Top five reasons why David Jolly did not critique PolitiFact in February (Updated)

Update March 2, 2018

We've been curious, especially in light of the gun debate's current popularity, what has happened to PolitiFact's experiment involving "reader advocates." Particularly we noted the absence of Republican David Jolly. We published a post yesterday  [March 1--bww] addressing this curiosity and included a healthy dose of snark. 

Mr. Jolly has since responded via Twitter that his silence was the result of personal matters, including a death in the family and threats he's been receiving.

Our sarcasm was intended to mock the same problems we typically do with PolitiFact. While there's nothing offensive in anything we wrote, we've decided to remove the post in deference to Mr. Jolly's personal circumstances.

We'll continue to use snark to highlight PolitiFact's dubious operation, but in this instance we don't see the value in unnecessary jokes in light of Mr. Jolly's response.
(above by Jeff D.)
Update continued:

Instead of deleting the post or preserving it offsite via the Internet Archive, we're putting it below a page break and changing the text to white (on a white background) to make it mostly invisible to all except the insatiably curious.

Some blue highlights from embedded URLs will remain visible.

It's March 1, 2018!

That means that Rep. David Jolly, hired by PolitiFact to serve as a Republican guest columnist on Feb 9, 2018 (unless it was Feb. 1, 2018, counting his hire as a "reader representative") has made it through his first calendar month without publishing anything.

In honor of that non-event, we decided to have some fun by naming the top ten five reasons behind Jolly's failure to publish.

5. Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact was too perfect. There was no legitimate critique.

 

4. Jolly thought the contract called for him to start in 2019.

 

3. Coyotes ate his laptop.

2. Jolly was too busy advocating for sensible gun-control measures.

 

1. Jolly realized when Alan Grayson was laid off with pay that he could likewise get paid for doing nothing.

PolitiFact announced its guest columnist scheme saying it was supposed to help PolitiFact gain credibility across party lines.

The experiment is slated to run through April. If it's successful, PolitiFact may renew it.

We don't see any reason to expect success from the scheme. On the contrary, PolitiFact's made itself a laughingstock by naming Florida Democrat Alan Grayson its first selection to serve as its Democratic reader advocate.

But maybe we're just natural pessimists.



Post-publication fixes: Right after publishing, we went back in to fix formatting and the title of the post, which announced "10 reasons" instead of five. We apologize for the errors. 3:55 p.m. update: Fixed a repeat of the error in the post text with a strikethrough plus the word "five."