An Army Of Conservative Fact Checkers
By K. Daniel Glover | December 16, 2009
And the Pu-loser Award for “Correction of the Year” goes to … The Washington Post for a correction that inspired the amusing hashtag #washingtonpostcorrections on Twitter.
Here’s the correction: “A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.”
And here’s the explanation: “It’s Correction of the Year because it communicates that people notice and care about corrections, and because it demonstrates the participatory potential being unleashed by the Internet.”
Craig Silverman, author of the book Regret The Error and the blog by the same name, gave the tongue-in-cheek award to the Post, and in the same article, he praised the fact-checking value of the Internet. Silverman noted that the practice gained prominence in 2009 despite the reality that professional fact-checkers are among the casualties of the ongoing media “market failure.”
“As a result,” Silverman said, “it appears as though the future of fact-checking is in open, public and participatory systems and organizations, rather than the closed, professional systems traditionally used by large magazines. The Internet has made this shift possible.”
He is absolutely right about that, and that’s good news for conservatives. They no longer have to lobby news organizations, often to no avail, to correct misreported facts; instead, they can do the legwork themselves and spread the word online.
Two efforts this year, one of which I contributed to, come to mind: The Heritage Foundation has been fact-checking the Obama administration on health care and other topics; and before it stopped published new material this fall, the newcomer nonprofit American Issues Project had bloggers like me writing fact-check pieces for its blog.
The emergence of organizations like FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, which won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for its 2008 campaign coverage, is an encouraging development for the future of journalism. But fact checkers have biases, too. Jim Geraghty noted at The Campaign Spot last year that FactCheck flubbed a report on President Obama’s views about gun control.
PolitiFact, meanwhile, revealed its own bias this month in picking finalists for its “Lie Of The Year” award. (Voting ended at noon today.) The media outlet chose five “lies” from the right and three from the left; four of the five from the right also fell into the worst PolitiFact category of “Pants On Fire,” while only one on the left reached that level. The subtle message: Conservatives lie more often and with more gusto.
Perhaps more telling, though, was PolitiFact’s selection of Rep. Joe Wilson’s infamous “You Lie!” rant at President Obama as he addressed a joint session of Congress this fall.
PolitiFact botched the story in September by accusing Wilson, R-S.C., of a lie of his own about healthcare coverage for illegal immigrants. Then it compounded the error by nominating Wilson long after the Senate in effect vindicated him by adopting language to close the loophole that prompted his outburst.
The Wilson episode and the reaction of the professional fact checkers to it (FactCheck and AP also took Obama’s side) make a strong case for conservatives to be diligently recruiting their own army of fact checkers rather than exclusively trusting journalists with a liberal worldview to do the job fairly.
18 comments
Great article! I hope we soon see an organized group of conservatives to counter what I see as frequent liberal bias in FactCheck.org.
I wish some conservative group,or blogger, would look at the Factcheck.org fact checking site. They invariably slant their factchecking toward the left by checking (refuting) conservative/republican statements and claims, with an obvious bias, in my opinion,toward the left position, while being very soft when commenting on the liberal facts statements, which they rarely write about.
Right-Wing Extremist,
You are 100% correct about Joe Wilson! The MSM (or as I call them) the Lame Stream Media (LSM), is more of a State Run Media…One can actually get more accurate U.S. news from the English Online Version of the Russian paper, Pravda.
The LMS never reported the Harry Reid bribe to Mary Landrieu for her vote of $300 Million Dollars (known as the Louisiana Purchase). Also according to several Senate Aids emails to friends, that Obama went behind closed doors and told the Democrats, that anyone who did not vote for the Health Care bill would face Political Suicide. What did Senator Ben Nelson (D-NB) receive for his vote on Cloture…Lifetime Medicaid for his State of Nebraska. The other 17 holdouts I have yet to hear what they got for their votes.
Never-the-less, it is something you will never hear from the LSM.
Well, Joe Wilson has now been proven spot on. If abortion was not included in the bill that Obama mentioned, the Dems sure spent a lot of time crafting language for something that wasn’t there in order to pull in Ben Nelson.
So……the bribing of the States should go to show everyone that the Health Bill IS NOT necessarily for “the good of the people”. All it is is merely a bargaining tool from Obama.
What the hell is this? An auction? (Envision a Texas auctioneer, if you will)
A democratic closed-door secret society mafia-style meeting.
I just read the rules/requirements of a Cloture and I felt like I was reading the 16th page of a computer tech’s schematic manual.
How can the closed-door-mafia expect any type of sane conversation with the republicans when the republicans don’t even know what’s in the bill?
The bill that was out on the floor is merely a stage prop. It isn’t the same thing the mafia group had.
This is insane. This is outrageous. This is unconstitutional.
Yes We Can!
REPEAL OBAMACARE!
Know what? It will be YEARS before anyone paying into this receives anything. Therefore, giving anyone who has paid anything into it a tax credit or a refund (perhaps some interest) thereby not taking away anything they have already received.
Then vote the Democratic clowns like Pelosi, Reid, Franken, Durbin, Conyers, Kerry, Schumer, Rangel, the tax evading Czars (indirectly) and repeal, repeal, repeal!
Reid who has already bribed Mary Landrieu with $300 Million dollars to her State (La.) to get Cloture the first time around, then the Liberals were angry with all the removed legislation caused the bill to be re-written.
Now Reid has bribed even more to get the current Bill passed before Christmas, for who and how much is in the Politico story below…and not a single word from the Lame Stream Media, only Fox News has reported the story.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30815.html
Now that Cloture has passed, the debate begins, around 98% of the time, a bill which reaches Cloture usually passes. But there is some heavy pressure being put on the Liberals in the Senate.
ObamaCare has and always has been Democrat against Democrat, so why are the Republicans being called the bad guys for not jumping in on the Marxist Heath Care Bills…The reason is that 70% of Americans do not want this Bill.
This is the third time in the past 100 years a Marxist agenda has been tried, FDR, LBJ, and now Obama. FDR’s Socialist agendas actually extended the Great Depression by ten years,HE did not bring us out of the Depression as the “New” History books tell our children, it was WW II…had it not been for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he wanted to stay out of the war. Had he done so, Europe would be speaking German today, and the Europeans forget that the U.S. fought two wars, not a single other country helped the United States against Japan.
I would like to make something clear, the Bill now up for debate, is not the same bill Reid has locked away in his office safe. That bill will replace the current one.
Peter, you are correct, if this Bill passes, the money will be immediately allocated and spent. Yet there will be nothing for applicable in Health Care for up to seven more years. The CBO angered Obama when it revealed there were going to be $464 Million in Taxes during that period, which will increase afterwards, as will the costs.
I have also been a proponent of cleaning out both Houses, and the White House for 11 months.
For more help on getting the trash politicians out of Government, go to: http://goooh.com/home.aspx
Wesley (# 8) <<“HE [FDR] did not bring us out of the Depression as the “New” History books tell our children, it was WW II”>>
I used to believe that myself for many years, but from more recent readings, I had found the arguments from some Austrian Theory economists more credible. Namely, that the Depression ended after federal government spending was slashed by two-thirds from 1945-1948 (98 billion down to 33 billion dollars). That, along with the scaling back of FDR’s failed massive interventionist schemes, which, as you pointed out, prolonged the Depression in the first place.
Could you imagine such a draconian cut in spending these days?
I am glad some conservatives are doing checks and balances as it appears no one else is and ever does.
Good morning Neo,
Never to be contentious with you, I haven’t seen the Austrian Data, or how it was collected. The economic figures I am using for from our own Government during the years of 1938 through 1946, which I received over a year ago via FOIA.
Long before we entered the war, dormant factories suddenly sprang to life once again to manufacture goods, weapons, building and selling parts for U.S. aircraft to send to Europe. This increased each year until we entered the war. Millions of people once again had jobs, after we entered the war, and our young men left for Europe, there were not enough workers to keep up, and began hiring women to work in building all forms of airplanes (fighters, bombers, and support aircraft), every type of naval ships, jeeps, tanks, light and heavy artillery.
The trickledown effect was enormous; all the military factories needed parts, which opened other dormant factories. Suddenly people had money in their pockets again; this caused farming to boom for the first time in years, prices of meats began to rise. Clothing was again needed on a massive scale…within three years (after we were there); stock markets begin to come alive as the GDP increased by leaps and bounds.
Where you may be correct, in 1945 and 1946, the economic charts showed growth in all sectors of our economy, but there was an asterisk. Since Europe was decimated, they needed goods, food, building materials, it wasn’t until then the money from Europe began making payments, which paid back much of the debt incurred. Especially when the US began helping rebuilding the decimated countries, then eventually Japan.
However, had WW II never happened, he would have kept up his progressive policies. With the exception of all the death that war took, the worst thing which eventually came from the War was the creation of the United Nations, and Nelson Rockefeller gave them the land to build it on, so it could be in the U.S.
As for your final sentence, yes…can you even imagine a two-thirds cut in spending today? That is not going to happen under our current Marxist leadership.
Wesley –
I initially came across the two-thirds reduction in government spending tidbit from economist Thomas Dilorenzo’s book, “How Capitalism Saved America”, page 184.
The footnote he references this claim to is an essay from another economist of the Austrian School, Robert Higgs, titled “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940’s”.
Wesley – Correction: re: #12
The CORRECT footnote that Dilorenzo references his two-thirds government spending reduction claim from his book “How Capitalism Saved America” (page 184), is listed as follows on page 269 –
[U.S. Department of Commerce, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961), 711.]
The footnote in my #12 post pertaining to the “Wartime Prosperity?” essay by Robert Higgs actually addressed some of the points that you had brought up in post #11.
Curiously, when I tried to Google that essay, none of the search results produced it. However, the essay is included in Higgs’ book, “Depression, War, and Cold War – Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity”, which I own. Since the book came out in 2006, perhaps the libraries would have it, should you desire to read it.
Another essay from the “Depression, War, and Cold War” book, entitled, “From Central Planning to the Market – The American Transition, 1945-47” is a good compliment to the “Wartime Prosperity?” essay.
Regards
Hi Neo…Hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. I bought the book, “Depression, War, and Cold War – Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity” locally, and have began reading it, I like what I have read so far…thanks for the recommendation.
Back to your post #8, FDR was able to cut spending due to the influx of capital (he was not a fan of Capitalism), but was force into doing so due to before we joined the war with other countries needing us to make military equipment, and other factories re-opened for making parts for not only our equipment, for the Allies military equipment and sending massive amounts of goods and food to those being attacked.
We have had Progressive Presidents in all parties, but the Democrats were the most costly.
What we need now is a change in Party Name, several polls show our people broken into three groups:
Tea Party: 44%
Conservative: 26%
Republican: 22%
I do not think a TEA Party will work for all Americans, so perhaps if we rename the Republican Party to the New Republic Party or New Republican Party, to get everyone on the same page. Airing PSAs that the new party is all inclusive (mentioning all three groups).
Hi Wes,
Glad to hear you have the book.
Actually, the spending cuts I had alluded to were the actions of the Truman administration; I was unaware that FDR had done so as well, as you had mentioned. I guess such an unlikely concession on FDR’s part shouldn’t surprise me since the reality of war mobilization also impelled him to make another concession – the casting aside of some of the more zealous New Deal planners in his administration and adding over 10,000 business executives in the federal war agencies, as described in “The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Great Depression and the New Deal”, pgs 163, 164.
Tied into that, and due to the relatively more pro-business environment started in FDR’s third term and continued by Truman, was the the surge in private investment, from 5.0% in 1945, to 14.7% in 1946 and 1947, and 19.5% in 1948.(according to the “From Central Planning to the Market” essay)
I wholeheartedly agree that a new party name is in order. The name ‘Tea Party’ greatly appeals to me since it serves as a constant reminder of what this country was originally intended to be about. I would shuck the ‘Republican Pary’ label in an instant along with the ‘bad blood’ within its ranks who had repeatedly betrayed its more conservative constituents.
<laughing> re: ‘spending cuts’ – These days, that means a reduction in the projected increase in spending.
Not meaning to change the subject, this Nigerian Terrorist on the NWA flight, is banned from Great Briton for his ties to terror, G.B. put him in the Airline Tides database. He then flew from Nigeria to Amsterdam, and on to the U.S. (Detroit). Thankfully the bombing did not work, however that is NOT what is really important. If Briton denied him entry into the U.K., so why or how was he allowed to continue his trip. Nigeria does not do any real security procedures, but The Netherlands should have.
Worse yet, the father of the bomber contacted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria and reported to the Americans that his son had become radicalized, and was in warning the U.S. that he most likely was involved with Al Qaeda in Yemen.
Mind you, our Government has yet to refer to this young man as a Terrorist, just as they did the same with Major Nedal at the Ft. Hood killings, and despite his contacts with an Al Qaeda Yemeni Cleric.
Fox News interviewed DHS Secretary Napolitano by Peter Jackson Jr. and other Fox News anchors, she attempted to dodge all their questions as to what happened, and why he was not on our No Fly List, but was on our Tides list (a database of suspected people who are considered terrorists, or have terror ties, I would love to know how he was missed. Peter Johnson would not let up on her claims the list was part of the Bush Admin…It has been a year since Bush was in office, it is now up to the new DHS to take care of business.
She actually told Fox that the system worked after the attempt…What in the hell is that type of statement? Would the “System” worked had he succeeded? NO!
Under Bush, the DHS had all of our agencies working together and sharing information, Obama has now undone that order, and are now prohibited from info sharing…THAT is why it was never picked up on.
I do not care what anyone thinks of Bush, but he had the right idea, more terror plots were thwarted during his term in office after the WTC attacks, due to the media, there are hundreds more the Lame Stream Media never reported.
A few weeks back, Briton’s Mi-6 have told the U.S. of 24 more airline attacks by terrorists, yet we had not heard that from our Media or Government, until Fox obtained the report.
If you all recall, Obama thought it best to “Talk” to Iran, other Muslim countries and Dictators…And how has that worked out for him? Did he actually think Iran would listen…during their talks, the secretly built even more uranium processing facilities. Not to mention the development of more and more powerful missile delivery systems…And still nothing from the Admin., not ever an embargo.
Then there was the other Nigerian man who was allowed to board planes “without a passport” from, on the same flight the Bomber made.
I believe Obama is protecting Muslims; I have posted a link before which shows Obama on several occasions using a meeting room in the White House where he and other Muslims are praying to Allah. This is a difficult prayer (done 5 times a day) yet Obama knows the prayer and rituals which accompany them).
The FIRST job of any American President is to protect our citizens, not going very well, is it?
This is the third time in the past 100 years a Marxist agenda has been tried, FDR, LBJ, and now Obama. FDR’s Socialist agendas actually extended the Great Depression by ten years,HE did not bring us out of the Depression as the “New” History books tell our children, it was WW II…had it not been for the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he wanted to stay out of the war. Had he done so, Europe would be speaking German today, and the Europeans forget that the U.S. fought two wars, not a single other country helped the United States against Japan.
http://www.squidoo.com/weddingmaidofhonorspeech
You’re absolutely right, Daniel. Great article by the way! I also really agree with this comment:
I also don’t think Joe Wilson should have to apologize to ANYONE for telling the truth. Just because he wasn’t “politically correct” and his constituents think he should join them in being pied piper followers who can’t think for themselves.
Probably a lot more of them were thinking the same thing Joe was thinking but too afraid to speak out for fear of losing money for their states.
(I do some writing for a sprained ankles website resource.)
December 17 at 3:27 pm | #1 | Link
Isn’t it fabulous that the liberals and their MSM’s seem to overlook all the health bill’s loopholes to fit what Obama “says”? Kind of reminds me of all their constitutional lawyers reading into the Bill of Rights and coming up with a completely different version than our founding fathers imagined.
I don’t listen to ANY of BO’s speeches because he’s full of condensed owl crap flip-flop garbage that always reminds me of the first person on the scene of a serious car wreck telling a victim who just lost half their brain, “Don’t worry, you’ll be up and running by next week”.
I also don’t think Joe Wilson should have to apologize to ANYONE for telling the truth. Just because he wasn’t “politically correct” and his constituents think he should join them in being pied piper followers who can’t think for themselves……probably a lot more of them were thinking the same thing Joe was thinking but too afraid to speak out for fear of losing money for their states.
BTW—Pelosi is still clipping the president’s toenails but for an extra 4% promised salary increase Obama has added a couple new tasks for her: 1. 3 days a week she stands in the Oval Office as Gibbs, Summers, etc. exits, she officially wipes their noses of any brown residue. 2. Seven days a week required to walk out of the office and not slither anymore.