Factchecks are a joke
Of all the things that the media does that make me laugh, the faux "fact check" is my favorite. I actually laughed out loud when I read the Associated Press' fact check on the Park 51 mosque. It began:
A New York imam and his proposed mosque near ground zero are being demonized by political candidates — mostly Republicans — despite the fact that Islam is already very much a part of the World Trade Center neighborhood. And that Muslims pray inside the Pentagon, too, less than 80 feet from where terrorists attacked.
As I wrote elsewhere . . . when composing something that you’re trying to pass off as an independent judgment of “facts,” lay off the non sequitirs, politicking, loaded phrases, red herrings and unsubstantiated statements.
The St. Petersburg Times PolitiFact had another howler this week. Mark Tapscott of the Washington Examiner, where my husband works, had written:
"Obama’s stimulus, passed in his first month in office, will cost more than the entire Iraq War -- more than $100 billion more."
Is this not true? Well, the PolitiFact machine cycles out paragraph after paragraph after paragraph explaining that there is a lot to consider here. They concede that the "facts" and "data" support Tapscott but they quote other people saying that maybe the numbers offered by official government sources don't tell the whole story. Now, they don't wonder whether the stimulus numbers are correct -- those apparently come from the hand of God. But the other numbers could, conceivably, undercount the full cost.
The final verdict? "Barely true."
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Barely true. That's awesome. So it is true . . . but only barely. That was a close one.
I wonder if the fact checker judged his wife only "barely pregnant" when she provided him with proof.
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Comments :
May '10
Re: Factchecks are a joke
You're barely right.
Jul '10
Re: Factchecks are a joke
It's one thing when a clearly agenda-driven outfit (like Media Matters) quibbles with "facts". But when putatively MSM organizations do it, it just highlights the fact that they simply do not have the imagination to imagine a world that fails to fit their preferred template. It grates on the mind in an awful way.
It is also more often than not a "fact-check" of opinion. If you say the sky is partly cloudy, and I say it is partly sunny, who is right? Well, we both are. Any attempt to say different smacks of agenda.
The whole thing's a fool's game.
May '10
Re: Factchecks are a joke
They'll be quite a bit of fact checking after the first week of Nov.: Americans are ignorant, mislead, don't grasp the "fact" that our president's policies are "correct," etc. Can't wait.