Politifact launches in Australia
Peter Fray, the former publisher and editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald, has today launched his new political fact checking website PolitiFact Australia and says he is close to announcing a media partner for the site.
Politifact Australia is based on the format of its US counterpart, created by the Tampa Bay Times, and seeks to test political statements categorising them along a ‘truthometer’, with different ratings from true to half true to “pants on fire” for completely untrue statements.
“I’m absolutely stoked – it hasn’t been the longest lead up to a launch but as anyone who has been involved with a website launch will know, there are always those dark nights of the soul and its really a testament to the whole team.” said Fray, who is the editor-in-chief of Politifact Australia.
Isn’t that Seven’s Martin Place studio?
I’m skeptical of all “news” outlets in Australia, commercial and public. Reliable right-wing groupthinkers.
Politifact was a great addition to the US media scene, and won a Pulitzer a couple of years ago. I’m looking forward to this Aussie version gaining traction.
And they have already faced a backlash on Twitter for actually misrepresenting a statement made by the ALP.
The statement ‘Labor’s overtime and penalty rate protections “can’t be stripped” away’ was rated as false stating that Parliament can take these away.
The actual statement made by Labor said that the protections they made in the National Employment Standards cannot be taken away by employers but noted that a coalition government could take these protections away.
Not a good way to start your first day……..
Sorry meant to also put the storify link for my above comment. Funnily enough I got drawn to this through the Twitter feed on Politifact’s own website:
http://storify.com/_robcorr/po.....fy.co_iJZy
Why the need to speak slowly and over-emphasize?
Whose “fact” is in fact, a fact?
Which “truth” is a truth?
In this era of political activists rewriting history to suit their dogma, of manufacturing history, of cherry-picking statistics while ignoring others to suit their cause, the concept of “fact checking” is frankly, laughable.
People will determine for themselves what a fact is, and if ‘fact checkers’ disagree, they will become the focus. Their backgrounds, political affiliations and more will be in the spotlight.
@Dave, I read the same ‘fact checking’ and it rang some alarm bells. I wasn’t surprised to see the backlash for that particular investigation. I agree that it really is not a good way to start their site, or a good way to establish credibility.
How they deal with the necessary correction will speak volumes about the integrity of their site.
Unfortunately, the launch of what was hopefully going to be a new wave of factual insight into the political rhetoric has not gone well for PolitiFact Australia. The sight has only 5 ‘facts’ it has ‘checked’ and ‘rated’ to date and each of the presentations of their ‘analysis’ as well as ‘rating’ is questionable on the ‘facts’ alone, much less the interpretation of the ‘fact’. While having held out great hope, and I really do hope it will get better, the claim of over 150 years of ‘professional journalism’ amongst the staff appears to be journalism as it has presented itself over the past few years and not true investigative journalism as it was once known. Here’s to great hope for future success but that will require less journalistic rhetoric and more objective and reproducible results. It will not be great because they are patting themselves on the back for bringing PolitiFact to Australia, it will be great because the actually apply the principles to themselves that they claim they are applying to the politicians. In the absence of that, who can the public really trust when seeking out the truth?