Sidebar: Does Ze Bra Hold Up?

I knew it might be too good to be true when my conservative counterpart appeared to stop posting his criticisms of PolitiFact at both of his sites...as well as stop posting at the PolitiFact Facebook page.  I also thought he might be up to something.  In my last contact on the PolitiFact Facebook page, he said he was going to do the same Pants on Fire analysis of the state PolitiFacts, and it seemed likely to me he was going through the process of collecting the state data which was taking up his time.

 

It also seemed he was getting heard at a higher level in the right-wing media where he was cited and featured with an interview; he had also "un-blogspotted" his PolitiFact Bias site, making it a real website, in order to give it more "cred" I suppose.  There's most likely money to be made in connections to Big Government or Weekly Standard especially when you're regularly trashing an "independent fact-checker" as being liberally biased.  Now that he was being cited by the bigger names, it seemed that would be a natural progression.

 

As it turns out, author Bryan White has decided to launch a new website where he does his own fact-checks with a conservative bent.  Of course, he's not rating them like PolitiFact or the Washington Post Factchecker, and he's given the site the name of Zebra FactCheck, which I think reflects his ideology very neatly--for most conservatives don't see the world in shades of grey, they see it in black and white.  This also is very indicative of  the false dichotomies he often presents.  But in terms of the right-wing websites, he may have segued into something that might get him a real job.

 

Speaking of that, this makes my theory seem all the more likely that Bryan White may have been someone rejected for a journalist-type job by the Tampa Bay Times or PolitiFact itself: he states that these fact-checks are what he does best.  So this bolsters my theory that this was his retaliation.  But that's pure speculation.

 

All in all, it makes it easier for me in the sense that it is harder to make a criticism of a criticism of a factcheck than it is just to criticize the factcheck itself.  And that I will do.  In fact, I've discovered that the best way to check his fact-checks may be with PolitiFact's fact-checks.

 

In the meantime, I am having fun trying to find a comical symbol for "Checking Zebra-Factcheck".  I thought of De-Zebtions and the graphic for the title of my post "does Ze-Bra hold up?'  Or there's the black and white angle.  Lil Black and White Lies?  "Gray"-ding Zebra Factchecks" maybe?   Stay tuned.