Fact Checkers

29Oct07

If you’ve ever read a fact check column and been displeased with the quality of the fact checking then you might wonder, who fact checks the fact checkers? Actually lots of people do, blogs, campaigns, other news outlets, just about anybody that can use google can give it a shot. I gather I’m not alone in being highly annoyed by some recent fact checking.

Here is a fact checker post about Al Gore in which he is awarded a rating of “one Pinocchio”. This is the second best score he can get and is meant to suggest only minor problems in the fact checking department.

My most frequent problem with fact checkers is not that get facts wrong (Although they do sometimes get facts wrong), but rather a serious mission creep problem that I think effectively smears the subjects of their fact checking. I remember the CNN fact of Micheal Moore’s Sicko, which in addition to not being accurate had some right wing guy talking about waiting lines in Canada. Perfectly fine to bring up in a debate, but it wasn’t actually responding to any claim Micheal Moore made during the movie. Crap like that implies a lie where non existed. You see a lot of this kind of stuff.

The Gore piece is mostly a defense of the column itself against Gore’s allies and advisers that had criticized the previous fact checking. We learn that Gore’s adviser’s critiques aren’t accurate. What’s problematic here is that the comments being fact checked are not comments Gore himself made. The discussion of Gore’s advisers was sort of relevant to the larger discussion but not relevant enough to lead off the story. To me this suggests that what’s important to the author is not any claims Al Gore made, but rather defending himself and preserving his own credibility.

After the discussion of things Gore didn’t himself say, we are treated to some seriously nitpicky analysis of the some of the claims in, “The Inconvenient Truth”.  All in all you get the sense that Al Gore should have physically gone around the world and gotten every climate specialist’s permission to make every claim in the movie. When you read the phrase, “conclusively linked to global warming”, you certainly get the sense that the goal posts will be moved as much as is necessary. How much research on polar bears do you think has been done exactly?

After quoting a climate expert saying Al Gore was 90% correct, whereas Al Gore critics are usually 90 inaccurate, the article ends with this:

In their zeal to draw attention to the cause, even Nobel peace prize laureates can make mistakes or shade the truth a little. I award Al Gore one Pinocchio.

This is obnoxious because it implies that Al Gore lied, as in he knew he was lying. Pinocchio’s nose didn’t grow if he wrote the wrong answer to on his homework, it grew when he lied. Newspapers don’t usually report that people lied because it’s difficult to prove someone knew they were lying. Somehow that standard gets thrown out here. A few days later their was a piece about a factually incorrect statement by Giuliani about the end of the cold war. Giuliani is full of crap about a lot of things, but I think he probably thought he was telling the truth.

The real embarrassment about these fact checkers is actually that they exist as a specialized type of journalist. Aren’t all reporters supposed to be checking the facts? In fact we have a weird situation the front page hardly ever call major politicians on their inaccurate statements, but hidden away you newspaper sponsored blogs that not only fact check politicians’ statements, but nitpicks them, implies they lied when it can’t be really be established, and pretends that there is some standard of communication that requires you to bring up every point that would undermine your argument lest you commit the sin of omission.

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Tags: Al Gore, Nobel Prize, Rudy Guiliani, Washington Post