Another site is PolitiFact Bias...Exposing bias, mistakes, and flimflammery at the PolitiFact fact check website
Personally, I think that all of these sites just confuse people as most seem to be biased. You can pick one and follow it but who really knows what the facts are? They are all a bit overwhelming to me!
"who really knows what the facts are?"
ReplyDeleteThat's really the key question.
The problem with most fact checking sites is that journalists do the fact checking. Journalists tend to have a limited general education (better than average in terms of news fare but weak in terms of math, science and logic). So journalists have significant limitations as judges of fact. They can go to experts or read journals, of course, but what happens when experts or journal articles disagree? Can a journalist determine which position among experts is the right one?
The other problem with journalists, of course, is that most of them lean left politically.
Put those things together and it starts to become clearer that political fact checking is a bit of a scam. There's good and bad to it, though.
How to solve the information problem? I don't have the answer to that. One thing that helps is honesty about bias, I think. And crowdsourcing may provide an avenue toward addressing the information problem (check out a project called "AllSides").
My role for now is to point out that PolitiFact isn't worthy of deep trust as a fact checker. None of them are perfect, but Annenberg Fact Check is probably the best for now.
And why do I do it? I'm concerned about us finding the information problem "overwhelming," as you put it. When that problem truly overwhelms us, democracy is done for. Voters have to know what they're doing to some extent to engage in responsible self-governance.
All great points!
ReplyDelete