If you're interested in fact checking, be sure to check out http://www.politifact.com/ . They put a lot of care and effort into what they do. They are run by the Tampa Bay Times. If you have any questions, I can pass them on to the founder (Bill Adair) and he'd be happy to answer them for you.
As part of a project I worked on, I did a daily review of fact-check sites. Politifact is great if you're a liberal and want fact checks to suit your partisan view of the world. This is easily proven by looking at the people who comment on their fact checks on Facebook, who are overwhelmingly liberal. If you are actually looking for unbiased fact checks, you should look elsewhere.
> If they don't suit your partisan view of the world, where exactly does the problem lie?
I don't know anything about the bias (or lack thereof) of Polifact, but it's not hard to see how this is a problem.
If I were to spot check every statement you made & only 10% of what your opponent said, even if you both had the same level of accuracy, you're going to look a lot more like the biggest liar.
When you start to look at how the fact checkers operate you'll see the same things over and over again, starting with leading questions, selective targeting of opponents, the use of selective data, selective interpretation of the data, ambiguous metrics (what does "half true" mean?) and in many cases wilful distortion of the conclusion that does not fit the agenda. Here's a couple of examples, the first being biased, and the second "Lie of the Year" being totally incorrect. There are literally hundreds of examples similar to these.
I'll just point out that your examples are not from politifact. I've never heard of newslines.org, but i'd trust their no-bylined factchecks about as much as I would trust a fact check from a random facebook commenter. I'm not defending every shitty news site out there pretending to do 'journalism', I'm defending Politifact's work.
Sorry, I didn't explain but those were my analysis of those particular Politifact fact checks. You can verify the facts yourself. In both cases Politifact is clearly biased, and misleading. BTW, I also did fact checks on the fact checks about Romney too. In any case it seems you have drunk the kool-aid so I'll leave the discuss here.
Facebook comments are perhaps the worst metric i can think of to measure a media company on. The data does not support your claims. Look at their factchecks. clearly nonpartisan.
FB comments are just indicative. The actual quality of the fact checks, and the choice of topics are obviously partisan. The whole "fact checking" industry is simply a way to give a veneer of authority to those who are not willing to get outside their partisan bubble.
I fail to see how facebook comments are indicative of anything. And I am not commenting on the 'fact checking industry' I'm commenting on the pulitzer prize winning work of a single organization.
A Pulitzer Prize winning organization whose "Lie of the Year" was proven to be false, and who probably knew it was a lie when they wrote it? Just because a newspaper receives a Pulitzer Prizes does not mean that it has no bias, or does not make mistakes. Here's the truth: all newspapers and media have bias, and to think that fact checkers don't have bias just because they say so is completely naive. When a site has at least 90% liberal readers (their FB comments are just one indicator), and is owned by a liberal-leaning newspaper, do you really think they are going to not going to skew their writing to suit their audience? Try doing your own fact checks (I did over 100) and you'll quickly see how their claims to truth are just a clever way to mask their own bias.
Roughly eighty full-time people work in fact checking
and the research/library at Der Spiegel. It calls this
its “Dokumentation” department. Another thirty or so
part-timers also do duty at the magazine.
In an advertising/click-driven 'news' outlet, this would probably be considered, at best, not worth the investment, and at worst, ridiculous. The business case for fact checking (beyond the bare bones you need to avoid law suits) seem to be dying.
You're right that the "low-end news" market probably can't afford to do any substantial quality control. But in the high end segment of the market, it's more important than ever. Edward Snowden's journalist/organisation selection was not arbitrary.
It's hyperbolic to say that the business case for fact checking is dying, as that suggests that the writing is on the wall and Der Spiegel & friends will soon be moving to a clickbait model.
I think a better assessment is that the market for fact checked articles can only support a certain number of players, and the barrier to entry is somewhat high. Meanwhile, the barrier to entry for clickbait news is low, hence the advert saturation and race to the bottom outcome.
I wonder if any of them are working for their online publication "Spiegel Online"[1] as well. It certainly doesn't feel that way, given that spell-checking their articles often already seems like too much work.
EDIT: Quote from the article: "AP: … In the German press, there’s newspapers that are more reliable than others"
I wonder how high "Spiegel Online" ranks in their internal reliability ranking.
Spiegel Online traditionally had a whole different news desk. Nowadays they work closer together but Spiegel Online quality in reporting is much worse than the print articles (which are mostly also put on Spiegel Online).
I wonder how many journalists are employed by news organizations compared to fact checkers. Seems to me like the main thing keeping journalist's facts correct is not wanting to lose their reputation points.
I don't know another publication that employees 70+ fact checkers. Even The New Yorker which has a similar circulation and is well-known for their fact checking has less than 20.
