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Fact-checking Outfits Monitor Claims in Political Ads
Public mistrust of political advertising and other communications is hardly new. But a poll released last month found that a majority of voters believe they were frequently misled during the 2010 campaign - and that the rate of political mendacity is on the rise. The poll, conducted by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, found that 91 percent of voters reported encountering information they considered false or misleading during the campaign; 56 percent say this occurred frequently; and 54 percent believe its prevalence is increasing.
It is an open question whether these perceptions 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 voters, 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 exaggeration, statistical hocus-pocus and flat-out lies flung around in the heat of the campaign by fact checking 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 gathering. In the last decade, however, two organizations have launched full-time enterprises dedicated 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 President Dick Cheney referenced it in his debate with Democrat John Edwards in an attempt to rebut Edwards 's charges regarding Cheney's former company, Halliburton. (Ironically, 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, won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign. The Pulitzer boards citation saluted it for examining...