A pie in the face of the ‘truthiness’ crowd

Oct. 7, 2007
Chris Satullo
Inquirer columnist

Stephen Colbert, meet Bill Adair. Truthiness has found its umpire. The quick-witted king of The Colbert Report coined that useful term a few years back.

Truthiness both describes and mocks the tendency of politicians, pundits and talk-show hosts to claim something to be true (no matter what the evidence says) simply because they would like it to be true, feel it to be true, or need it to be true.

Bill Adair is steeped in the ways and means of truthiness.

As Washington bureau chief for the St. Petersburg Times, he’s covered dozens of political campaigns, including riding on the Al Gore plane in 2000 and the George W. Bush plane in 2004.

And now, as czar of a new Web site called PolitiFact (http://www.politifact.com), he’s primed to help voters sort truth from truthiness during the 2008 presidential campaign.

PolitiFact is devoted to one task: fact-checking the blizzard of assertions falling daily from the mouths of presidential hopefuls, their staffs, their TV ads, and YouTube videos. The site’s team of reporters, researchers and editors — all St. Pete Times employees — dig deep to check the facts beneath the spin. They present crisp judgments on pieces of political rhetoric using what they call the Truth-O-Meter. The Truth-O-Meter’s daily verdicts cover a spectrum: True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False, and the dreaded Pants on Fire. Each judgment is backed up by a fully reported story.

On Oct. 15, for example, the Truth-O-Meter clanged “False” on John Edwards’ claim to be the first candidate to produce a full health-care plan. It also confirmed the Republican National Committee’s charge that Sen. Barack Obama skipped out on a Senate vote on a resolution to back Gen. David Petraeus against attacks by MoveOn.org.

You can click on a candidate’s name to see a report on all of the Truth-O-Meter ratings in which he or she has been involved. You can click on an issue to see all the reporting related to the issue. And you can let PolitiFact know about a political claim you’d like to see checked out.

It’s a timely service to voters in what has already (before Halloween, for crying out loud) become an exhausting, exasperating presidential campaign. And it’s done with both class and sass. PolitiFact renders serious reporting with a sense of humor that helps even dry issue assessments stick in the voter’s mind.

And it comes from a paper which, while Florida’s biggest, isn’t usually on the short list of big-time players in national politics. That’s another example of how the Internet is reshaping the universe of political media at warp speed.

What prompted Adair, a 45-year-old Philly native, to hop out of his seat on the presidential campaign plane (the Holy Grail for most young reporters) and into the earnest, stationary world of fact checking?

In a word, guilt.

“I’m doing this to atone for my sins,” he says, only half-joking. “Especially in ’04, I found myself out on the trail feeling guilty that, a fair number of times, I’d quote someone from one of the campaigns in a story, even as I said to myself, ‘Hey, what they’re saying isn’t really true.’ But the normal thing was to put it in there anyway, because it was news, and you hoped that voters would figure some way to sort it all out.”

Except most voters couldn’t do that, at least not without more help from the journalists who were supposed to be serving them.
The more time he spent on the trail, the more Adair noticed, with a kind of wary admiration, how deft political campaigns had become at exploiting the routines and rules of daily journalism to get out a distorted, self-serving take on events.

“I could see how when we bent over too far backward to be fair, to quote all sides, we unintentionally allowed falsehoods to breed,” he recalls. “I kept feeling like I wasn’t doing what I should have done to give voters what they needed to know.”

It’s not as if no one was on the fact-checking beat. FactCheck.org (http://www.factcheck.org), run out of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, does a superb job, but it tends to do fewer issues, albeit in authoritative depth.

PolitiFact tries to deliver the goods, but in a style less old-fashioned than FactCheck.org, a style attuned to the sensibilities of a YouTube-Facebook-Digg generation. The site, for example, includes a hilarious music video of the PolitiFact theme song, the hard-rocking “Gimme the Truth.”

PolitiFact’s weakness so far comes down to “so many lies, so little time.” Trying to update daily, the PolitiFact team finds it easier to reach verdicts on more superficial claims. The dry wit in a report documenting a Pants on Fire rating for Rudy Giuliani’s claim to be one of the five most famous Americans is priceless. But, in the long run, how much does this example of Rudy’s massive ego matter?

By contrast, Adair says ruefully, he spent days trying to sort out an Obama claim about the fuel efficiency of American cars. He thought it would be easy, but soon was deep in the weeds of complexity and counterclaim. He’s still plugging away, but it’s a cautionary tale. Substance is harder. Adair says the site is planning to add staff, and to spend more time digging deep on major
issues, less on refereeing campaign silliness.

My recommendation: Add PolitiFact to your favorites list today. And if FactCheck.org wasn’t on it already, add it, too.
Truthiness hasn’t been routed from the field. But it’s feeling the heat.