Bill Adair, at Politifact, attempting to justify their bullshit Lie of the Year:
At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.
“I listen to Rush and read NewsMax,” he said. “And to make sure I’m getting a balanced view, I watch Fox.”
My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.
Both sides do it! Except, of course, Limbaugh, Newsmax, and Fox are lying, and HuffPo is hardly a liberal site.
It gets worse:
We’ve read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.
And you are wrong, and you are idiots. As someone on twitter quipped, if someone bought Politifact and turned it into a direct mail organization, if you said they had killed Politifact, you would win a Lie of the Year award. Cripes, even the NRO agrees calling the plan to end Medicare is not a lie, because REPUBLICANS DO WANT TO END MEDICARE and that is precisely what the bill proposed.
And the grand finale:
Ezra Klein of the Washington Post wrote that this episode was proof that the nation is so divided that “the ‘fact checker’ model is probably unsustainable.”
The most over-the-top response (was it tongue-in-cheek?) was a rant from Jim Newell in Gawker under the headline “Why PolitiFact is bad for you.” He conveniently ignored the fact that our fact-checks are based on hours of journalistic research and portrayed them as the work of rogue bloggers with a gimmicky meter.
“PolitiFact is dangerous,” he said.
Really? It’s dangerous to put independently researched information in the hands of the citizenry?
We got other silly comments from readers who declared we were “a tool” of the Republicans, Fox News and the Koch brothers. Their reaction is typical these days. To paraphrase George W. Bush, you’re either with us, or against us.
In reality, fact-checking is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth. PolitiFact now has nine state sites run by news organizations around the country that employ more than 30 full-time journalists for fact-checking. We’ve inspired many copycat sites around the nation and roughly a dozen in other countries.
And yet, for many of our readers, the love for PolitiFact has always been conditional. They love us when we confirm their views that the other side is wrong — and they hate us when we don’t.
The Broderesque pablum is rife here- “Because both sides attack us, we must be doing something right.”
Klein Jim Newell is right. Politifact, as it is now, is dangerous, because it gives a veneer of objectivity to the kind of journalistic false equivalences which have run this country into the ground, and in this case, deemed an outright truth to be a lie. With that kind of intellectual dishonesty being pumped into our political discourse, you are fucking a right politifact is dangerous.
The Other Chuck
Black is white. The fact that both sides tell me I’m wrong is clear proof that black is white, because black is, after all, white.
For further proof, I point you to the fact that black is white.
cathyx
Listening to Rush for news. Just wow.
dmsilev
There are still ~8 days left. You’re being rather optimistic here.
amk
Their righteousness is so touching. So firebaggerish.
Egg Berry
This obviously means they are feeling the heat.
cathyx
@The Other Chuck: And now I know that black is white because I read it on the internet on a liberal site.
Benjamin Franklin
The watchdog which needs watching.
We are in a crisis of credibility.
Who has 8 hours or more every day to follow up on false leads and specious facts?
Who to trust?
jl
Now, now. Let’s not be mean to Politifact. The did say that if Democrats had slightly ‘tweaked’ their message by saying that the Ryan plan would end Medicare as we know it, then it would not have been a lie at all!
Shame on the Democrats, absent that fateful tweaking it would not have been a lie at all, and would not have been the lie of the year.
That makes sense, right?
Remember kids, for some things, minor ‘tweaks’ can make the difference between truth and LIE OF THE YEAR!
I think that sums up our corporate political culture. And he/she who gets in the last tweak gets the dough.
Edit: just to be clear, this is snark. I’m giving more evidence that Politifact is making no sense.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Benjamin Franklin: Randomly break off a group of the fact checkers and have them fact check the fact checks.
So the fact-checking journalists are employed by the companies that need their facts to check out? The big part of Politifacts problem is that they think that journalists are unbiased.
Baud
@jl:
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Hunter Gathers
Why are you such a hyper-partisan? You know, perhaps if you asked the editors of PolitiFact out to a nice lunch, you could find common ground using Hayekan priciples, Burkean modesty, and a healthy dose of moderate viewpoints. You’ll never reach the hallowed ground of pure Centrism if you don’t aspire to fulfill your inner Broderistic tendencies. And stop being so mean to Republicans. They only have the best interests of the country in mind and besides, programs like Social Security and Medicare have outlived their usefulness, they are outdated and have no place in the Free Market of Ideas in the first place. We need to let the Invisible Hand make our decisions for us, for the Hand always has the best judgement. Your irrational partisanship will only hinder the Exchange of Ideas, and all of us will be hindered under the Jackboot of Government Programs designed for a time gone by. You owe an apology to Politifact and you should go ahead and pre-apologize to that Champion of the Market, Mitt Romney, for the many un-hinged attacks you will throw at him, and pray that The Market allows him to become our President, so we can end this Tyranny of the Majority.
Benjamin Franklin
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Objectivity is the first myth that should be fact-checked. Human Beans are,just human, after all.
jl
What is the fancy Latin name for this?
Middle Ground Fallacy
Golden Mean Fallacy, Fallacy of Moderation
This fallacy is committed when it is assumed that the middle position between two extremes must be correct simply because it is the middle position. this sort of “reasoning” has the following form:
Position A and B are two extreme positions.
C is a position that rests in the middle between A and B.
Therefore C is the correct position.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/middle-ground.html
PeakVT
Maybe the waaahmbulance can swing by the Politifactless offices after it picks up our whiny millionaire bankers.
Benjamin Franklin
@jl:
Fallatio…
jl
Also, is the response that they did ‘hours of journalistic research’ special pleading, or appeal to common practice?
We need the fancy Latin name for those too.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/
RSA
I see that Politifact has the same understanding of “research” as your average middle schooler.
Villago Delenda Est
Bill Adair, this year’s winner of the Joseph Goebbels “Just what I would have done, Kamerad!” award.
Congratulations, Herr Adair!
SFAW
Quis custodiet ipsos canem custodes?
[Yes, I know it ain’t proper Latin, you illegitimi]
jl
@Benjamin Franklin:
Fellatio temperantia?
Not sure I got that right.
Citizen Alan
The one bright spot in all this is that I keep seeing David Broder’s name all over the place and so I get a continual reminder that that fucking pig is dead and roasting in hell. So there is that!
SFAW
I thought it was “Hayekian modesty”, did I miss something. (That is, more than I normally do, of course.)
Villago Delenda Est
@RSA:
Counsel for the entire class of average middle schoolers on line two, they demand an apology, or they’re going to sue!
Nellie in NZ
Off topic – more big quakes hit Christchurch this afternoon. 5.8, 5.3. Minor injuries, building damage, and liquifaction.
Hunter Gathers
@SFAW: I don’t really know myself, I was trying to construct some mealy mouthed centrist word salad. And I don’t plan on finding out either, as I have no use for dead conservative philosophers.
Cheap Jim
Why do I care that some pimp uses the phoneme “fact” when describing his whore?
Mnemosyne
How did you decide that the Democrats’ characterization of the Ryan plan was “false” if you didn’t look at the merits of the Ryan plan? Flip a coin?
burnspbesq
If you lie when you call something a lie, shouldn’t your punishment be to have to watch the Harry Mudd episode of Star Trek for all eternity.
jl
@Benjamin Franklin: Heeey, buddy, I think you may have tricked me, you bounder.
Ad Numeram: see Appeal to Common Practice
This one may come in handy too:
Ignoratio Elenchi: see Missing the Point
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/argument/fallacies/fallacies_latin.htm
I feel so learned, just like William Buckley (RIP).
Benjamin Franklin
@jl:
The long form…
Obscenis, peream, Priape, si non
uti me pudet improbisque verbis
sed cum tu posito deus pudore
ostendas mihi coleos patentes
cum cunno mihi mentula est vocanda
PeakVT
@Nellie in NZ: The people in Christchurch must be really tired of that by now.
ETA: USGS is reporting three: 5.8, 5.3, and 5.8.
cmorenc
If you try to split the difference midway between truth and lies, the result isn’t simply half-truths any more than splitting the difference halfway between a tasty apple and arsenic isn’t simply a half-tasty apple with a bitter twang. The result is still poisonous in the case of the arsenic-laced apple, and the result is still a poisonously contaminated view of reality in splitting the difference between truth and lies.
jl
@Benjamin Franklin:
And a cheerful Saturnalian
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetur adipiscing elit.
Vestibulum urna nisi, dapibus
id volutpat et, tincidunt id velit.
Donec nisi nisl, tristique id aliquet
dictum, sollicitudin cursus neque.
to you too.
beltane
@Citizen Alan: The man himself may be dead, but everything he stood for has taken root in a multitude of little Broders. He “died” in the way a dandelion dies, by dispersing his seed to the winds.
amk
@Citizen Alan: amen. may his shriveled soul rot in hell.
jrg
Fuck it. Go ahead and convert Medicare into a voucher plan. We’ll see then if the geriatrics consider it to still be medicare.
This level of “politifact” bullshit exists in this country because too many people let it slide. Start screwing over enough people, and this broderide “both sides do it” nonsense will go the way of the dodo.
Benjamin Franklin
@jl:
Happy Xmas to you, as well.
Quid pro quo. Sorry, that’s all I got.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
All that politifact is missing, is the principled stand against overheated rhetoric and calls for civility.
i have to give their spin an incomplete.
MonkeyBoy
OT: if you view Gov Walker’s Holiday Ad: Let’s ‘Put Our Differences Aside’ at YouTube, he didn’t disable the dislike button.
wilfred
“With that kind of intellectual dishonesty being pumped into our political discourse, you are fucking a right politifact is dangerous.”
Talk about wanking. We’ve had a catastrophic war based on lie after lie and a corporate/bank telethon that subsidized the rich while children go hungry and zero prosecutions. This amongst a host of other lies routinely dumped on people without any accountability.
But Politifact sucks. How fucking pathetically stupid.
Jim Newell
“Klein is right. Politifact, as it is now, is dangerous…”
You mean Newell is right! Newell is right!
[runs off]
jl
@jrg: Um, no, not this they, I don’t love/hate them when I agree/disagree with them. I have complained about these cheezy outfits for awhile, and at least once right here on this miserable lefty blog.
They are cheezy gimmicks.
Is the Pinocchio nose thing still in operation? The first time I saw that, I hated the idea.
The fact checkers have long been on my big irritation list, right below self righteous radical moderate centrist bloggers (who usually reveal themselves to be Perot style insane sooner or later).
Bondo
the first fox quote is the best. Yes, we’re politifact, and our definition of fair and balanced truthtelling is to lie about everyone equally.
jl
@Benjamin Franklin: That was supposed to be Latin nonsense I copied off some typesetting article on Wikipedia. Did it mean something? Did I insult you? I hope not.
Mike in NC
My neighbors! Ignorant old white people. Ask them about the war in Iraq and they’d go “What war?”
beltane
@MonkeyBoy: I see he learned nothing from Rick Perry’s foray into YouTubeland.
Benjamin Franklin
@jl:
I got the humor. DId mine fail?
JoeShabadoo
It’s just sad that you see journalists quoting them without getting embarrassed. If a reporter can’t even verify if something is true or not themselves what good are they? It just shows how worthless the media is when they need some small outfit to verify what they say on their million dollar tv show.
I’m not surprised that they have a Broderesque view of the facts because they caught on with news and big stations. Do you really think that the establishment would have started quoting this site if it wasn’t always “safe”?
Gravenstone
@jrg:
Portmanteau of Broder and bromide? Me likey.
Robert
Was it someone on the front page here who pointed out that Politifact labeled their original story about “republicans want to kill Medicare” as “somewhat true” rather than a lie at all?
jl
@Benjamin Franklin: My sexytime sense detected a high obscenity quotient in your Latin. I have copied it for indiscriminate use in the comments at appropriate times. Perhaps in response to BJ trollbots.
Cat Lady
Wanking won’t turn lies into truth, no matter how much these fucktards try, and this whole episode just redounds to reality’s credit. Truth has a certain resonance to it, and a force of its own. The only way to make this bullshit stop is ridicule and Adair and Kessler need to be mercilessly mocked. Paging Stephen Colbert.
Benjamin Franklin
@jl:
It’s actually hilarious prose if you scroll down Wiki, you’ll see the translation.
carpeduum
Oy vey, what a load of excrement. Dkos and Fluffington Puff are not what I call liberal. More like firebagger central and enough lies to make Drudge blush.
AnotherBruce
Here is what I find to be weird about Politfact’s method. If you are to believe that their criticism is valid, then you have to believe that the naming of a thing is more important than the content of the thing. To use a crude example, I offer you a tasty piece of cheese, you assent and I bring you a rock. You look askance and I explain that I am offering you a piece of cheese and it’s tasty and I hope you are stupid enough to bite into it even if it breaks your teeth.
You know us liberals, we’re all hung up on reality and its liberal bias. There are a number of liars in the political world that can sell chicken shit as chicken salad and rocks as cheese. Politifact, take your place at the table.
El Cid
I hope this isn’t how they used to determine what was and wasn’t true in Encyclopedia Britannica — you know, one side earth goes round sun but other side blah blah and we get criticized by bof!
handy
@jl:
Fallacy of the excluded Not-Middle?
Shalimar
@jrg: The trouble with this line of “fuck em all” reasoning is that Ryan makes sure no one over 55 experiences the brilliance of his plan. If we could compromise and make it effective for everyone right now, it might be worth it just to see how quickly seniors could form a hoveround mob to go after Ryan.
MonkeyBoy
@jl:
I would call it a “monotonic fallacy”.
For a monotonic function F that gives values for A and B, then for any D between A and B, F(D) will be between F(A) and F(B).
pete
The email of the fellow who wrote their justification is [email protected].
Just sayin’.
Redshift
My favorite thing is how he quotes a specific person who believes in the “balance” of insane wingnut sources, but just makes a vague blanket statement about where his “liberal friends” get their information, attributed to no one.
Probably because even this guy’s friends aren’t stupid enough to actually say they use stuff posted on Facebook as their backup source.
dead existentialist
@Benjamin Franklin: The tell is the “30 journalists” in a country of 300 million. Orwell weeps.
Cacti
Saying the Ryan Plan ends Medicare = Pants on Fire and the Lie of the Year.
John Kyl saying that “Abortions are well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does” merely garners a “False” rating.
different-church-lady
Jesus, all that and you guys STILL managed to fuck this one up?
different-church-lady
@Benjamin Franklin: Please claim your prize internets on the way out.
toujoursdan
I don’t know any liberal who gets their news from HuffPo, Maddow and DKos. All the liberals I know get their news from NPR, BBC, NY or LA Times and possibly CNN.
They may turn to those other sources for a certain amount of context, opinion or infotainment, but the news comes from respected, mainstream, not-very-liberal sources.
On the other hand, my conservative friends do get their news from Rush, Drudge, NewsMax and Fox. But that’s the difference. Conservatives can’t separate news from opinion.
Cain
Now you know why Democratics get it in the shorts every time. We fight with each other, and the external guys like these guys prey on us as well.
Shit…
Richard
Those GOP dicksuckers should change their name to Politifarce.
Elizabelle
Krugman’s upped his game against PolitiFarce.
Today’s column, “The Post-Truth Campaign”, calling Romney out on lying about Obama’s record and character on the campaign trail.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/23/opinion/krugman-the-post-truth-campaign.html?hp
Got to love it, though, when he uses Romney’s shamelessness for another whack at Bill Adair’s beloved disrupter of the status quo, fearlessly “holding politicians and pundits accountable for their words.”
Rather like that Krugman described the Republicans’ plan, in plain English, which Politifact and its “more than” 30 whip-smart journalists failed to do.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
“We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.”
Savor the flavor of that sentence. How does one make no evaluation of, well, anything, while calling the evaluation of another a lie? Is that possible? On what grounds could you base that claim? It hurts…
slag
I’m truly starting to think that they actually believe their own bullshit. That, in itself, is discrediting enough.
wasabi gasp
Mustang Bobby
Wow, that sounds really needy. These folks need to get laid more often.
Ryan
How did politifact become the go-to site for “objectivity?” What’s to stop me (a retired and handsome man) from starting my own website that actually does provide objective facts?
Pat In Massachusetts
Are not these fact checking sites designed so that the average American does not have to exercise their critical thought processes at all? Are not they there to tell us “don’t worry, TRUST US, we did the investigating for you.”? I think that is why every day there is a new poll out telling us how Americans “think” about an issue. I have news. In order for me to “think” and express my views on an important issue, I need more than 30 seconds or a couple of sound bites to do it in, thank you very much.
I was taught at a very young age to always read between the lines – to always question what is being left out and why. This lesson was taught to me by my Republican father who never finished high school, and who called the television the “Idiot Box”, and thus my TV watching was very limited as a child. He must be flip-flopping in his grave today at the amount of money people pay to watch their Idiot Boxes! Of course, growing up I thought my dad was very mean in not allowing me to watch the latest Monkees episode so I could talk about it with my classmates the next day at school. However, unlike many people my age today (I’m 59), I can begin my day without Fox and Friends, or that nice Ann Curry advising me on the conditions in America. I have eyes and ears, and most importantly, a brain that can process events without the help of polls, people like Chuck Todd or the latest shiny model of “fact checking sites”.
Thanks, Dad! I owe my independent, critical thinking skills all to you and for which I am now forever grateful!
WaterGirl
Here’s what I find interesting about the rebuttal:
The so-called arbiters of truth and falsehood, ostensibly based on facts, did not provide a fact-based explanation of how and why they arrived at their conclusions that this was a LIE. Neither did they provide a fact based explanation of why this was the LIE OF THE YEAR, as compared with other “LIES”.
The fact that the rebuttal spoke only to politics and emotional responses is one more big indication that the decision wasn’t fact-based. The Krug-man was right: “…and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant”.
It was nice of them to include some of the criticisms all in one place, though. That makes it easier to say, yep, yep and yep when I read the criticisms.
WaterGirl
@Pat In Massachusetts: I’m with your rad on everything but not letting you watch the Monkees. That was just wrong. :-)
Elizabelle
@WaterGirl:
Very well put, and critical thinkers (like Pat’s dad) will see that.
You can’t outsource fact-checking, and you have to get your news from a variety of sources, the better to compare and pull out the facts vs. opinion.
Elizabelle
@Ryan:
Nothing to stop you! Go for it, and link here.
You will hear soon enough what commenters think of your efforts.
Elizabelle
Incidentally, here’s the link to Jim Newell’s “PolitiFact is Bad for You.”
http://gawker.com/5869817/politifact-is-bad-for-you
SFAW
I don’t believe in the afterlife, but at times like this, I wish there was one, so that your Dad could see this.
Maude
I think I remember that NewsMax was started by a guy who used to call into WABC radio in the 1990’s. He called himself Carl from Oyster Bay and he would talk about the so called crimes that the Clintons committed. He was nowhere near the truth and I say this as someone who despises the Clintons.
You have to give him credit.
Jerzy Russian
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Catsy
It is correct that Politifact, as it is currently run, is dangerous–in the same way famously described by Jon Stewart as “hurting America” when he kneecapped Tucker Carlson on his own show.
But they overplayed their hand badly this time, and it’s going to cost them. Up until now Politifact was still fairly widely respected amongst liberals, on the theory that while they get it wrong quite a bit and dabble in the usual Beltway false equivalence too much, overall they perform a valuable service.
But this? This is transparent hackery that anyone with eyes and a brain can see. They’re getting an enormous amount of exposure over it, almost uniformly and rightfully contemptuous. They exchanged their long-term credibility for short-term gain.
wrb
Ah, the kind the Newt has.
Eric U.
to be fair, when republicans lie, it’s uninteresting because they do it reflexively, and everyone knows it. When Dems stretch the truth a little, it’s interesting because they do that so little. It does make the job of a Broderian rather difficult.
In this case, the lie of the year was actually the lie of the year award itself.
Catsy
@Eric U.:
This.
Perhaps the good folks at Politifact are just that subtle.
…nah.