Angry PolitiFact co-founder speaks truth to power?

PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair tends to get all the credit (or blame!) these days for creating PolitiFact, but news technologist Matt Waite, once of the St. Petersburg (later Tampa Bay) Times has a claim to a role as PolitiFact's principal developer.

Thus we were surprised that Waite stuck his neck out by blaming journalists for the problems facing journalism.

Waite was one of the journalists Nieman Journalism Lab chose to make bold predictions for the coming year in journalism. Waite's contribution was a scathingly worded prediction that journalists would not resolve any of the big problems because ... journalists would not admit they are the problem. Yes, PolitiFact Bias readers, click the link and read it. It's short, pithy and angry.

This is what happens when you predict the future while angry. https://t.co/e4EfeA7880

— Matt Waite (@mattwaite) December 13, 2016

PolitiFact is mainstream media journalism. The problems Waite describes in the mainstream media apply broadly to PolitiFact.



Afters:

We appreciate Mollie Z. Hemingway's prescription for journalism published at The Federalist.