Commentary Archives | Page 4 of 7

Torture narrative trumps facts at PolitiFact

Bryan W. White May 30, 2016 0 Comments

There’s no solid evidence that waterboarding works. https://t.co/rWBEn8n9r2 — Bill Adair (@BillAdairDuke) May 24, 2016 Bill Adair, Duke University’s Knight professor of computational journalism, helped found PolitiFact. That likely helps explain his “Truth-O-Meter”-ish Twitter avatar. Adair’s tweet about waterboarding helps show the way mainstream fact checkers help reinforce false partisan beliefs, in this case the popular narrative that torture…
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Commentary, Zebra Fact Checks

Bill Adair, PolitiFact, waterboarding

Trump supporters & truth: A reply to Rider University’s Michelle A. Amazeen

Bryan W. White December 28, 2015 0 Comments

Last week I posted in reply to Politico’s Jack Shafer, who suggested in an article that Trump supporters don’t care if Trump does not tell the truth. We responded with a post suggesting Trump supporters have reason to distrust fact checkers such as PolitiFact. We tagged Shafer in a tweet highlighting our reply and Shafer retweeted it. Meanwhile Michelle A….
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A reply to Politico’s Jack Shafer

Bryan W. White December 24, 2015 0 Comments

In a Dec. 24, 2015 column, Politico’s Jack Shafer wonders why the mainstream media fact checkers have no discernible effect on the presidential race. Republican Donald Trump, for example, pays them about the same heed Godzilla pays the Japanese Air Force. Shafer writes: It would stand to reason that the documentation of Trump’s lies—not to mention his rudeness and crudeness—would…
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Donald Trump, fact checking, Jack Shafer, Politico

PolitiFact vs. Rubio on defense spending

Bryan W. White December 19, 2015 0 Comments

Back in May 2015 PolitiFact, specifically PolitiFact Florida, published an amazingly incompetent fact check. PolitiFact Florida’s fact check looked at whether Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio was right that the United States is not building aircraft, aircraft carriers and submarines. PolitiFact Florida said it found plenty of evidence the United States was building aircraft, aircraft carriers and submarines, rating Rubio’s…
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Commentary, Zebra Fact Checks

defense, Marco Rubio, PolitiFact

Review: “His Lips Are Moving: Pinocchio Effect and Other Lexical Indicators of Political Deceptions”

Bryan W. White December 7, 2015 0 Comments

Near the tail end of November 2015 somebody shared with me a link to an NPR story about a new study looking at the lexical features of political lying, “Researchers Examine How to Spot a Lying Politician“: SHANKAR VEDANTAM, BYLINE: Well, Steve, this is research by social scientists who are doing what social scientists do, which is they look for…
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Lisa Vang, Lyn M. Van Swol, Michael T. Braun, PolitiFact

Fact-checker agreement—and disagreement

Bryan W. White May 28, 2015 0 Comments

In recent months we’ve pored over a pair of scholarly works on the topic of fact-checking. One, Checking the Fact-checkers in 2008: Predicting Political Ad Scrutiny and Assessing Consistency by Michele A. Amazeen, we reviewed earlier this year. The second, a doctoral dissertation by former PolitiFact writer Lucas Graves, contains much material we’ll address in one way or another over…
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Commentary, Zebra Fact Checks

fact checking, fact checking methods, Lucas Graves, Michelle A. Amazeen, PolitiFact, Washington Post Fact Checker

Revisiting the Romney Jeep ad

Bryan W. White February 9, 2015 0 Comments

Fact Checkers are Great Because They Condemned Mitt Romney’s Jeep Ad? In the peer-reviewed article Revisiting the Epistemology of Fact-Checking, researcher Michelle A. Amazeen offers readers an example of the beneficial effects of good fact-checking: When a framework of fact-checking becomes established, it should become more difficult for a politician to fabricate claims. For example, at the end of the…
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Commentary, Zebra Fact Checks

FactCheck.org, Jeep, Michelle A. Amazeen, Mitt Romney, PolitiFact, Washington Post Fact Checker

Review: ‘Checking the Fact-Checkers in 2008: Predicting Political Ad Scrutiny and Assessing Consistency’

Bryan W. White January 29, 2015 0 Comments

In 2014 we first heard of a branch of scholarly research purporting to support the accuracy of mainstream fact checking. The research was mentioned in a paper by political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, The Effect of Fact-checking on Elites: A field experiment on U.S. state legislators: While individual fact-checks sometimes veer into punditry or semantic disputes (Marx 2012;…
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Commentary, Zebra Fact Checks

FactCheck.org, Glenn Kessler, Krippendorff's alpha, Michelle A. Amazeen, PolitiFact, Washington Post Fact Checker

The give and take on political donations

Bryan W. White September 29, 2014 0 Comments

Occasionally the mainstream fact checker PolitiFact will publish an article giving an overview of a fact check topic. But two recent fact checks of political attack ads point to the need for one PolitiFact has yet to publish: the relevance of the source of political campaign cash. On March 27, 2014, PolitiFact published a fact check of an ad by…
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Commentary, Zebra Fact Checks

Alison Lundergan Grimes, Jeanne Shaheen, PolitiFact

Michael Hiltzik wrong on Social Security

Bryan W. White September 11, 2014 0 Comments

Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik blasted PolitiFact Oregon, among other PolitiFacts, with a Sept. 10, 2014 column titled “Another ‘fact-checker’ gets Social Security wrong.” We have complaints about the PolitiFact Oregon item, also. But Hiltzik’s demagogy takes precedence. This paragraph encapsulates Hiltzik’s most objectionable points: The money accounted for in the trust fund was borrowed by the federal government…
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Commentary

Michael Hiltzik, PolitiFact Oregon, Social Security