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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Arianna Huffington
Whenever I speak about the future of media, I get the most positive reaction when I talk about the urgent need to create an online tool that makes it possible to instantly fact-check politicians and commentators as they speak. Truth 2.0.
That's why I had such high hopes when it was announced that PolitiFact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking project of the
Then my dust-up with Liz Cheney on the show last month was given the PolitiFact treatment -- and I saw firsthand why the pursuit of Truth 2.0 is going to be harder than we think.
PolitiFact's finding that my statement that
First, a quick refresher on the incident that started things. While discussing the connection between the Bush-Cheney administration's lax approach to regulation and the BP disaster in the Gulf, Liz Cheney and I had this exchange:
Me: Right here we have the poster child of Bush-Cheney crony capitalism,
Cheney: Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on --
Me: -- it's involved again.
Cheney: -- but it's not -- it's not facts.
Me: I'm living on this planet, you're living in a planet that is --
Cheney: Arianna, what you're saying has no relationship to the truth. No relationship to the facts.
Notice that Cheney didn't just deny what I said -- she acted as if this was the first she'd ever heard of it. If
At the end of the exchange, I mentioned how glad I was that PolitiFact would be fact-checking the show. Unfortunately, the "fact check" turned into a model of how to avoid the truth.
What makes this particularly troubling is that PolitiFact's "fact check" was well-researched and well-sourced. The truthiness part was that PolitiFact's facts clearly supported a conclusion different than the one its editors came to.
For instance, they noted how
They noted how KBR billed for "meals it didn't serve" to the tune of, as the
They noted that "the
They noted that, aside from all this, KBR has, in fact, been officially accused of "fraud" for having, in the words of the
And all of this happened right here on the planet I'm living on. And yet, when it came time to draw the obvious conclusions from all the facts that it had just marshaled, PolitiFact backed off. After all, certain things are just not said in polite society. Even after you've just said them.
So the "rhetorical tap-dancing" began:
"Certainly there have been hundreds of millions of dollars that
Really? "Hundreds of millions" lost due to "waste and inefficiency"? Sure, no program is perfect, but when "hundreds of millions of dollars" just disappear, they don't fall between the sofa cushions. And why is it that all of
In the end, this is not about me, or Liz Cheney or even
As long as we allow truth backed up by a mountain of evidence to be, in the name of "pious fairness," downgraded to Half True, that's the way the planet we're all living on is going to continue to operate. And that's a fact.
Available at Amazon.com:
The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy
The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics
Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
AMERICAN POLITICS
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PolitiFact Embraces Equivocation, Truth Gets Squeezed | Politics
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