The "Verification Industry"

According to MoJo's David Corn, fact-checking as a separate entity emerged in response to the press accepting the G.W. Bush administration's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  The assertion, of course, proved to be false and some members of the media subsequently looked for ways of vetting information before they published/distributed it.  Corn makes the point that in the Twitter age we can't rely on individual newspaper journalists to delve into the veracity of the issues they write about because they are "overwhelmed" by constantly emerging stories.  Fact-checkers might seem a good solution.

But Kevin Drum tells us that it's not as simple as that.  He states that "Politicians try to mislead voters all the time," but not usually by "flat-out lying."  He suggests a formula for assessing a speaker's intent to mislead.  I like Drum's idea, but I'm afraid it may be too nebulous to provide much help to truth-seekers.

Rush Limbaugh and others believe that bias exists in the fact-checking realm. Limbaugh claims that the "drive-by media" used "bogus fact-checkers" employing "misleading data" in an attempt to prove that Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan was lying in his speech to the RNC.  The implications of this cannot be underestimated.  If politicians and influential political observers are successful in casting aspersions on the trustworthiness of fact-checkers, the American public will discount the information coming from the "verification industry."  Candidates' claims will go unexamined and, as Corn points out, such a scenario will most benefit "those politicians who lie with the greatest abandon."