Deciding What's True by Lucas Graves

Author:Lucas Graves
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN008000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Journalism, POL008000, Political Science/Political Process/Elections
Publisher: Spry Publishing LLC
Published: 2016-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

What was striking was that Grimes herself stood in front of the camera and personally repeated this claim, even though she had already been told that it was false, which was a pretty good indication of the deep hole she found herself in…. Grimes ended up being the first Democratic Senate candidate in Kentucky history to lose every coal county, which again indicates why she was so desperate to keep making this charge.7

Professional fact-checkers often point to episodes like this one to disabuse anyone of the idea that their work will somehow cleanse American politics of deception and distortion. No episode makes the point more clearly than the debate over health care reform in 2009.8 President Obama’s ambitious reform plan was the first major policy initiative to unfold in the contemporary fact-checking landscape. The issue dominated the national media for more than as year and hinged on precisely the sort of detailed and complex questions fact-checkers specialize in.

As the debate took shape, veteran journalist James Fallows made a bold prediction about the salutary effect online fact-checking would have. Fallows had chronicled the collapse of President Bill Clinton’s health care reform initiative in the 1990s, paying special attention to misinformation that circulated freely on talk radio as well as in the elite media. The most damaging charge came from Betsy McCaughey, a future lieutenant governor of New York, who authored an influential analysis in the New Republic suggesting the plan would all but outlaw private health care.9 This interpretation was explicitly contravened by one of the first provisions of the Clinton bill.10 Nevertheless, claims about its sharp restrictions and draconian punishments spread widely. As repeated by George Will in Newsweek in early 1994,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.