I'm watching Anderson Cooper on CNN just now (what is up with MSNBC surrendering Friday evening and the rest of the weekend to freaking prison documentaries and hidden camera shows?!) and Cooper threw over to a spot by Joe Johns which was a "fact check" of Obama's homerun last night...
There actually were not any facts which were wrong according to Johns. If you listen closely to the report you find that the most damning thing he actually found was a statement by Factcheck.org which said that Obama "stuck to the facts until he stretched them". From my perspective, that is hardly a full throated denunciation from the fact finding referees regarding Obamas speech.
But from the tenor of the report, Johns makes it sound like Obamas speech was rife, through and through, with inaccuracy. In his need to find fault with the speech, Johns siezed on one inaccuracy in particular with drove me from the couch to the keyboard in order to bash out this diary.
Just to clarify here, I don't have the video or transcrip so I'm paraphrazing this.
Joe Johns claims that when Obama tosses out the line about John McCain voting with President Bush 90% of the time, Obama is being deceptive. Not because that fact is not true, but because Obama does not also mention that he votes with the Democratic party line 97% of the time.
I'm serious here... the lack to Obama clarifying his own record makes the 'McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time' claim deceptive by omission, from Johns point of view. Not just a little deceptive either. Deceptive enough to be included in a "fact check" on Obamas speech and aired in millions of homes around the world.
It occurs to me that, nearly by definition, the fact that Obama slams McCain for voting WITH the President so often would tend to indicate that Obama does NOT vote with the President very often. Which, again by definition means that Obama would tend to vote the Democratic line. If Johns really believes that Obama is being deceptive for not pointing that out, maybe he should take some sort of course in understanding fundamental logic. Actually I feel silly for even explaining this it is so obvious... so please ignore this paragraph!
It just bugs me that a couple of million people saw that report, and some portion of them came away from it with a notion that Johns had proven how deceptive Obama was.
Fact Checking is important. I would hate to see this necessary function of the press devolve into the gamemanship of "bipartisan" coverage, with the result that for each negative they give to one campaign, they have to search high and low to find a like result from the other campaign.