An Army Of Conservative Fact Checkers

AIM ^ | 12/17 | K. DANIEL GLOVER

[FromLori]

And the Pu-loser Award for "Correction of the Year" goes to ... The Washington Post for a correction that inspired the amusing hashtag #washingtonpostcorrections on Twitter.

Here's the correction: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number."

And here's the explanation: "It's Correction of the Year because it communicates that people notice and care about corrections, and because it demonstrates the participatory potential being unleashed by the Internet."

Craig Silverman, author of the book Regret The Error and the blog by the same name, gave the tongue-in-cheek award to the Post, and in the same article, he praised the fact-checking value of the Internet. Silverman noted that the practice gained prominence in 2009 despite the reality that professional fact-checkers are among the casualties of the ongoing media "market failure."

"As a result," Silverman said, "it appears as though the future of fact-checking is in open, public and participatory systems and organizations, rather than the closed, professional systems traditionally used by large magazines. The Internet has made this shift possible."

He is absolutely right about that, and that's good news for conservatives. They no longer have to lobby news organizations, often to no avail, to correct misreported facts; instead, they can do the legwork themselves and spread the word online.

Two efforts this year, one of which I contributed to, come to mind: The Heritage Foundation has been fact-checking the Obama administration on health care and other topics; and before it stopped published new material this fall, the newcomer nonprofit American Issues Project had bloggers like me writing fact-check pieces for its blog.

[Always Right]

Assigning 11 people to Fact Check Palin’s book before it was released and coming up with nothing but a few lame or incorrect points has to rank up with the worst of all time.