Back in December, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen had a proposal – fact check the Sunday morning talk shows. The proposal was eagerly embraced in the blogosphere but seemed to go nowhere. ABC’s Jake Tapper, the interim host for This Week has decided to give this a try:
The idea was first proposed by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen and I thought it worth a try. PolitiFact editor Bill Adair, the St Petersburg Times’ Washington bureau chief, and I know each other from fact-checking forums and such (I was at the Fact Check desk during the 2004 elections) so I asked him if he’d be willing to give it a try. He was.
Obviously I aspire to fact-check newsmakers during the show itself, but in addition to that, starting this Sunday April 12, after the show, you can read Politifact’s fact checks on ABCNews.com/This Week and at Politifact.com.
The guests for the show are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani will certainly keep those fact-checker busy. I hope this experiment works because the media has really become a place for politicians to deposit their talking points, and the media pretends they don’t know what’s true and what’s false. There’s no penalty for lying. Hopefully fact-checking can start killing those lies that become conventional wisdom (like the one that Rudy Giuliani is some kind of security expert).