Donklephant » Blog Archive » Debate Fact Checks

Debate Fact Checks

By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in 2008 Election, Biden, Debates, Palin, Veep

If you’re interested in seeing where the vice-presidential candidates stretched the truth or just down-right fibbed, the AP has good coverage.

Unsurprisingly, both Sarah Palin and Joe Biden managed to squeeze in some deceptions.

Isn’t it sad that a whole “fact check” industry has to exist because our politicians simply can’t stop spewing half-truths and misrepresentations?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 3rd, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Biden, Debates, Palin, Veep. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Debate Fact Checks”

kranky kritter Says:
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:11 am
Not as sad as not having one, if you accept human nature. What is sad is that we’ll probably never see a “check the checkers.” I can almost guarantee that all the major media fact checkers for debates do their best to fit a quota where they have close to equal numbers of oopsies for each candidate, even if they find more oopsies by one or the other.

Notice how the story is organized palin/biden/palin/biden until the end where palin gets 2 extras.

Granted, this stuff is hard to grade.
Alan Stewart Carl Says:
October 3rd, 2008 at 9:47 am
Kranky — yeah, balance and accuracy aren’t the same thing — a fact the media often forget. I guess at some point it’s up to us voters to weigh the severity of the deceptions and decide who we trust more.
mdgeorge Says:
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:02 am
I think that in some sense the “bending the truth” is an inevitable consequence of our very short answer media culture. If you only have 90 seconds to respond to something, you can’t possibly describe your posiiton in detail. You have to misstate things to actually say anything. Yes, some are more shameless than others, but I think more an, longer, and focused debates would help a lot with this. (Also, more depth in news coverage, instead of more short interviews with many pundits).

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

NOTE TO COMMENTERS:

You must ALWAYS fill in the two word CAPTCHA below to submit a comment. And if this is your first time commenting on Donklephant, it will be held in a moderation queue for approval. Please don't resubmit the same comment a couple times. We'll get around to moderating it soon enough.

Also, sometimes even if you've commented before, it may still get placed in a moderation queue and/or sent to the spam folder. If it's just in moderation queue, it'll be published, but it may be deleted if it lands in the spam folder. My apologies if this happens but there are some keywords that push it into the spam folder.

One last note, we will not tolerate comments that disparage people based on age, sex, handicap, race, color, sexual orientation, national origin or ancestry. We reserve the right to delete these comments and ban the people who make them from ever commenting here again.

Thanks for understanding and have a pleasurable commenting experience.