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 […]
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 […]
For more than a year, suggesting that the COVID-19 virus, which originated in Wuhan, China, might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology was a crazy, right-wing conspiracy theory that was the equivalent of believing the moon landings were faked. Let's start with this: You shouldn't trust anything the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) says. […]
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 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 […]
...and dishonest. And not transparent. And thin-skinned. (Hat-tip to Politifactbias.com for the original observation that Politifact California is stupid. They can remove the question mark now.) A couple weeks back, I took Politifraud's California incarnation to task for their failure to correct Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom's dishonest mischaracterization of one of their fact checks. I […]
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. […]