re: #187 Cannadian Club Akbar

Well, there has been a rash of “Politifact is pure shit!!” here recently yet the Times still endorses Obama.

No, there hasn’t. Nobody has said that Politifact is pure shit. What has been said is that a lot of their ratings are inexplicably at odds with their analysis, and that they’ve gotten some things wrong. In addition, their two-dimensional scale o truthiness is kind of game-showey, and is more of a marketing concept than something useful to people actually wanting to know the facts. If they dispensed with that and just did good writeups on the facts behind the controversies, I’d like ‘em more.

They show their work, which makes them a step above most people offering an opinion, but they’re not magically imbued with any qualities just by calling themselves factcheckers. In addition, the very limited number of statements they choose to vet skews things as well; for example, they’ve evaluated the truth of insane theocrat David Barton’s statements, but they’ve picked his milder ones so in the end they rated them ‘mostly true’. So, someone looking up Barton on Politifact might come away with the impression that he generally tells the truth.

So, no, it’s not that people say that Politifact is shit. People do say that Politifact falls a long way short of being a reliable source of judgement, and that their standards for evaluation— literal or non-literal— change wildly between judgement.

If they actually wrote some standards for themselves to follow and adhere to them, they’d be better off.

Does this help?