Forbes: "PolitiFact and the Traditional Journalism Trap"

After a focused effort to publish my own response to Bill Adair's thin defense of PolitiFact's choice for its "Lie of the Year," I ran across a similar item in Forbes by John McQuaid.

McQuaid and I found two key areas of agreement.

First, the response story from PolitiFact editor Bill Adair was born of conceit:

The whole PolitiFact ruckus has the feel of traditional newspaper journalism (despite the new-ish fact-checking approach) whipsawed by forces it cannot grasp. Traditional newspaper journalism wades boldly into the public square wielding its post-Watergate, “objective” approach and finds itself besieged. And so it concludes: from nasty anonymous comments to partisan sniping to political debates that are never resolved, the public square sucks.

Second, PolitiFact is unable or unwilling to adequately explain and defend its argument for "Lie of the Year":

Today, if you make a Big Statement, people will come after you. Yes, some (most?) will be hacks and fools. But some will be smart, and they will demolish you. Your Pulitzer Prize will not protect you. So you should be prepared to defend yourself and your statement. That means wading into the public square not only with facts, but with arguments and a grasp of the subtleties of the issue at hand. This is, on the whole, a good thing. Readers can affirm or object. Commentators can comment. And fact-checkers can defend and elaborate on their decisions.

That Politifact is apparently unable to understand the necessity of this, and may not even possess the vocabulary or self-awareness needed to do it, suggests it has big problems ahead.

McQuaid's article is worth a read.  It's short and occurs in two parts (1,2).

McQuaid does not touch on the issue of PolitiFact's bias problem.  But his comments touch one of the key sources of media bias.  Superficial knowledge of the subject tends to increase the role of ideological bias in reporting.  That's why citing expert sources may lead to problems where the experts disagree.  The journalist isn't likely to settle an issue debated by the experts on the topic.  Yet bias may lead the journalist to prefer one expert assessment over another.

Forbes: "How to Fix Fact-Checking"

It's gratifying to see journalists and pundits piling on PolitiFact for all the reasons PFB preaches.  The latest to jump on is Forbes magazine with a story by John McQuaid titled "How to Fix Fact-Checking."

McQuaid uses the recent Weekly Standard story by Mark Hemingway as his jumping-off point:

The Weekly Standard deplores fact-checking – the journalistic efforts, by PolitiFact and others, to vet what politicians and others in the public eye say and call out lies and half-truths. So much that Standard editor Mark Hemingway is trying to knock down the whole fact-checking enterprise, arguing it’s a liberal media scam.

McQuaid doesn't buy into Hemingway's suggestion that fact checkers intentionally skew to the left.  But he grants that the fact checking biz does have problems (bold emphasis added):

Here’s the thing, though. The Standard piece offers up some genuine examples of faulty fact-checking in service of its tendentious argument. The problem with fact-checking is not that it’s a liberal media plot. The problem is that fact-checking – like everything – is sometimes a lazy, half-assed business. If fact-checking is as important as it claims, its practitioners need to acknowledge its problems and fix them.

We argue that the tendency of journalists to lean left translates into a tendency for the preponderance of "half-assed" fact checking to harm conservatives and benefit liberals.  McQuaid is probably right that the bias isn't intentional--but often it's so bad that one is hard pressed to detect the difference between intentional and unintentional bias.

Read it all.  The snippets above come from Page 1, while Page 2 contains McQuaid's prescriptions for the tainted industry.