If you’ve not become a reader of factcheck.org, you should. They work too hard, in my biased view, to present flaws on both sides. But that’s a virtuous sin in such an organization. It’s review of the VP debates is great.
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Meta
If they only presented flaws from one side (I’m assuming the right), they’d lose all credibility. I would agree that this sort of unbiased reporting is virtuous. It’s too bad none of the other “news” outlets can follow suit.
Jason Kiesel
Founder & CEO
http://www.freedomspeaks.com
Factcheck seems to have missed Biden’s constitutional blunders. He claimed:
1. That the position of the VP was executive rather than legislative, as demonstrated by Article I. Article I is about the legislative branch and describes (among other things) the VP’s role therein. One can argue that the VP has become primarily executive, but that isn’t how the office is set up in the Constitution, which is what Biden was citing.
2. That the only legislative role of the VP was to cast a tiebreaking vote. The VP is stated in Article I to be president of the Senate. As I understand it, that means both that he presides, if present, and that he gets to make decisions on the rules which require a supermajority to overrule. I gather the latter was something of an issue back when the Republicans were discussing the “nuclear option” to dealing with judicial filibusters.
Knowledge and truth are the only true callings, and any exposure of the truth has its own purpose and validity. The difficulty comes when an entry in column A must be titrated with an entry in column B, and there is a charade that the magnitudes equal and obliterate each other.
The failure comes when criticism and reporting degenerates to “Some say the sun sets in the east, some say it sets in the west — the truth must be somewhere in between.” That is a corruption and distortion of truth, and not virtuous sin.
I think FactCheck.org and similar factchecking work because 1) they are professional nonpartisans (not your self-volunteered online teenager or angry person) and 2) stick to simple facts.
It’s easy to catch Obama continuously giving false information about McCain’s socials security program (you seniors in FL would have lost all your money). It’s much more difficult to present complex issues such, as is social security privatization benifical; a position I agree with Obama and the democrats http://www.socialsecuritybullshit.com
It’s a much more difficult journalist problem of how to report on complex issues. Get a quote from both sides?
The thing is it isn’t unbiased when it’s false equivalency. When you “work too hard…to present flaws on both sides” (ie. show big lies from one side and small slips from the other as if they were equally bad) you’re biased. FactCheck is biased because they try to ignore reality, which has, as Steven Colbert quipped “a well known liberal bias”.
Crazy – it looks like you got the Obama talking point about “false equivalency” (also known as, “I don’t beat my wife as much as he beats his wife,” defense), but missed that Fact Check does not make any effort to compare sins:
http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/sadly_mostly_true.html
“We won’t attempt to assess which side is more deceitful, a task that would require subjective judgments about the degree of untruthfulness and the relative importance of each misleading statement. But, sadly, each side is correct to say the other has used false attacks.”
Others, including Crazy, have compared sins, but it’s usually seeing the splinter in the other guy’s eye while being blind to the log in your own eye.
Has anyone ever changed their mind about whom they will vote for, based on either the debates or factcheck.org? Anyone ever? Ever?
Debates, articles all matter to some slight extent – but they are usually only one of dozens or hundreds of factors affecting a voter. Many voters are so committed to either the left or the right that nothing matters – but fortunately these voters are not the middle, median voters who change elections.
The JFK-Nixon debate where Nixon looked pale and sickly is usually given as the example of debates mattering a lot.
I don’t think FactCheck.org has been credited with changing an election, but many people on the left (Lessig?) credit some ads for Kerry’s loss.
FactCheck.org may or may not play a larger role in keeping candidates less dishonest, and FactCheck’s reports are often quoted in papers and even by VPs.
the Obama talking point about “false equivalency”
Are you kidding? You think “false equivalency” is an Obama talking point? I’d say you need to get out and breathe some fresh air. Also, characterizing it as the “I don’t beat my wife as much as he beats his wife,” defense is misguided. Objecting to “false equivalency” in the media (or any other reporting of facts) isn’t a defense of one’s own actions, it’s a critique of the media. It’s probably one of the most insidious ways that the so-called “unbiased” mainstream media promulgates rank falsehood, seeming to value ‘fairness’ or ‘balance’ over truth.
This country is so bitterly divided I really despair about getting unbiased info from anywhere.
Remember O’Reilly was going to have “The No-Spin Zone”?? Yeah, right. On Fox, hello.
factcheck.org seems to be a noble experiment, like snopes or consumer reports……….but
all of these enterprises depend upon TRUTHFULNESS/HONOR/ETHICS from all participants.
This seems a dubious outcome, at best.
I would like to know about the public financing-I understood that Obama filled out a survey-and (the rest of the candidates did not-Clinton, McSame, Richardson & Edwards etc,) and he wrote that if the Republican candidate decided-that he would discuss it with whomever. Now-that evil, arrogant-so-called Republican strategist-Brad Blakeman, Pat B., Joe S., Campell Brown and others-have chosen to keep repeating it to make it “their truth”-as they have with so many lies. So has it became your “TRUTH” ALSO?