Mainstream Media
The Wall Street Journal doesn’t give PolitiFact a grade, but one suspects it wouldn’t even reach the level of “half true”: So the watchdog news outfit called PolitiFact has decided that its “lie of the year” is the phrase “a government takeover of health care.” Ordinarily, lies need verbs and we’d leave the media criticism…
We’re well past the point at which it became fruitless to care, but it’s fascinating to watch a mainstream media “fact check” feature contort itself to justify the bias that we all know to exist in the halls of Big Journalism. One can almost see the erased editorial marks reading, “this organization couldn’t possibly say…
It’s a small thing, perhaps, but it’s been bugging me that the headline writers for the Providence Journal gave the title “Election shows Obama needs to shore up his base” when the paper published this article on November 14: Two years before voters render judgment on his tenure, Obama’s most critical task may be winning…
Sunday’s PolitiFact correctly rates as “true” RI Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s statement that “the law… permits companies that close down American factories… to take a tax deduction for the costs associated with moving the jobs to China or India or wherever.” But in its headline, in its presentation, and in an expanded quotation from Whitehouse,…
You may have heard that House Republicans’ effort to defund NPR has failed. A cynic might wonder why Republicans would push the issue during a Democrat-dominated lame-duck session, but the it came up because it won a new “online contest that allows Americans to vote for the items they want slashed from the federal budget.”…
I promise after this that I won’t hack at the ProJo’s politiflack (for at least today). Remembering that the ProJo’s model for Politifact came from the St. Petersburg Times, I note Mark Hemingway’s reminder that “‘Politifact’ is often more politics than facts“: In 2009, Politifact won a Pulitzer prize, so people put a lot of…
This paragraph, from a post-election article by Providence Journal staff writer Peter Lord deserves some reflection: For much of the general election campaign, polls indicated there was no contest. Cicilline was running ahead by 20 points or more. And he raised and spent about $1 million more than Loughlin, though that included financing his primary…
For some reason, I’ve been glum, today. Stresses at work have much to do with it, to be sure, but some of my mood has to do with concern about what voters will do, tonight. What portion of voters have even a generally accurate sense of the people and policies for which they’re voting tonight?…
“Exit polls show voters unhappy with economy, both parties” says Associated Press headline. Related: Guess who’s been repeatedly Googling the words “exit polls” for the last 10 minutes or so?
Oh, it sounds so good, doesn’t it? PolitiFact will fact check politicians to see what is true and not. But, as we’ve been pointing out here and there, PolitiFact can be used as another vehicle to slant political news coverage, albeit under the guise of “fair and balanced” fact checking. Justin has already explained how…