Democrats have adopted Bush’s tactics says guy who wrote book on Bush’s tactics.
Another factchecking fiasco

When so many reporters are practicing this style of journalism, it should not be surprising that politicians have become adept at targeting its weaknesses. In All the President’s Spin, my Spinsanity co-editors Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer, and I documented how the Bush administration relied on misleading half-truths and strategically ambiguous language to promote its agenda. Because few of these claims were outright falsehoods and debunking them often required detours into policy specifics, they were typically reported without challenge or in a “Bush says X, Democrats say Y” framework.

The conclusion to the book warns that Democrats were starting to embrace similar tactics. Reid’s attacks on Romney are a case in point.
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MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, for instance, acknowledged that Reid’s claim is “totally unsubstantiated,” but still used the PolitiFact rating as a vehicle to dismiss the site, telling her viewers that “it’s ok to not take them seriously on anything ever.” A better approach would consider whether claims can be supported and whether they are consistent with the best available evidence without assigning labels to them (full disclosure: this is the approach we used at Spinsanity).

The controversy over Reid’s claim is likely to be a minor blip in the 2012 campaign, but it perfectly illustrates why the media is still losing the spin arms race. In a world where establishment figures in both parties are increasingly willing to smear their opponents publicly, journalists need to be more cautious about amplifying partisan attacks and more careful about how they evaluate the accuracy of those claims. Without smarter coverage, reporters and factcheckers will continue to get exploited.