Despite the start bashing Trump, it's a rather interesting article. File it under "dumbing down voters."Of what use are all of journalism’s fact-checking operations? Don’t get me wrong. I’m a devoted fan of the truth, love reading corrections columns in the press and do not shy from revisionist history. So I endorse the good work done by all of the fact-checkers—the pioneers at Annenberg’s FactCheck.org (who invented the racket in 2003), the Tampa Bay Times’ Politifact, the Washington Post’s Fact Checker as well as the less frequent truth-squading efforts conducted by CBS News, Politico, the New York Times, The Associated Press, NPR and others, many of which fact check in real time during debates.
Without the fact-checkers, the lying lies of politicians and others would go uncorrected and then where would we be? Well, we’d probably be right where we are, with one of the biggest documented liars in modern political times—Donald J. Trump—leading the Republican polls for the presidential nomination by a large margin.
That Trump fills the sky with lies cannot be denied. Last week, Politifact crowned him the winner of its 2015 Lie of the Year award, noting that the competition wasn’t even close. Of the 77 Trump statements Politifact checked, 76 percent were determined to fall in the lie category. Sixteen were deemed Pants on Fire!—the highest rating on Politifact’s sliding scale of fibs, far more than for any other candidate.
The Post’s Fact Checker, which rates lies on a sliding scale of one to four Pinocchios, gave Trump 11 four-Pinocchio scores, many more than any other candidate. Meanwhile, Factcheck.org calls Trump the King of the Whoppers in its year-end tally. “In the 12 years of FactCheck.org’s existence, we’ve never seen his match,” the site proclaimed.
It would stand to reason that the documentation of Trump’s lies—not to mention his rudeness and crudeness—would hobble his candidacy. Yet it appears to have had little to no effect.
What to conclude from this? Perhaps that the fact-checkers don’t know what they’re writing about—which I reject—or that Trump supporters don’t know about the fact-checker’s findings, which seems wildly unlikely given the saturation coverage his lies have enjoyed. My guess is that Trump supporters don’t believe and just don’t care what the fact checkers say.
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/the-limits-of-the-fact-checker-213461
