Homework
: Dan Froomkin calls on all bloggers to fact-check the debaters tonight. Your editor has spoken. Now get to work.
9 responses to “Homework”
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How about fact checking the questioners? Journalist seem to have some issues in this area as well.
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This debate, it will have questions?
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Not to seem Orwellian, but it’s also important to fact check the “fact checkers”. Much of what I see passed off as “fact checking” on the internet is brazen political opinionating, no more reliable than the candidate himself saying “so-and-so lied about my position”.
This is particularly worrisome in Kerry’s case, in that he has in fact taken so many divergent sides of every issue that “fact checkers” can “debunk” anything you say about him simply by proferring some alternate quotation.
When Kerry, for instance, claims that it wasn’t worth it to go into Iraq, it is quite fair to say that he is implying that leaving Saddam in power was fine; this reasonable assertion is turned on its head by partisan defenders who parse words and offer other more macho statements made by the Senator in front of more macho audiences.
Yet you already see this assertion being characterized as a “lie”. That’s not fact checking, that’s politics. -
In fact, that’s not fact checking or politics, that’s slinging mud because your position is weak.
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The GOP is not counting on the fact-checking in the press to be non-partisan, and has set up a site to fact check Kerry as the debates go on. Here it is: http://www.DebateFacts.com
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I hope that the Kerry camp is doing more than that. The Bush camp has live feeds going to thousands of conservative bloggers and has issued a downloadable handbook to them so that they can get any Kerry mistake out and “on the ground” via the internet even before CNN can.
I have a link to the downloadable book and quotes from Bush’s team here. -
Is anyone watching the debates to judge their positions on issues, rather than simply their accuracy on minutiae?
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An impossible task – more apt as a dissertation. What would be more manageable would be fact checking anything that comes out of FactCheck – they usually make oodles of mistakes even on a limited topic.
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. . .fact-check the debaters
Why, do you really expect either one of them to say something they haven’t already been saying for the past few months?
