Monday, February 13, 2012

National Review: "Mark Hemingway on 'Fact-Checking'"

National Review's Reihan Salam amplifies (December 2011) the criticism of PolitiFact by Mark Hemingway and published in the Weekly Standard from the same month:
I’ve often noticed that the “fact-checkers” in question are often obtuse, misleading, or both, and Hemingway makes the case in systematic fashion.
Salam quotes Hemingway's article extensively and adds his hearty agreement to Hemingway's criticism, adding his own swipe at PolitiFact's lack of transparency with respect to ideological bias:
To the extent that the mission of PolitiFact is to offer richer context for the statements made by leading public officials, I’m all for it. That is part of what we try to do in this space. Yet there are at least two important distinctions: (a) our ideological perspective is clear; (b) we make an effort to make reference to and to provide links to contrary views, though perhaps not as much as we might if we presented ourselves as neutral observers on the political scene.
PolitiFact's use of the "non-partisan" label is a fig leaf.

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