Today, Everybody's a Fact Checker

Hugh Pickens points out an article by David Zweig at The Atlantic about the rise of fact-checking sites on the internet, and the power they give to journalists and average internet denizens to sniff out fiction parading as truth. Quoting: "Since the beginning of the republic (not the American republic, I'm talking the Greek republic) politicians have resorted to half-truths and bald-faced lies. And while tenacious reporters and informed citizens have tracked these falsehoods over the years, until now they've lacked the interconnectivity and real-time capabilities of the Web to amplify their findings. Sites like the Washington Post's Fact-Check column and FactCheck.org, which draws hundreds of thousands of unique visitors each month, often provide fodder for public fascination with fact-checking. ... Perhaps the masses don't care about inaccuracies. Many Democrats and Republicans alike will believe what they want and ignore or disregard the truth. ... But there are enough experts within a variety of fields rabidly conversing about errors that content-creators—be they politicians, journalists, or filmmakers—are now forced to be on their toes in a way they never have been before. And that's a good thing.'" Zweig also points out Snopes, Prochronisms, and Photoshop Disasters as useful tools for spotting errors or misrepresentations.

Comments

truthiness

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if there were a running tally on each politician for how many times they distorted or lied about something

I want to know ho much truthiness each of these clowns emit.

Re:truthiness

[Sir_Sri]

It's not just the number of lies though, it's the scale and scope. If you say "my plan will create 350 000 jobs at no cost to the taxpayers" and some independent analysis says "more like 300 000 jobs at a cost of 10 million dollars" versus "will cost 150 000 jobs, and cost taxpayers 100 million dollars".

have a look at, for example: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/01/bill-clinton/its-typical-presidential-candidates-release-10-or-/

Which is rated as half true by politifact. Bill clinton claimed that it's typical to release 10 or 11 years of tax returns when running for president. Now here's the problem, lets take one datapoint. Barrack obama releasing only 7 years of tax returns (from 2000-2007 I think). But he didn't release more than that, because almost certainly the ones *before* 2000 are mind numbingly boring. He was a lecturer, then a senior lecturer, with no other appreciable income. So what are his tax returns going to have? A list of math mistakes he made that was corrected by the IRS and generic pointless stuff about earning a lecturer salary. So they kind of mindlessly ignore why he didn't release tax returns (- as in they weren't relevant-) and just count him as 7 years. Then they add up all of these numbers of tax returns listed out of context, and spit out an average saying bill clinton is exaggerating. Well sure, he's exaggerating, but the fact check itself is based on shitty data analysis that doesn't consider the quality of any of its data points. (other example, John Kerry's returns were only for the period he was with his current wife).

Lets take a trivial example. True. Sarah Palin, 1 in 7 families are on food stamps (http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2012/aug/02/sarah-palin/sarah-palin-says-1-7-american-families-food-stamps/ ). Ok... there's some trivial calculations to do there, but basically this is a single discreet fact that can actually be measured. So sure, she is telling the truth, but does it matter if the fact she is working from is true if her suggested solution isn't testable?

On the broad spectrum of minor spoken errors to complete disregards for the existence of reality politicians will have different degrees of lies on different topics, and you can always count on them to lie about each other. But lying about each other isn't actually policy, policy is what matters and trying to gauge the accuracy of proposed policy predictions is still well beyond the realm of most people, or even beyond all but the most specialized of bloggers (and then trying to figure out which specialized blog is correct and which isn't is beyond most people). To me, this gap, in trying to accurately assess credibility is the role the media should have, in finding experts who work with testable models that have track records and giving their assessments to the public. But that's not what happens. And as you say, you want to know how much truthiness these clowns emit, but in practice that's really freaking hard and no one with the capability to do it properly is rising to the challenge. Including, unfortunately, the long respected BBC, who have started to buy into the equal time for competing views even if one is discredited problem.

Re:truthiness

[Uberbah]

The fact checker (it was either the Washington Post or Politifact) claimed he was off by miles, but that was because the person doing the fact checking knew nothing about how Congress makes budgets. For example, the Department of Veteran's Affairs is a separate budget item from the Department of Defense, but to claim that this is really a separate cost from 'defense spending' is ignorant

^^^^^This. The "official" number bandied about is ~600 billion dollars, but the real number is more than twice that much. They make it look smaller by, as you point out, excluding things like the VA from defense spending. Ditto for the GI Bill, interest on past military spending, Fatherland Security, military aid to countries like Israel, the Department of Energy managing our nuclear weapons, etc etc.....

The Real US National Security Budget: 1.2 Trillion

Facts are facts... or are they?

[Sebastopol]

Political fact checking is actually a lot harder than it seems. I used to follow politifact.com and there were a large number of debates over their assessment of policy statements, largely due to the fact that emperical data for dollars spent or benefits from policy (in terms of dollars) are either not recorded, not part of public record, or are just estimates from various biased "experts".

There isn't even agreement on how to measure federal spending (e.g., when Bush administration purposefully excluded out the cost of the two wars when computing debt/deficit)!!!

Sigh.

Re:Facts are facts... or are they?

[dkleinsc]

The problem with Politifact, and in fact much of political reporting, is the cult of false equivalency. If they consistently portray politicians as liars and others as truth-tellers, then they'll be accused of partisanship and lose credibility. So the effect of this is that political figures who are regularly liars and only occasionally speak the truth end up looking no more dishonest than political figures who usually tell the truth but occasionally slip up.

Who Fact-checks the Fact Checkers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the media "fact checkers" are really checking whether a particular statement contradicts the media's narrative. If it does, then it is "misleading" whether it is accurate or not. And they don't check facts unless they contradict a narrative. They also don't check the medias on ingrained urban myths no matter how often they are reported.

My favorite un-checked fact is the claim that Daley stole the 1960 election for Kennedy. There have been whole articles written about why Nixon didn't demand an investigation in Illinois, especially during the Florida imbroglio in 2000. There is a book out now that attributes this failure to intervention by former Presidents who, according to this story, feared such an investigation would raise doubts about the whole legitimacy of the government. Missed in all this and never "fact-checked" is the reality that Kennedy had enough electoral votes even without Illinois. In other words, its impossible for Daley to have stolen the election.

Big Brother will Take FactCheck.org Offline

[ClassicASP]

They're already all over Wikileaks and doing whatever they can to kill that off. I'm sure FactCheck.org is next on the chopping block in the years to come. We can't have the truth out there. Thats not in the govt's best interest! They'll think of some kinda excuse. Maybe it'll be copyright infringement, or perhaps they'll claim its a bunch of propaganda. Whatever the reason, I'm sure in time they'll find one.

"Rabid" is an appropriate word

[Baloroth]

Blogs like Prochronisms look at 'historical changes in language by algorithmically checking historical TV shows and movies.' They utilize tools like Google Ngram viewer to bust Mad Men, for example, for using terms or phrases in dialogue that didn't yet exist.

Really, no offense (ok, maybe a little offense), but this comes across (to me anyways) as slightly... sad. It's one thing if you are looking up a fact about the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere last year. But this is another thing completely. I think Ratatouille actually put it quite well:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.

The grammar nazi or the fact checker is essentially a critic: someone who is basically incapable, or simply too lazy, to bother creating something worthwhile, so they spend their time criticizing other people's work instead. I think they do it largely to inflate their feeling of self-worth: after all, if they can see the flaws in other peoples' work, it must not be all that great.

The fact is in many of these cases, whatever "problem" they find is really totally and utterly insignificant. Honestly, I don't care if Mad Men uses phrases that weren't around in the 1960s: it's an enjoyable show with great characters, in my opinion. It would be one thing if it was horribly unrealistic or created a culture radically different from the real culture of the 60s, but the mere fact that they are "busting" Mad Men for using anachronistic phrases... I mean, I suppose you could complain about something more shallow than that, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head (wait, nevermind, speaking of the top of the head gave me an idea: they could complain about the hairstyles being just slightly off. Yeah, that'd be a bit more shallow). Can it be that there are people who literally have nothing better to do than find tiny errors in phrases in a critically acclaimed show? I suppose there is, but there really shouldn't be.

Of course, this is nowhere near as bad as the people seriously complaining on the Internet about the use of Comic Sans in the presentation announcing the discovery of the Higgs Boson. I don't even have a comment about that, really, besides that it's almost unbelievable, but that's the Internet, I guess.

The problem with facts....

[dremspider]

Is you can tell the truth, and still completely misrepresent the information. To see how this works, I will differ to Jon Stewart... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/26/jon-stewart-you-didnt-build-that_n_1705264.html Recently I saw someone post on facebook "how ridiculous it was that olympians needed to pay $9K in taxes to the US". I though.. man that is ridiculous, I am sure very few athletes are going to go and sell their medals, though some athletes would have difficulty paying for that tax bill. Then I do 5 seconds of googling and find out, that they are payed $25K for each gold medal, and are simply paying on that... to top it off, to pay that the athletes would need to be in the upper tax bracket meaning they aren't struggling for cash. In other words, it is simply income and therefore they need to pay taxes on it. I mentioned it and they commented back thanks, that makes more sense though usually people get pissy because it doesn't fit with their idealogy. Then you find out that Romney, Foxnews and everyone trying to convey taxes are evil are repeating this same mis representation of the facts.

Re:Misrepresentations killing political discourse

[Attila Dimedici]

Only one side will outright lie...

While I absolutely agree with that statement, I am pretty confident that you think it is the other side from the one I do. The Republican interpretation of Obama's "you didn't build that" is consistent with Obama's record. That is, Obama has shown a consistent pattern of considering all money as legitimately the government's and that people should be grateful that the government lets them keep some of it.

David Brooks (NYT) said it best

[whitefox]

Dullest Campaign Ever - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/31/opinion/brooks-dullest-campaign-ever.html

"Finally, dishonesty numbs. A few years ago, newspapers and nonprofits set up fact-checking squads, rating campaign statements with Pinocchios and such. The hope was that if nonpartisan outfits exposed campaign deception, the campaigns would be too ashamed to lie so much.

"This hope was naïve. As John Dickerson of Slate has said, the campaigns want the Pinocchios. They want to show how tough they are. But the result is a credibility vacuum. It’s impossible to take ads seriously. They are the jackhammer noise in the background of life."