When factcheckers get trigger-happy

[salvorhardin]

Brendan Nyhan on how factcheckers dilute and devalue their product.

Is there such a thing as too much factchecking? Factcheck.org described former President Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic convention Wednesday evening as a “fact-checker’s nightmare” in part because, “with few exceptions… his stats checked out.” Rather than concede that it had little material to work with, however, The Associated Press manufactured a “fact check” of Clinton that focused far too heavily on omitted context and possible counter-arguments to his opinions rather than untruths or errors—and even managed to work in a gratuitous Monica Lewinsky reference that invoked Clinton’s reputation for factual slipperiness.

Journalists have also struggled to define an appropriate standard for factchecking in the case of Rep. Paul Ryan, the GOP vice presidential nominee. Significant portions of Ryan’s speech to the Republican convention last week were condemned as misleading by the press, creating a new focus on the honesty of a politician who was previously viewed by many commentators as a courageous truth-teller. The focus on Ryan’s misleading statements about policy was laudable, but it had perverse consequences—a disproportionate amount of coverage devoted to the news that Ryan had misstated his marathon time.

The turn toward narrative-driven nitpicking of Ryan worsened this week when The Washington Post ran a pedantic feature about the charges against him. As political scientist (and Post contributor) Jonathan Bernstein pointed out on his personal blog, the Post article devotes far too much attention to minor factual discrepancies that seem to be news only because Ryan’s honesty is now in question—a pattern that recalls reporters’ treatment of Al Gore in 2000.

...

The debate over Ryan’s recreational habits became even more inane yesterday when The Atlantic’s James Fallows published reader speculation that Ryan was lying back in April 2009 about his record of climbing mountains with 14,000-foot elevations in Colorado—a claim that was both trivial and apparently wrong.

Full post: http://www.cjr.org/swing_states_project/when_factcheckers_get_trigger-happy.php?page=all

[Confusious]

1. It's a way to aviod getting into the politics

So they don't have to say Ryan was full of shit accusing Obama of running up the deficit, when Ryan himself voted for things that ran up the deficit, for example.

[loves_dulcinea]

2. I disagree

I think that Ryan's claim to climbing 14000 foot mountains is not trivial.

I've met some people in my life who lied out of sheer habit. They lied when nothing was on the line. I really grew to despise those people.

If Ryan is willing to lie when it doesn't matter, why wouldn't he lie when the chips are piled huge? It's a character issue, honesty matters.