Monday, November 18, 2019

We want Bill Adair subjected to the "Flip-O-Meter"

It wasn't that long ago we reported on Bill Adair's article for Columbia Journalism Review declaring "Bias is good" along with a chart indicating fact-check journalism has more opinion to it than either investigative reporting or news analysis.

Yet WRAL, in announcing its new partnership with PolitiFact North Carolina, quoted Adair saying PolitiFact is unbiased:
“What is important about PolitiFact is not just that it’s not biased,” Adair said, “but that we show our work and that we show all of our sources.”
Naturally we cannot allow that to pass. We used WRAL's contact form to reach out to the writer of the article, Ashley Talley.

We pointed out the discrepancy between what Talley reported from Adair and what Adair wrote for Columbia Journalism Review. We suggested somebody should fact check Adair.

Next we'll be contacting Paul Specht of PolitiFact North Carolina over this quotation:
“One thing I love about PolitiFact is that the format is very structured and it's not up to me to decide what is or isn't true,” said Paul Specht, WRAL’s PolitiFact reporter who has been covering local, state and national politics for years. “It's up to me to go do the research and then it's up to the research to tell us what is true.”
We're not sure how that's supposed to square with Adair's declaration from a few years ago that "Lord knows the decision about a Truth-O-Meter rating is entirely subjective."

What changed?

In addition to its "Truth-O-Meter" PolitiFact publishes "Flip-O-Meter" items.

We'd like to see Adair on the Flip-O-Meter.

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