| PolitiFact.com has faced criticisms and assertions of bias from political commentators across the political spectrum. A Wall Street Journal editorial in December 2010 called PolitiFact "part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and 'facts,' rather than differences of world view or principles".[20] Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard criticized all fact-checking projects by news organizations, including PolitiFact, the Associated Press and the Washington Post, writing that they "aren’t about checking facts so much as they are about a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths out of the conversation".[21] In February 2011, research associate Ostermeier with University of Minnesota, wrote a study showing that PolitiFact has a selection bias targeting Republican politicians more often than Democrat politicians.[22] The study was criticized by PolitiFact and MinnPost.[23] In December 2011, Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy wrote in the Huffington Post that the problem with fact-checking projects was "there are only a finite number of statements that can be subjected to thumbs-up/thumbs-down fact-checking".[24] Matt Welch, in the February 2013 issue of Reason magazine, criticized PolitiFact and other media fact-checkers for focusing much more on statements by politicians about their opponents, rather than statements by politicians and government officials about their own policies, thus serving as "a check on the exercise of rhetoric" but not "a check on the exercise of power".[25] |
The Bupkis Act?
No, someone who will only credit people who agree with them with honesty is worse.
If you like inexperienced heads of government. It's not a deal breaker, but as so many have pointed out, it would be funny to see a party push someone who so easily lines up with much of the criticism aimed at the current President in his first bid.
