Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site Politifact.com has come under fire here at Hoystory for several months because of its tendency to consult left-wing sources and then use them to discredit conservatives and prop up President Obama. Now, I’m not usually a defender of Ann Coulter, but Politifact.com decides to give a statement that she made regarding […]
I could put up a post a day on fact-checker PolitiFact fact-checking poorly. Bryan White over at Politifactbias.com put up a post on their failure to properly fact-check an analogy just last week, and then compounded it by surprise consulting a bunch of partisan experts to validate their predictably lame ruling. But it's this fact-check last […]
It's taken me a while to digest what happened in southern Israel on October 7. I realize it's not really informative or productive to publish a blog post that consists of little more than outrage and expletives over what was the largest single-day loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust. In the days and weeks […]
There are two major subjects of political contention in America that the news media continuously gets wrong because of its ideological bubble: guns and abortion. In response to the Dobbs decision, California liberals have proposed an amendment to the state constitution that proponents argue is simultaneously necessary to preserve the "right" to an abortion and really […]
Corrections policies, especially at newspapers, used to be pretty straightforward. In most cases, they'd run in the same, dedicated spot in the section of the newspaper in which the story they were correcting first appeared. So, corrections on AP wire stories often ran on A2. If it was a correction to a feature piece in […]
USA Today, the newspaper that decades ago pioneered the practice of short front page stories that weren't continued inside has recently pioneered a new type of opinion piece: The ever-evolving commentary. Our Horrible Media: Stealth Editing In a first of its kind, USA Today had former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams rewrite her piece on Georgia's […]
In the past decade, as media organizations have aggressively downsized in the face of a collapse in advertising revenues, copy editors have been among the first to get the ax. Misspellings, comma splices, rudimentary fact-checking and the art of good headline writing have all been seen as an unnecessary extravagance in times of ever-decreasing budgets. […]
The past couple of weeks have been especially bad for media fact-checking. Two incidents really stand out as the ostensibly unbiased, objective national media have gone all-in on their war on President Donald Trump, their own credibility be damned. Media Not Interested in Fact-Checking Sen. Tammy Duckworth Two Sundays ago, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) appeared […]
The inclusion of “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace as one of the moderators for this fall’s presidential debates sparked a firestorm when he told colleague and media reporter Howard Kurtz that it wasn’t his job as a moderator to fact-check the candidates during the actual debate. I do not believe that it is my […]
Last week, Politifact's California arm issued a rating for Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom's "Safety for All" group. Politifact runs the numbers and it turns out that by cobbling together a bunch of Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) categories you can get a number that is more than 2x the number of McDonalds franchisees in the state. […]