US Elections

In actuality, however, Politifact seems to have been trying to do exactly what the New York Times's Public Editor was asking whether journalists should do: police truth. The problem is twofold: yes, Politifact is doing an increasingly poor job of policing truth, but truth is never the cut-and-dried thing we imagine it to be. Fact-checking websites try to claim credibility by setting themselves up as impartial observers, but in politics, there are so many shades of grey that even a disinterested fact checker should be assumed to be just one more voice in the fray — potentially a highly credible voice, but certainly no kind of godlike figure.

This is a point Kevin Drum recently made:  

There are, among lefties, a smallish number of issues where we believe that conservatives routinely peddle flagrant factual falsehoods that ought to be refuted immediately. Climate change is the obvious one, and there are a few others. But the truth is that misstatements of plain facts are fairly rare. That's just not how most political debate works. I think that federal stimulus would be good for the economy. Republicans claim otherwise. Is this a fact? No: it's an argument. That kind of thing makes up about 99 percent of all political discourse. It's just not fact-checkable in the usual sense.

See also Communication Studies professor Matthew McGlone telling the New York Times that politicians get away with lying because truth is difficult to define:

Despite centuries of scholarly inquiry into the enigmatic nature of “truth,” in most cultures a simplistic notion of a dichotomy persists: statements are either true or not, and speakers who knowingly produce the former are being honest and those who knowingly produce the latter are lying. There are situations in which this formulation works, but countless more in which we pretend the line is clear — even when we know otherwise.

In particular, we know that many political messages are passed off as truths, although a little inspection reveals the statements have only some degree of truth. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that “all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”

This is the unsolvable problem of political media: we long for someone to hold disingenuous politicians to account, but cannot accept that doing so requires a definition of truth that doesn't exist. Of course, the alternative, in which partisans flee to figures who repeat their preferred definition of truth as if it were gospel is not particularly desirable either. 

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