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

[CanHasDIY]

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

Oh, hell, that's an easy one to figure out - just tally up the number of times said politicians' lips move.

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.

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.

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

[SomeKDEUser]

This. This is very important: the necessity to seem "non-partisan" for those sites makes it wayyy too easy for the liars. After all, if you get to lie all the time and the "fact checkers" feel compelled to scrutinise your opponents extra-hard just so they can say that both sides have about the same lying rate, it's win-win!

There are issues where there are two sides. But more and more, people fight over _facts_ and this means that one side is right and the other wrong, and if you claim otherwise, you are delusional. There is no middle ground to the debate on the shape of the planet. If you say that gay parents cannot raise a child, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me there is no global warming, this is a statement of fact, not an opinion. If you tell me that the gold standard is a good idea, this is a statement of fact, that reducing taxes will increase revenues, and so on, and so forth.

All things amenable to experimental verification -- and in many case which have been previously experimentally checked -- should not be debated. Journalists should just mock the politicians saying stuff which is obviously false.

Fact checking is one thing...

[RabidReindeer]

But too many people would rather only listen to facts that they agree with.

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[Samantha Wright]

I hate to be crass, but... you may want to check your facts on that one.

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

[GodfatherofSoul]

You're an AC so I'm assuming you're trolling, but I'll answer. That quote was specifically about a bridge someone uses to get to work. Now, unless you manufacture bridges, you didn't build the bridge or the road you use to get to work.

You also didn't run the power lines, pay for the eletrical infrastructure, pay for the fuel infrastructure, pay for the education infrastructure that you're probably exploiting to hire employees who can read, write and count well enough to work for you, you didn't build the hospital just in case someone gets hurt on the job, you didn't pay for the law enforcement to protect your business and the safety of your workers at home and on the job, you didn't pay for the fire fighters who risk their lives should your business burst into flames, you didn't pay for the court system to address your grievances, you didn't pay for the military that protects you from raiding hordes of bandits from Canada and Mexico (and they WOULD exist if we didn't have a military) streaming in to steal our resources, and you probably didn't pay for the *fundamental* research your products are based on.

Yes, *A* business might have build some of those, but not YOUR business. And it's our collective tax revenue that funds these sweet amenities you call society. Your small contribution to a collective pool is what makes all of this infrastructure possible.

So, NO YOU DID NOT PAY FOR THAT.

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."