Factcheck.org this

[pnh]

People on my friends list keep linking to Factcheck.org as if they were some kind of reliable guide to what is and isn't true in political arguments.

What is Factcheck.org? The following answer is reprinted, slightly revised, from comments I recently posted in gregvaneekhout's LJ.

Factcheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the

Comments

[kateelliott]

[copperwise]

Thank you. I did not know that.

I kind of don't bother with those sites anyway because I think too many people use them as a substitute for, yanno, paying attention to what's going on in the world.

[superplin]

The Annenberg Foundation may be funded by Annenberg, but it is operated under the University of Pennsylvania and the School for Communication. The students who run the center are not chosen on the basis of their political views, and they do not receive pressure of any kind. I would wager anything I own that most of them have no idea any Annenberg is even still alive, much less have a clue about her political leanings.

As someone in the same discipline, I'm not a fan of the school for a number of reasons, but I have absolutely no reason to doubt that their fact checking operation is fully above board.

[pnh]

Right, because who-pays-the-bills never has any effect on how journalism or research is practiced! Uh huh.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that the day-to-day work of the Annenberg Foundation, and of factcheck.org, is unexceptionable. This isn't the same as trusting them. I don't trust them, for the same reason I don't trust news media owned by Rupert Murdoch. Because rich right-wingers don't put money into operations like out of nothing but charitable impulses.

[superplin]

Right, because who-pays-the-bills never has any effect on how journalism or research is practiced! Uh huh.

Of course it does! I would never argue otherwise.

However, I would need a lot more evidence that the Foundation directly intervenes in the day-to-day operations of this university center before I could be convinced that FactCheck.org's work is biased. For one thing, they have to turn information around too quickly for it to receive much vetting, so unless you believe they have a set of political guidelines to work from, I remain skeptical.

There are plenty of biased research operations out there. I do not think the Annenberg Center is one of them, based on current evidence and my knowledge of the other work the School produces.

[pnh]

We're arguing at cross purposes. You're saying their day-to-day work is OK. I'm perfectly willing to stipulate that this may be true. But I never accused them of "bias." I said that I don't trust them. And I still don't.

If the last twenty years of political history have taught us anything, it's that zillionaire right-wingers are perfectly capable of executing long-term plans to affect our country through careful deployment of their money. If I were one of them, I would consider it quite prudent to have a sober-looking, well-respected "fairness" monitor among my holdings.

[prusik]

I think your last point is the most important one. Even if factcheck.org has no ideological bias, they still act as if maintaining a false balance is fairer than just calling things as they see them. That is, if one side actually is more misleading, and is misleading more often than the other side, they will never point this out.

Of course, it's not just factcheck.org. I listen to Counterspin, a radio show produced by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. They're merciless in pointing out cases where a journalist has manufactured or exaggerated a misleading claim in order to produce the false result that both sides are equally at fault.

It'd be nice if the press, rather than manufacturing the appearance of fairness and balance, would actually be fair and balanced instead. However, what I see, if anything, is segments of the press getting more partisan with other segments holding ever more steadfastly to false balance. *sigh*

[pnh]

Indeed, your own comment illustrates one of the basic problems with sites like Factcheck.org, even when their funding and operation is unimpeachable: the basic assumption that all political questions exist on a "spectrum" which has "ends".

[mmcirvin]

I've seen a lot of studies of political opinions and alignments that actually do find something like a left-right "main sequence" running across most Western democracies; of course this might be the result of party politics feeding back into people's opinions, and there are always some outliers off the sequence.

The "ends" business, and the notion that the ends are currently in some God-given natural place, is the bigger problem, I think. I have this Sorkinian sensible liberal reflex to believe that I need to hear very different opinions pulling at me as a check on my own thinking. But where a lot of American liberals go wrong when they think this way is that they only think of dissent from the right as a legitimate corrective, because that's how the political parties line up in the United States: the Other Guy is on the right, and the further left is just this weird circus that happens around college campuses.