More of this, please
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.
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Journalism
PolitiFact's scope
Submitted by Matt Waite (not verified) on 4 September 2007 - 8:50pm.
I'm one of the developers of PolitiFact. The short answer to your question is that the statements we review will be confined to the 2008 presidential candidates. We've had a lot of encouragement to expand the idea behind PolitiFact to look at everything from the President and the current Congress down to the local city council. But for now, we're just looking at candidates for president.
I wonder whether the fact-checking will be limited to
"candidates". Will, for example, Mr. Bush's recent whopper about US reductions on carbon emission be challenged as part of this?
Mr. Bush claimed, without factual support, that "the US is the only major industrialized nation to cut greenhouse gases last year" See the Washington Post and Think Progress