Rieder: Cruz outburst reflects rise of political fact-checking

Rem Rieder | USA TODAY

You get the idea that Republican presidential hopeful Ted Cruz really, really doesn't like the fact-checking outfit PolitiFact.

"There is, however, a new, particularly noxious species of yellow journalism that is beginning to infect what passes for modern political discourse. It's called 'PolitiFact,' " he writes in his new book, A Time for Truth. "Through this website, left-wing editorial writers frequently dress up their liberal views as 'facts' and conclude that anyone who does not agree with their view of the world is objectively lying."

Come on Ted, tell us what you really think!

The tirade is amusing in that even while vilifying PolitiFact for shoddy journalism, Cruz gets his facts wrong, saying the Florida-based sleuths found one of his assertions to be "mostly false" when in fact the verdict was "half true." More important, it reflects the fact that the fact-checking movement, a relatively recent phenomenon, is becoming an essential part of our political landscape.

And thank goodness.

For too long, too much political journalism too often settled for reporting on an allegation, adding a denial from the other side and leaving things at that. That really doesn't help the reader, viewer or Web surfer too much.

What fact-checkers do is thoroughly investigate the pronouncements of the pols and reach judgments on their truth or falsity, judgments based, or certainly supposed to be based, not on the political orientation of the writer but on the facts he or she unearths.

The fact-checking movement got underway in earnest in 2003 with the debut of FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. PolitiFact was launched by the Tampa Bay Times four years later. Another mainstay of the movement is The Washington Post's Fact Checker, aka Glenn Kessler.

There are few stauncher believers in the art of fact-checking than Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact's editor. Holan, a former newspaper reporter and researcher with master's degrees in both journalism and library science, joined PolitiFact at the outset as a reporter.

"I love it, It's wonderful," she says. "It's the best journalism ever."

What makes fact-checking so terrific? "You're forced to focus on the substance of the issue," she says. "You can't leave the court with an 'undecided.' You have to get to the bottom of the issue."

And after eight years on the beat, Holan gets the feeling that fact-checking is coming of age, "It does feel like we are at a moment where people expect fact-checking, and appreciate it," she says. "The readers really like it. It's heartening."

And she says it has sunk in among political campaigns that the fact-checkers are something they have to deal with. Unlike at the beginning, when the campaigns would try to get by with a generic quote, "they now know that they need some sort of evidence," she says. "They engage with us."

The exception, Holan adds, is when a campaign really doesn't want to stop using a rhetorical point that is flawed. Then, they are apt to stonewall.

It's not unusual for campaigns and readers to push back on conclusions. The most vehement dissent tends to come from the most partisan readers, both on the left and on the right.

A frequent response from critics is, she says, is "'Yeah, but the larger point is right,'" she says, adding, "one person's minor quibble is another person's huge distortion."

PolitiFact, which has partnerships with local news outlets in seven states, has spawned controversy by its use of rating categories, which range from True to Pants on Fire. The Post's Fact Checker doles out Pinocchios to flawed statements. Critics say those categories open the door to too much subjectivity. FactCheck.org avoids such categories, simply saying whether something is right or not.

But Holan is a big fan of the device. "Some of these fact-checks are dense," she says. "We want to make it as palatable as we can. The benefits far outweigh the drawbacks."

As for Cruz, Holan calls the Texan "a really interesting political figure." But, she adds, "He says things that are not accurate. I'm not surprised he got the details (in his critique of PolitiFact) wrong."