It is an open question whether these percep-
tions reflect a real decline in political truth-telling or simply the fact that ads that would once have stayed under the radar, reaching only targeted vot- ers, are now available for all to see on the Internet, where the most extreme specimens go viral and get picked up by national media. Indeed, public awareness of misleading ads may even be a result of efforts by media organizations to help voters wade through the thicket of creative exaggera- tion, statistical hocus-pocus and flat-out lies flung around in the heat of the campaign by fact check- ing political claims. These fact checks may even help to turn the tide and hold political campaigns to a higher standard of accuracy. Political fact checking has been an occasional
feature of media outlets such as the New York Times for years, though these efforts tend to be sidebars to their primary mission of news gath- ering. In the last decade, however, two organiza- tions have launched full-time enterprises dedi- cated to political fact checking—and they have begun to make their presence felt. FactCheck. org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center that launched in late 2003, gained renown the next year when Vice Presi- dent Dick Cheney referenced it in his debate with Demo- crat John Edwards in an attempt to rebut Edwards’s charges regarding Cheney’s former company, Halliburton. (Ironi- cally, Cheney misstated the Web address as
FactCheck.com, and media focus on his solecism brought the organization even more attention.) PolitiFact, launched by the St. Petersburg Times in 2007,
PolitiFact’s harshest rating is reserved for claims that are both inaccurate and ridiculous.
won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 presi- dential campaign. The Pulitzer board’s citation saluted it for examining “more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.” Over the last two years, PolitiFact has expanded its mission to fact-check members of Congress and the White House as well as other political players, rendering judgments with the six settings of its “Truth-O-Meter”: True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and Pants on Fire. (The latter is reserved for claims that are not only inaccurate but ridicu- lously so.) It has also partnered with local papers to set up state-based operations in Florida, Wisconsin, Texas, Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, Oregon and Rhode Island. As the new fact checkers on the block settle in, cam- paigns are feeling out how to handle them. Like all political reporters, the fact checkers get plenty of pushback from campaigns that feel they have been treated unfairly, though they also get calls that sound a bit like students pleading for a D rather than an F on a paper. “Sometimes campaigns would say, ‘Oh, tell me it’s not a False,’ or, ‘Can’t you just make that a Barely True?’” says Greg Borowski, editor of PolitiFact Wisconsin. “There was this sense of, ‘We under-
stand what you’re doing, just don’t give us a False or, God forbid, Pants on Fire.’” Campaigns also regularly chime in with exhortations to look into their opponents’ allegedly dubious claims and clearly see the potential in taking advantage when their adversaries receive damning ratings. “If an opponent ran a negative ad that was rated False, hitting back with an ad saying, ‘Even this non-partisan fact-checking organization said this attack was false’ would be extremely effective,” says Abe Dyk, who managed Florida Congressman Kendrick Meek’s 2010 Senate campaign. Another Florida campaigner, Todd Jurkowski, who was
communications director for former Congressman Alan Grayson, likens PolitiFact and
FactCheck.org to non-parti- san, governmental entities. “These fact-check organizations are very much like the Congressional Budget Office,” he says. “Politicians and campaigns tout the information when it works in their favor and dismiss it when it’s against what they want.” There is some anecdotal evidence that persistent fact checking can make campaigns more careful in how they present their claims. “As we got further into the season, the phrasing in some of the ads we saw seemed to improve,” says Borowski. “It’s hard to quantify, but you’d tackle a statement and say, ‘That’s a lot truer than how they might have put it earlier.’” In a few instances, campaigns (and other political play-
ers) have actually corrected themselves after being taken to task by fact checkers. Here are three such examples from the 2010 campaign.
April 2011 | Campaigns & Elections 23
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