides, side by side, so I can be free to draw my own conclusions based on facts and opinions from BOTH sides.