Has anyone else noticed that all election season reporters have waited for “fact-checkers” to come out with lists of lies in political speeches?Example:
“I will reach out my hand to anyone to help me get this country moving again,” McCain will say, according to prepared remarks. “I have that record and the scars to prove it. Senator Obama does not.”
But when Joe Lieberman tried this line of attack on Obama, fact-checkers called the “claim false.”
“In the Senate he has not reached across party lines to get anything significant done, nor has he been willing to take on powerful interest groups in the Democratic Party,” Lieberman said.
“But we’ve found several instances of legislation that Obama passed in concert with Republican lawmakers,” Politifact wrote. Politifact cited three instances – working with Tom Coburn, a McCain supporter on a creating a databse “of federal contracts and grants;” with Dick Lugar on a law that “won enactment of a 2006 law (PL 109-401) that allowed the United States to export nuclear fuel, technology and reactors to India for the first time in three decades;” and “with Lugar on a Senate bill that authorized the president to carry out a program to provide assistance to foreign countries to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Another part of the measure was intended to stop the spread of conventional weapons, notably shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles that the legislation refers to as man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS. The bill’s provisions were incorporated into a House bill that passed later that year and was signed into law in January 2007 (PL 109-472).”
Because if all it takes is some Googling or a phone call or a records check, last I checked that kind of “fact-checking” was the realm of JOURNALISTS. Why are we relying on separate organizations to do this, and waiting on their reports? I thought the big networks sent hundreds of reporters to the conventions. Can’t somebody have an intern look some shit up?
I know we’re outsourcing and right-sizing in newsrooms these days, but this is ridiculous.
A.