Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Lost letters: Apology Tour edition

We love getting reader feedback on our posts. And we're much more likely to respond to criticism than is PolitiFact. We found this bit of feedback very recently posted to a message board after somebody mentioned how PolitiFact found claims about an Obama "apology tour" false:
How cute, some nut's blog claiming that conservative-leaning Politifact is biased in favor of Obama. And claims that Obama had an "apology tour" because...far-right nutcase Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation says so
How odd for "conservative-leaning PolitiFact" to dismiss the one conservative view among the four experts whose views it solicited! Especially when Gardiner stood alone among the experts with his experience in international relations.

And, of course, our argument wasn't based solely on PolitiFact arbitrarily ignoring an expert opinion it solicited. We found descriptions of apologies in professional journals and applied the definitions we found to the idea of an Obama "apology tour." Because that's what nutcases do.

Why didn't PolitiFact bother reviewing professional literature in its effort to settle the fact of the matter? Probably the same reason it ignored Gardiner's professional opinion: PolitiFact is conservative-leaning.

It makes complete sense if reality is liberally biased.


Find the full explanation of why it's reasonable to call Obama's world tour an "apology tour" at Zebra Fact Check

Addendum:

Jeff thinks it may not be obvious to every visitor that I'm kidding about PolitiFact's conservative bias. This note is intended as a corrective for any who might fall in that group.

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