It was late
in 2010 when I first thought about doing my own database of PolitiFact
rulings. So between Christmas and New
Years of that year, when there was a brief stand-still in publishing due to the
holidays, I went through PolitiFact's personality page, linking to each person
or group on the list and then recording the count. So each record reflected the name and
political affiliation, along with a total by True, Mostly True, etc.
In 2011, I
started a more detailed analysis. Each
record was one ruling: I also included
the date of the ruling, subject and writer.
Late in 2011, I decided to include a brief description of the ruling.
In doing so I
realized an historical account of PolitiFact was needed--the "up to
2010" rulings should be recorded in the same way, as one by one rulings
instead of by person/group. Recently my conservative counterpart made allegations with regard to Congressional
Quarterly (CQ), which was PolitiFact's partner in 2007 and 2008. The only way I could test their theory--that CQ
mitigated PolitiFact's alleged left wing bias--was to record those rulings in
this way, so that a complete timeline could be created, and the CQ rulings
could be filtered out for analysis.
Luckily,
PolitiFact doesn't delete "old" rulings. So I've been spending a lot of time in a
somewhat tedious process, although it's been interesting reading some of the
claims made back then, as well as seeing how PolitiFact grew and progressed as
a fact-checker, which I will post about soon.
Between other
things going on in September (personally) and doing this, I've not done a whole lot of
posting. It should be picking up soon, however, as
we look at PolitiFact with an historical perspective.
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