Saturday, July 16, 2011

Red State: "PolitiFact or PolitiSpin?"

Red State blogger "Flagstaff" published a survey of PolitiFact's fact checking in early July.  Though the survey was limited in scope and lacked any apparent scientific construction, the conclusion is solid:
In the end, we can’t trust a newspaper service to grade the truthfulness of politicians for us.  The grades turn on the political bias of the paper, and you can imagine where that is.  We can’t simply believe claims that they’re non-partisan; we must make them prove it by what they write, then do our own evaluation anyway, based on whether what they say makes sense or not.
Flagstaff made a valuable addition in the subsequent commentary thread:
The bias mostly seems to present by nit-picking at petty mistakes of the right, insisting on strict definitional usage of words, finding fault with what is NOT said, and glossing over major errors from the left, supplying exculpatory explanations for obvious mistakes, allowing broad interpretation of leftist words and their intent, basically behaving exactly as the MSM does every day
Yeah.  That.

Visit Red State to read it all.

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