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 St. Petersburg Times, was going to evaluate the truthfulness of statements made each Sunday an ABC's "This Week." It wasn't going to be instant, but it was a step in the right direction.

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 Halliburton had defrauded American taxpayers of "hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq" was "Half True" -- after first documenting example after example of why it was completely true -- was an object lesson in equivocation, and a prime exhibit of the kind of muddled thinking that dominates Washington and allows the powerful to escape accountability.

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, Halliburton... They, after all, were responsible for cementing the well. Here's Halliburton, after it defrauded the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars--

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 ABC had had a fainting couch on the set, no doubt Cheney would have taken to it, so shocked -- shocked! -- was she to hear the charge that Halliburton might have been involved in some malfeasance in its glorious history of serving our nation.

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 Halliburton's then subsidiary KBR charged "inflated prices for gas." Or, as the House Oversight report put it: "...these unnecessary charges increased the costs to the government by $167 million, an increase of over 90 percent."

They noted how KBR billed for "meals it didn't serve" to the tune of, as the Washington Post reported, "$4.5 million more than was necessary."

They noted that "the Defense Contract Audit Agency was recommending withholding $289 million in contract costs not yet paid and asking for the return of $121 million already paid."

They noted that, aside from all this, KBR has, in fact, been officially accused of "fraud" for having, in the words of the Justice Department, "knowingly included impermissible costs" in its accounting to the government -- for which the Justice Department filed a civil fraud suit against KBR in April of this year.

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 Halliburton's KBR attempted to charge the government that have been denied," said PolitiFact. "There's also much evidence that makes us believe that hundreds of millions of dollars were lost to waste and inefficiency, not deceitful fraud."

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 Halliburton/KBR's "inefficiency" somehow redounded to the company's benefit and not the government's? In any case, the best defense PolitiFact could muster is that Halliburton/KBR was only a little fraudulent, and simply hugely, massively and spectacularly incompetent. Thus, my statement was adjudicated Half True.

In the end, this is not about me, or Liz Cheney or even Halliburton. It's about our accountability double standard. It's actually not that complex, nor is it ambiguous. It's plainly obvious and the American people know it. And the refusal of our political and media leaders to acknowledge it is contributing to the widespread anger and cynicism sweeping the country right now.

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 Feminine Mystique

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

 

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PolitiFact Embraces Equivocation, Truth Gets Squeezed | Politics

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