Red State: "PolitiFact Proves Yet Again It Is a Left Wing Attack Machine With Nonpartisan Veneer"

Red State's Erick Erickson is all over PolitiFact for its grading of a recent claim by Texas governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry.

Erickson works quite a few angles against the PolitiFact effort.  We think Erickson perhaps shorted the basic obvious criticism that Perry's statement was never intended to hold up tort reform as the sole explanation for Texas' increase in physicians, but Erickson hits his target with such gusto that his piece is certainly worth a read.

The introductory material is particularly good:

As a general rule of thumb I heard somewhere, fact checkers don’t check facts.

Fact checkers exist to put an objective, nonpartisan veneer on whatever some reporter wants to say. And when fact checkers take it upon themselves to be arbiters of truth, they use their own biases. One of the worst is Politifact, which the media now hides (sic) behind routinely to give cover to a left-of-center spin on truth.

The fact check is striking for its acknowledgment of expert opinion to the effect that tort reform helped attract doctors coupled with its flat finding of "False."

There is no question that tort reform drove down medical malpractice insurance premiums and reduced the number of malpractice suits. And there is no question that most health care providers like the change and say it’s a factor that leads them to practice in the state.

Bold emphasis added.



Note:  This post was accidentally reverted to draft form at some point.  Restored to published status 1/15/2012