Patterico's Pontifications

6/28/2008

The Fact-Checker

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 12:16 pm



There’s a very interesting blog/column in the Washington Post called The Fact-Checker.

The writer is Michael Dobbs, who participated in a hard-hitting and fair piece on the CBS forged documents, and who did some of the best independent reporting in the mainstream media on the Swift Vets controversy (I believe that Beldar agrees). Dobbs did write that the Vets had failed to disprove Kerry’s accounts of what happened in the war zone, but he also questioned Kerry’s failure to release all “relevant records and personal diaries.”

Dobbs tends to lean a bit left, and is a little overly dismissive of blogs, but he clearly makes the effort to rigorously tie his assertions to the facts. This sets him apart from a lot of other reporters out there.

If you’re looking for a fascinating post that serves as an example of his fact-checking, check out this December 2007 post of his with the Most Revealing Fibs of Barack Obama. At the time, that is. There have been a few since. Also good is his fact-based analysis of whether Obama broke his public financing pledge. His conclusion:

He does not want to disarm in the face of likely Swiftboat-type attacks on his character, mounted by conservative groups not directly affiliated with the McCain campaign. But none of this alters the fact that he has gone back on his word.

(My emphasis.)

I don’t read the reference to “Swiftboat-type attacks” as being necessarily as dismissive as that phrase usually is when used by a mainstream reporter, since Dobbs did such good and largely fair reporting on the controversy. It’s nice to see a reporter so clearly saying that Obama broke his word.

Dobbs gives Obama three “Pinocchios,” which signifies “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”

The site is now on my regular reads.

Another site that seems more even-handed is Politifact.com from the St. Petersburg Times.

It’s good to see this sort of fact-checking at major newspapers. I hope they do more of it.

7 Responses to “The Fact-Checker”

  1. It’s good to see this sort of fact-checking at major newspapers. I hope they do more of it.

    Aah, but it won’t last. Too many Inconvenient Truths I suspect.

    Bill M (57c57f)

  2. I am stunned to see the St. Pete Times being hailed as an “even handed” fish wrap. I wish I had the time and energy to do a Patterico style demolition ala LA Times. The Times is incredibly left leaning. I even got into a shouting match over the phone with a huy trying to sell me subscription. I politely stated that the Times was too liberal for my tastes and the guy went off on me. He assured me Bush would lose the election and/or get impeached.

    I’m still waiting.

    FLBuckeye (7459be)

  3. I didn’t say the paper was even-handed, but that particular blog seemed to be.

    Patterico (cb443b)

  4. I’ll take FLBuckeye’s word for it that the St. Petersburg Times leans liberal, but that makes columns like PolitiFacts even more exciting. For instance, take this PolitiFacts’ entry from June 16, 2008, on Barack Obama’s economic promises. PolitiFacts found them to be “Barely True” but the most important aspect isn’t whether the column is for or against Obama. The vital part is that the column tries to apply facts to Obama’s campaign promises so people can make up their own minds.

    The Washington Post’s The Fact Checker seems to do the same thing on a wider range of topics. Of course, careful readers should read everything with skepticism but I agree with Patterico that these are worth reading.

    DRJ (fdd611)

  5. Dont you people get it? He’s about Change. CHANGE!

    love2008 (0c8c2c)

  6. Dobbs actually looked at some of the individual allegations, and then looked into what different eyewitnesses had to say about them. He chose to focus on allegations as to which there were disputes about both the underlying facts and about the subjective characterization to be applied to Kerry’s conduct. That put him far ahead of any of the other MSM reporters who purported to “investigate” the allegations.

    His single best piece, on August 24, 2004, was entitled “Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete.” In it, he concluded (correctly) that different first-hand eyewitnesses had differing stories on some of the key facts (e.g., whether, after another Swift Boat in the formation hit a mine, Kerry’s boat was under enemy fire from the shores as he returned to pluck out of the water the soldier who his earlier sharp maneuvering had thrown overboard). He likewise reported that depending on whose version of the facts one credits, there would still be room for argument over the conclusions argued by the SwiftVets in some of their allegations (e.g., that in that same incident, Kerry displayed at best ordinary, non-Bronze Star performance, and at worst, considerably less courage than any other Swift Boat commander on the scene).

    “Incomplete” actually was a poor description, though, of what he actually wrote about, which was conflicting evidence. What actually was “incomplete” turned out to be his own, and the rest of the mainstream media’s, reporting on both the subjects he’d flagged and the many others he never got to.

    Dobbs never touched, for example, on many other major SwiftVet allegations that cried out for hard-hitting and persistent investigative reporting, followed by confrontations of the candidate. Neither he nor anyone else in the MSM ever truly dug into, for example, the details of Kerry’s trip or possibly trips to Paris to meet secretly with representatives of the North Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong while Kerry was still a commissioned officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve.

    For what he actually wrote about the SwiftVets’ allegations, Dobbs gets a solid B. For what he ignored, he gets an F. Moreover, because they wholly ignored Dobbs’ own reporting — which at least established that there were competent witnesses with first-hand accounts that supported the SwiftVets’ allegations — and consistently mischaracterized the entire controversy, his fellow reporters not only flunked, but stand guilty of treason to their profession.

    Beldar (e91136)

  7. For what he actually wrote about the SwiftVets’ allegations, Dobbs gets a solid B. For what he ignored, he gets an F. Moreover, because they wholly ignored Dobbs’ own reporting — which at least established that there were competent witnesses with first-hand accounts that supported the SwiftVets’ allegations — and consistently mischaracterized the entire controversy, his fellow reporters not only flunked, but stand guilty of treason to their profession.

    What Beldar said!

    Bill M (57c57f)


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