5 ms·

Most of those sites are extremely biased. If you think that's a good idea it's because the bias leans towards what you agree with.

fudgie 10y ago
I've only seen these sites being accused of being leftist, so shouldn't there be a market for a right-leaning one?
jimbokun 10y ago
This right here is exactly the problem. A nihilistic viewpoint that nothing at all is knowable, because every source of information is equally suspect. This is kind of why we humans invented science, you know, so we might actually figure out some things about the world. Randomly selected Politifact article: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/07/donald-trump/closing-argument-donald-trump-wrongly-says-he-outd/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/... Not just their opinion, but how they arrived at that opinion. Links to Billboard's data on Jay-Z and Beyonce's concert attendance, and Trump's own claims about his crowds. Reality doesn't always just come down to differing opinions. Many things are actually knowable, to anyone willing to investigate and entertain the possibility they are wrong.
- adnzzzzZ 10y ago
  Bias can appear both in what facts they decide to cover and in how they cover it. The first part is the one people usually ignore and the easiest to hide. You can just fact check one person on their every sentence and not fact check the opponent on their every sentence. You can also decide to only fact check mostly true or true statements for one person and mostly false or false statements for the other person. You'd be performing proper fact checking most of the time, but you'd be helping one person more than the other.
- quantumwannabe 10y ago
  Trump's statement could have been interpreted in two different ways. One, Politifact's interpretation, is that he draws bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at their concerts and another is that his rallies are bigger than Hillary's rallies where Beyonce/Jay-Z performed. I don't know if the second interpretation is true or not (as I haven't done the research), but the whichever one you choose to analyze shows your bias. Probably most Clinton-leaning folks would pick the first interpretation of Trump's statement and most Trump-leaning folks would pick the second. So from the perspective of a Trump supporter Politifact looks biased, but from your perspective they're an impartial fact checker.
  - jimbokun 10y ago
    The point is THEY CITE THEIR SOURCES and lay out their analysis showing you exactly how they came to their conclusions. So the end result is the reader is more informed than before. Also, Politifact sanely sticks to the common sense meanings of English words. Your interpretation of "bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at Hillary's rallies" adds a qualifier beyond what was in the original quote.
    - makomk 10y ago
      Except that what Trump originally said was: "She's not getting any crowds so she gets Beyoncé and Jay Z, I like them, I like them and you know that they do, I get bigger crowds then they do. It's true. I get far bigger crowds," referring to a Clinton rally a couple of days earlier headlined by them. It was Politifact that edited out this reference to Clinton's rallies, starting their clip from his speech not just in the middle of a sentence but the middle of a word. They don't give readers an easy way to find the uncut version either - I'd have to find and dig through a video of the entire speech to link it here. NBC's fact check provides better context despite being far shorter and not citing a single source: http://www.nbcnews.com/card/not-even-close-trump-said-he-draws-bigger-crowds-beyonce-n679251 http://www.nbcnews.com/card/not-even-close-trump-said-he-dra... The stuff Politifact cited is easy to check even without the citations, but their omissions are much harder to spot.
entee 10y ago
I don't think that's true. There seems to be a view that nobody can try to be objective and the objective doesn't exist. I'm a scientist by training and trade, and in my experience the real world is pretty damn objective. Something happened, or it didn't. Something is true or it's not. I used to say as a grad student that nature didn't care whether I graduated. Granted it's not always easy to get good data, and it's not always obvious what's clearly true. But where possible, we should embrace it, and where it's hard, then we should have a clear discussion about what we can and cannot believe. Fact checkers in my experience do a good job of that, they present a clear picture of what is known and what isn't, and they take that responsibility very seriously. If someone tends to make more false statements than someone else, that doesn't mean pointing that out is biased, it's just reporting the facts. Sometimes reality is biased.
- FoxHound56 10y ago
  After looking at many fact checkers and the job they do, I could not disagree more. People do not speak in simple statements that can be either scientifically "verified" or "not verified". When talking, people often use hyperbole. They speak in approximate numbers (e.g. 20% instead of 17%, simply because it sounds better). Not to mention people often talk about socially complex subjects that cannot be, in ANY way, verified as simply "true" or "false" without interjecting the fact checkers own personal opinion into the mix. Fact checkers have tried to solve these issues by having "truthiness" ratings. For example, Politifact has the ratings "True, Mostly True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire". However, this is obviously a scale that has no objective meaning. As a result, these ratings are applied inconsistently and with a heavy bias towards the fact-checkers own agenda (which, for Politifact, is heavily left-leaning). How do you objectively decide whether a hyperbole is true or not? How do you objectively decide that numbers are too far off the actual scientific numbers? What rounding is too much? How do you objectively decide the truth of complex social issues and statements, and what data do you trust for determining these "objectively true answers"? The answer is you can't, and you don't.
  - JamesBarney 10y ago
    It might be hard to determine a false statement from a pants on fire statement, but just because it's not purely objective doesn't mean its not useful. What would are some Politifacts that you think were wildly off base? Like statements that you believe to be true that are labeled "Pants on Fire".

fudgie 10y ago

I've only seen these sites being accused of being leftist, so shouldn't there be a market for a right-leaning one?

jimbokun 10y ago

This right here is exactly the problem. A nihilistic viewpoint that nothing at all is knowable, because every source of information is equally suspect. This is kind of why we humans invented science, you know, so we might actually figure out some things about the world. Randomly selected Politifact article: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/07/donald-trump/closing-argument-donald-trump-wrongly-says-he-outd/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/... Not just their opinion, but how they arrived at that opinion. Links to Billboard's data on Jay-Z and Beyonce's concert attendance, and Trump's own claims about his crowds. Reality doesn't always just come down to differing opinions. Many things are actually knowable, to anyone willing to investigate and entertain the possibility they are wrong.

adnzzzzZ 10y ago
Bias can appear both in what facts they decide to cover and in how they cover it. The first part is the one people usually ignore and the easiest to hide. You can just fact check one person on their every sentence and not fact check the opponent on their every sentence. You can also decide to only fact check mostly true or true statements for one person and mostly false or false statements for the other person. You'd be performing proper fact checking most of the time, but you'd be helping one person more than the other.
quantumwannabe 10y ago
Trump's statement could have been interpreted in two different ways. One, Politifact's interpretation, is that he draws bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at their concerts and another is that his rallies are bigger than Hillary's rallies where Beyonce/Jay-Z performed. I don't know if the second interpretation is true or not (as I haven't done the research), but the whichever one you choose to analyze shows your bias. Probably most Clinton-leaning folks would pick the first interpretation of Trump's statement and most Trump-leaning folks would pick the second. So from the perspective of a Trump supporter Politifact looks biased, but from your perspective they're an impartial fact checker.
- jimbokun 10y ago
  The point is THEY CITE THEIR SOURCES and lay out their analysis showing you exactly how they came to their conclusions. So the end result is the reader is more informed than before. Also, Politifact sanely sticks to the common sense meanings of English words. Your interpretation of "bigger crowds than Beyonce and Jay-Z at Hillary's rallies" adds a qualifier beyond what was in the original quote.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Except that what Trump originally said was: "She's not getting any crowds so she gets Beyoncé and Jay Z, I like them, I like them and you know that they do, I get bigger crowds then they do. It's true. I get far bigger crowds," referring to a Clinton rally a couple of days earlier headlined by them. It was Politifact that edited out this reference to Clinton's rallies, starting their clip from his speech not just in the middle of a sentence but the middle of a word. They don't give readers an easy way to find the uncut version either - I'd have to find and dig through a video of the entire speech to link it here. NBC's fact check provides better context despite being far shorter and not citing a single source: http://www.nbcnews.com/card/not-even-close-trump-said-he-draws-bigger-crowds-beyonce-n679251 http://www.nbcnews.com/card/not-even-close-trump-said-he-dra... The stuff Politifact cited is easy to check even without the citations, but their omissions are much harder to spot.

entee 10y ago

I don't think that's true. There seems to be a view that nobody can try to be objective and the objective doesn't exist. I'm a scientist by training and trade, and in my experience the real world is pretty damn objective. Something happened, or it didn't. Something is true or it's not. I used to say as a grad student that nature didn't care whether I graduated. Granted it's not always easy to get good data, and it's not always obvious what's clearly true. But where possible, we should embrace it, and where it's hard, then we should have a clear discussion about what we can and cannot believe. Fact checkers in my experience do a good job of that, they present a clear picture of what is known and what isn't, and they take that responsibility very seriously. If someone tends to make more false statements than someone else, that doesn't mean pointing that out is biased, it's just reporting the facts. Sometimes reality is biased.

FoxHound56 10y ago
After looking at many fact checkers and the job they do, I could not disagree more. People do not speak in simple statements that can be either scientifically "verified" or "not verified". When talking, people often use hyperbole. They speak in approximate numbers (e.g. 20% instead of 17%, simply because it sounds better). Not to mention people often talk about socially complex subjects that cannot be, in ANY way, verified as simply "true" or "false" without interjecting the fact checkers own personal opinion into the mix. Fact checkers have tried to solve these issues by having "truthiness" ratings. For example, Politifact has the ratings "True, Mostly True, Mostly False, False, Pants on Fire". However, this is obviously a scale that has no objective meaning. As a result, these ratings are applied inconsistently and with a heavy bias towards the fact-checkers own agenda (which, for Politifact, is heavily left-leaning). How do you objectively decide whether a hyperbole is true or not? How do you objectively decide that numbers are too far off the actual scientific numbers? What rounding is too much? How do you objectively decide the truth of complex social issues and statements, and what data do you trust for determining these "objectively true answers"? The answer is you can't, and you don't.
- JamesBarney 10y ago
  It might be hard to determine a false statement from a pants on fire statement, but just because it's not purely objective doesn't mean its not useful. What would are some Politifacts that you think were wildly off base? Like statements that you believe to be true that are labeled "Pants on Fire".