the Blog
Bryan W. White
May 10, 2013
Pardon the “Sound of Music” pun. The liberal blogosphere is once again agog at the inadequacy of PolitiFact’s rating system. Tennis great Martina Navratilova claimed 29 states lack legal protections against job discrimination over sexual orientation. Specifically, she stated a person could be fired for either being gay or simply because the boss thinks they’re gay. PolitiFact noted a few…
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Bryan W. White
March 24, 2013
To help pursue the aim of educating readers about the workings of logic and rhetoric and to help make the rating system less daunting and mysterious, we’ve updated the rating system page to include an example of each icon we might use. When we add a new icon we’ll add the image to the rating system page. Each of the…
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Bryan W. White
March 13, 2013
We’re adding a new icon to our ratings arsenal. We use fallacy icons and descriptions from yourlogicalfallacyis.com because that site did a great deal of good work designing fallacy icons—work we’d have ended up doing otherwise. Yourlogicalfallacyis.com also provides simplified descriptions of the fallacies well-suited to readers new to analyzing rhetoric in terms of logic. We use a variety of…
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Bryan W. White
February 4, 2013
We’re close to making the site look like the way we planned it. We have revised the pages of posts to show only the beginning of stories and posts with a “Continue reading” option, making it much easier to see all the recent stories with just a bit of scrolling. The images accompanying the stories and posts give the site…
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Bryan W. White
January 30, 2013
We were sure we’d need a few more fallacy icons eventually. For some, it’s easier to conceive a design than for others, and because of the ease of the design we started work on a “red herring” design last week. The red herring fallacy is one of the fallacies of distraction, named for the way a reeking fish might throw…
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Bryan W. White
January 16, 2013
Alas! Sorry for the lack of new content lately. It’s not for lack of effort, as I’ve been working furiously on a fact check of PolitiFact Texas. PolitiFact’s fact check had to do with a statement from President George Washington. My research on this one has proved so extensive that I’m planning a fact check entry as well as a…
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Bryan W. White
January 7, 2013
Though I haven’t especially pushed it in the few promotional statements put forth about Zebra Fact Check, it was never lost on me that the name lends itself to fact checking other fact checkers. “Zebra,” of course, often serves as a mildly derisive nickname for sports referees who run about, at least in American football, in uniforms that feature black…
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Bryan W. White
January 1, 2013
Over the past weekend we created two new icons for use with our rating system. First, we filled the anticipated need for an “out of context” icon. We also added an icon for use with statements that rely on or suggest apples-to-oranges comparisons. More planned changes include a revised front-page presentation as well as category pages that display only a…
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Bryan W. White
December 17, 2012
Not long after I first started criticizing the fact checkers at PolitiFact, I declared that I could come up with a better system of rating fact checks than the “Truth-O-Meter” system PolitiFact uses. I gradually fleshed out the main idea over the course of a year. The system would not jam statements into ill-defined categories and would summarize the key…
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Bryan W. White
November 22, 2012
Sometimes political statements include would-be facts that pique our curiosity but aren’t of any special importance to the overall message. One such occurred during President Obama’s joint press conference with Thailand’s Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra: PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, let me just say, first of all, that democracy is not something that is static; it’s something that we constantly have…
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