Outrageous claims masked as facts are a staple in our deeply divided political culture, offered up not just by politicians but also by talking heads, bloggers and columnists. And all too often, there's no one to check them out and call them out.
Until now.
In early November, PolitiFact, which evaluates the claims of pols for a living, will launch PunditFact. Its mission is to assess the validity of the pundits' pronouncements. And that's a very welcome development.
The advent of the fact-checking movement has been a real plus for democracy. With so much misinformation cavalierly and cynically tossed around, it's really important to investigate in an objective, non-partisan way and help voters separate the facts from the nonsense.
FactCheck.org, an initiative of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, pioneered the practice when it was founded in 2003. While FactCheck and PolitiFact are the major players in the field, many other news outlets have embraced vetting politicians' claims rather than settling for the dispiriting he-said, she-said approach to reporting.
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Neil Brown, editor of the Tampa Bay Times, which launched PolitiFact in 2007, says he's "really pumped up" about the new venture.
Pundits "fling stuff left and right," he says. "Ever since we started, we knew there was a gap in our coverage.," After all, most voters get their political information not directly from candidates and officeholders but filtered through the media.
But there was that nagging question of resources. Owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, which describes itself as is "a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders," the Tampa Bay Times is one of the nation's top reg! ional dailies. But it has hardly been immune to the financial challenges that have engulfed all newspapers as they confront the digital era.
So when he saw in 2012 that the Ford Foundation, in an unusual move, was giving money to for-profit newspapers The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, Brown pounced.
PunditFact, which will have its own website (punditfact.com), is funded by $625,000 in grants over two years from Ford and from the Democracy Fund. It received seed money from craigconnects, a philanthropic venture by craigslist founder Craig Newmark.
"Creating broad and nuanced media coverage of complex social issues is all the more difficult when the facts are often disregarded or ignored," Jonathan Barzilay, director of the Freedom of Expression Unit at the Ford Foundation, said in a statement. "PunditFact is poised to play a critical part in reaffirming the role of facts in our civic dialogue."
Brown emphasizes that he's cool with pundits expressing their opinions or even voicing their hunches. That's their game. But when they state things as a matter of fact, they are fair game for scrutiny.
Like its older sibling, PolitiFact, PunditFact will subject the pundits' facts and "facts" to the truth-o-meter, which awards grades including "true," "mostly true," "half true," "mostly false," "false" and the dreaded "pants on fire."
PunditFact will be led by Aaron Sharockman, who has been the Times' deputy government and politics editor, and will have two other staffers. A 10-year Times veteran, Sharockman believes that Punditworld is ripe for exploration
In a telephone interview, his enthusiasm about his new mission crackled over the phone line. "Everyone needs to be fact-checked ," he says. "On talk radio, on cable, on blogs, there's so much they say, and so little accountability."
Many pundits, he points out, gain fame and fortune by making extreme, inflammatory statements. Nuance and shades of gray are not highly valued on many, if not most, cable ! and talk ! radio outposts. Says Sharockman, "They take rhetorical flourishes right past rhetorical flourishes to misleading statements,."
Given the vast amount of terrain it will be patrolling, PunditFact won't be able to police everything. Brown says the focus will be on declarations that are "outrageous, provocative." Sharockman says one point of emphasis will be the Sunday morning shows such as Meet the Press and Face the Nation, since they so often make news.
But while they love the mission, Brown and Sharockman know well that it's fraught with peril. When you are critiquing other media outlets, you better be right. Otherwise, be prepared for a barrage of blowback. And Sharockman is anticipating plenty of return fire.
"The pundits we are checking have big microphones, too," he says. That raises the stakes for the pundit-watchers.
In fact, PolitiFact has received its most withering criticism from a pundit, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. Maddow was so incensed by a couple of PolitiFact's conclusions that she declared it "shockingly, shockingly bad" and ordered it to close up shop and go away. (While Maddow may have gone too far in calling for the death penalty, her criticism in the cases she cited was on target.)
Given the intense glare of attention PunditFact will face, Sharockman says it's vital that it be totally transparent, laying out in great detail all of the information on which it bases its verdicts.
But despite the potential pitfalls, the PunditFact leadership is energized by the huge upside.
"From a consumer standpoint," says Brown, "if we do this right, this can't miss."
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