Sorting out the "truth" may seem a treacherous endeavor in such a politically polarized time. But we believe our journalists can play a greater role as an honest broker for voters bewildered by the barrage of campaign talk.
So in a move rare for a news organization, we're dedicating a team of reporters and researchers to meticulously examine the rhetoric of candidates and their partisans, and then make a call: Is the claim true or not?
You might think such work would be standard journalistic fare. But many news organizations can spend less money and get less grief if their political reporting sticks to stenography and puffery.
It's easier to record the words and claims of competing candidates than to vet their accuracy. It's easier to write about the strategy of using negative advertising than to do the painstaking research to sort out whether the claim is actually true or false.
— Neil Brown, Executive Editor of the St. Petersburg Times, announcing Politifact, a new project to determine whether candidate statements are actually true.
Towns?
I remember Ed Towns. Isn't he the guy who comes up from Florida every other year to campaign for office? I guess he only does that when he's afraid of his job, which he owes to Roger Green (and to Roger Greene, too).
I think he's also the one paying for Rock's rent. Yup, Rock finally admitted that he's on Towns' paid staff. So the piece above is really campaign literature, paid for by Congressional Republicans' best friend in Brooklyn, Ed Towns.