Media fact-checkers

When  a dispute arises between Dems and the GOP, how do fact-checkers in the MSM figure out who is telling the truth and who gets pinocchios?  Simple -- they just call the Democrats and ask. 

To date, three PolitiFact columns have been written on the main welfare reform controversy—two concluding Republicans are lying, and a third concluding that Bill Clinton was telling the truth about Sebelius’s misleading, garbage-in, garbage-out 20 percent metric. Factcheck.org and the Washington Post fact checker have also concluded that Republicans are not telling the truth about what the Obama administration did to welfare reform.

In order for “fact checkers” to swiftly, unanimously, and erroneously reach the wrong conclusion, they created a feedback loop, credulously taking at face value the statements of the Obama administration and liberal policy experts, while systematically ignoring critical sources—including the primary source for the allegation the Obama administration is gutting welfare reform.

Though they’ve selectively and dismissively quoted him, Rector says PolitiFact has spoken to him only once, and that was about a tangential matter involving Republican governors who have requested welfare waivers. He’s never been asked by any fact checking organizations “about the core argument, which is Obama gutting workfare,” he says.

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The Weekly Standard also spoke to the leading Republican welfare policy expert in the House of Representatives, Matt Weidinger, staff director of the Ways and Means subcommittee on welfare. He said he had never been contacted by a fact checking organization. Becky Shipp, an adviser for the Senate Finance Committee, known as the premiere GOP welfare geek in the upper chamber, also reports she hasn’t been contacted by a media fact checker. Further, she tells The Weekly Standard she went so far as to reach out to a fact checking organization to correct the record and never heard back.