Who Fact Checks the Fact Checkers?
The core problem facing “fact checking” websites like Politicfact, FactCheck, and Snopes is that they determine the “facts” by citing stories written by journalists. They don’t do their own original reporting — they rely on the reporting done by others — and that reporting often has a bias.
Most journalists and newspapers have a bias to the right or left. For example, the Washington Post is known for their left-leaning positions and their endorsement of Hillary Clinton while the Wall Street Journal is known for their right-leaning positions on various issues. The fact checkers base their “facts” on information gleaned from biased sources.
Of course the fact checkers have their own biases. The George Mason University Center for Media and Public Affairs did an indepth study of Politifact and determined that the “fact checkers” at the site had a disproportionately negative bias against Republican lawmakers. The Politifact fact checkers would go out of their way to find ways to judge Democratic statements “true” and become “hyper-literal” when judging Republican statements. The results were shocking — the site determined that Democratic statements were true 3X as much as Republican statements. It took the fact checkers twice as many words, on average, to judge Democratic statements true than it took to them to judge Republican statements true.
If “fact checking” websites all simply judged things true or untrue based on the “facts” they would all come up with the same answers. The reality is that they don’t. Not even close.
For example, Bill Clinton claimed that his wife (while first lady) helped pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program during her presidential campaign against Obama. Those fact checkers who relied on sources that were supportive of Obama’s campaign determined Hillary Clinton had very little involvement in the passage of the legislation — i.e. rating the claim FALSE. The AP who was supportive of Obama’s campaign noted, “She wasn’t a legislator, she didn’t write the law, and she wasn’t the president, so she didn’t make the decisions.”
The Boston Globe, also supportive of Obama, found that Hillary had “little to do with crafting the landmark legislation or ushering it through Congress, according to several lawmakers, staffers, and healthcare advocates involved in the issue….” The co-author of the bill, Senator Orren Hatch agreed, “The White House wasn’t for it. We really roughed them up” in trying to get it approved over the Clinton administration’s objections, Hatch said in an interview. “She may have done some advocacy [privately] over at the White House, but I’m not aware of it.”
Despite the findings of the AP, Boston Globe, and the co-author of the legislation FactCheck disagreed suggesting, “We review the record and conclude that she deserves plenty of credit, both for the passage of the SCHIP legislation and for pushing outreach efforts to translate the law into reality.”
Those supportive of Hillary Clinton agreed that she deserved a lot of credit for the legislation. Those supportive of Barack Obama agreed that she didn’t deserve much credit if any — in fact the co-author of the bill felt as though she opposed the bill. How can a “fact checker” decide what the facts are in this case? The sources don’t agree. The fact checkers don’t agree. The reality is — fact checkers are just like journalist/newspapers except that they don’t do original reporting — they use the original reporting of other journalists.
