Showing posts with label Jack Marshall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jack Marshall. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Ethics Alarms: "The Washington Post’s Integrity And Trustworthiness Test Results: Mixed; Naturally, PolitiFact Flunks"

We've highlighted PolitiFact-related stories from Ethics Alarms before.  This one offers some plaudits and criticisms for the Washington Post Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler.  And it pulls no punches in its assessment of PolitiFact:
PolitiFact ... is an unethical fact-checking site that often doesn’t even try to cover its tracks as a partisan resource. It dishonestly uses the “fact check” format to challenge conservative positions and bolster Democrats. As I would have expected, PolitiFact employs euphemisms and convoluted descriptions to describe Obama’s flat out falsehood, like “overly optimistic” (you aren’t being overly optimistic when you know the sunny results you are promising won’t happen—you are lying), “less accurate” (a Clintonism), and “a different impression than what Obama is suggesting” (He wasn’t “suggesting” that nobody would be forced off their health plan; he was asserting it with no qualifiers at all, “period.”)
 There's plenty more worth reading, so visit Ethics Alarms and take it all in.

The president's promise that people could keep the healthcare plan and the doctor they like has appropriately focused attention on PolitiFact's (in)competence.

We're delighted.

Friday, January 7, 2011

Ethics Alarms: "'Lie of the Year'? Hardly"

Here's yet another well-reasoned takedown of PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" for 2010, this time from Jack Marshall's blog "Ethics Alarms."

Marshall provides an excellent summary of the PolitiFact's fundamental error:
The point of disagreement depends on one’s tolerance for  an outside  authority’s interference with free choice. Every new control, regulation or alteration in options reduces the autonomy of individuals and the marketplace. To supporters of government micromanagement of individuals and commerce, this isn’t a “takeover,” because significant choices still remain with the consumer and the industry. To those who object to all but the most unobtrusive government controls, it is a takeover, because the government is deciding which options are available.

Regardless of who is right, and this is just part of a long-standing argument about what is the proper role of government, calling one side’s sincere and defensible characterization of the law  1) a lie, and 2) “the lie of the year” is taking partisan sides, especially obnoxious for a website that promotes its lack of bias.

As usual, read the whole thing.