Over the past few presidential elections the number of outlets offering up their “fact check” of candidates has grown exponentially. The game of “gotcha” is now an expected part of the political landscape, and embraced with relish by partisans looking to score debate points based on the findings.
But with the rise of fact checking, some critics are pushing back, claiming that the fact checkers themselves demonstrate bias, presumptions and are willing to get a little squishy with their definition of the facts.
An essay published by the Hannah Arendt Center – which is self-described as “a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities” – claims that frequent fact checking may actually be making things worse.
“Today, there is another kind of fact finding of increasing prominence: political fact checking,” the essay states. “It is a different beast entirely. The most well-established of these is Politifact, which has the “Truth-o-Meter” that rates the truth or falsity of public claims on a spectrum that ranges from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” Other sites deliver similarly clever reports on the statements uttered by politicians during the course of the campaign. Part marketing and part well-intentioned policing of a discourse divorced from reality, these fact checkers are trying to bring sense and seriousness to political debate. What they are actually doing is making the problem worse. The reason for this is that what is being checked today are less facts and more opinions.”
Writing in Forbes, author Avik Foy charged self-styled fact checkers with combining bias with a lack of policy expertise.
“The problem is that a combination of ignorance and bias warps the perspective of fact checkers, and their focus ends up being on their own personal prism as opposed to what’s accurate,” he said.
With these caveats in mind, we invite you to read through a half-dozen different fact-checking outlets’ take on Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump’s acceptance speech from Thursday night. The publications chosen are from across the political and geographical spectrum.
Editors note: Check back next Friday when we share multiple fact-checking sites following Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech.
