Whom Can You Trust?

Back in 1897, an 8-year-old named Virginia O’Hanlon had heard her father praise the New York Sun so vociferously – “Papa says, ‘If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.'” – that when she wanted to know the truth about Santa Claus, she knew exactly where to turn. Where would little Virginia turn today?

If she were my daughter, you can be sure I wouldn’t send her to Fox News or MSNBC or the Drudge Report or Daily Kos or World Net Daily. Instead, I’d send her to my favorite Web site, PolitiFact.com. In fact, working for PolitiFact.com has almost replaced festival programmer for Turner Classic Movies as my ultimate dream job.

PolitiFact is a continuing project of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times. The St. Pete Times is a local daily paper – “mainstream media,” if you will – but it is decidedly different from most newspapers in that it is owned by a nonprofit journalism think-tank called The Poynter Institute, which has made a huge financial commitment to national political reporting. Last year, PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, not for any individual story but for its groundbreaking work in fact-checking statements and claims made during the 2008 presidential campaign.

Nowhere else will you find the “Truth-O-Meter,” a feature in which journalists give one of six ratings to political statements: true, mostly true, half-true, barely true, false or – with a blazing animated graphic – “pants on fire.” Every Truth-O-Meter entry is accompanied by a complete explanation of how the rating was reached, a welcome recognition that political truth is more complicated than sound-bites and campaign ads would have us believe.

PolitiFact has a couple of other ratings tools as well. Its “Flip-O-Meter” studies whether politicians have actually changed their positions on various issues, handing out “no flip,” “half-flip” or “full flop” ratings. The “Obamater” is tracking more than 500 promises Candidate Obama made to see whether President Obama is following through. (At this writing, the Obameter determined that he had kept 91, compromised on 33 and broken 14. The rest are either “stalled” or “in the works.”)

*     *     *

One of my favorite Arkansas Business readers (that is, one whose regular e-mails don’t insult my ancestry) recently forwarded a chain e-mail and asked if I thought there was any truth to it. This particular e-mail had to do with how many members of Congress have criminal records or bankruptcies or can’t qualify for a credit card, and my correspondent was rightly suspicious of its accuracy.

Both PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org do some “mythbusting” of chain e-mails. For instance, FactCheck.org debunks a chain e-mail that claims “the White House” tried to turn away former President George W. Bush when he visited Fort Hood after the massacre there in November. PolitiFact.com debunks a chain e-mail that infuriated a lot of people at my church by claiming that “In God We Trust” had been removed from the presidential dollar coins.

A couple of other Web sites I recommend when it comes to chain e-mails and other carriers of urban legends are Snopes.com and UrbanLegends.About.com. (Snopes.com tracks my reader’s chain e-mail about the criminal records of members of Congress back to 1999, and even then there was no way to confirm any of it.)

*     *     *

There’s a lot of discussion in journalistic circles these days about whether The National Enquirer should win a Pulitzer for its investigation of former Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards’ extramarital affair and the child it produced.

I think there are a couple of reasons the story was ignored for months by the “mainstream media” – and even by Fox News, which, has a vested interest in putting Democrats on the spot. First, who would have thought any post-Clinton politician with presidential aspirations could be so stupid? Second, everyone knows you can’t really trust The National Enquirer, which is why it won’t win a Pulitzer even when it was so right about such a big story. 

(Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at [email protected].)