Back in 2016 I used the Medium platform to skewer Bill Adair’s errant view of fact-checking.
Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact and after PolitiFact was elevated to journalistic sainthood with a position at Duke University.
My article, titled “Fact Check This, Bill Adair,” pointed out that bias is irrelevant to fact-checking if the fact check gets the facts right and the bias is, one way or another, balanced.
Give it a read. If my argument doesn’t work, use the comments here to explain why.
Excerpt:
Adair published his opening remarks to the third Global Annual Fact-Checking Summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In his remarks, he touched on the definition of fact check journalism:
In the past year, the students and colleagues who maintain our fact-checking database have come across a couple of sites that primarily check one party in their political system. That’s not fact-checking; that’s advocacy. To be a reputable fact-checker, you must check all the players in your political systems.
As an admitted conservative and the publisher of Zebra Fact Check, Adair’s attempt to define me out of fact-checking hit close to home. Is he right? Am I an advocate and not a fact checker?
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