Who Checks The Fact Checkers?

With the accusations and counter-accusations going on, much as been made, especially by CNN, about FactCheck.org. They claim to be non-partisan. I myself had not really questioned this. Then I read this hyperbolic blog post and started glancing over their write-ups with a little closer scrutiny.

I started with Gun Rights, a topic important to me, and on which I have read a lot of propaganda, on both sides. Wow. The response to the NRA reads like something straight out of the Brady campaign, and is hardly an objective source. The section on banning of hunting cartridges is laughable. It claims that Sen. Kennedy's propaganda for the bill should be substituted for the bill's actual language. The language would in fact ban the vast majority of hunting ammo, if enforced by anyone with any anti-gun bias. Here's how: It bans ammo that can pierce armor and (for rifles) is "designed or marketed" as such. Any round that is used for hunting something larger than a groundhog will rip right through a IIA vest, which is what most police wear to stop handgun rounds. Virtually all rounds are advertised to have good "penetration" which is implicitly known by hunters to refer to animal flesh. Add the two together and add in any desire to ban the round, and under the legalisation, it's illegal. In fact, the round used by the military for killing humans, the M16's 5.56mm, is illegal for deer hunting, because it is too weak. Animals that are hunted are a lot harder to kill than humans. I could go on and on about this section's flaws, but I'll move on.

To make sure this wasn't isolated, I checked on the VP debate section, the most recent one I watched. There were twice as many corrections of Ms. Palin as Mr. Biden. Both made plenty of mistakes (here is a list of Biden gaffes they could have picked from). Factcheck.org did not even mention possibly the most bizzare, when Mr. Biden claimed the US and France defeated Hezbollah, and he and Mr. Obama wanted to send in NATO forces. Nothing that could ever be construed as that ever happened.

I then checked the Presidential debates. In the second debate, Mr. McCain was corrected twice as much, and in the first he is corrected five times to Mr. Obama's three times. So in three debates Factcheck.org corrected the Republican ticket 13 times and the Democratic ticket 7 times. Both sides made plenty of mistakes, so any non-exhaustive list is selective. A non-partisan list therefore, should pick an equal number of examples of each. Yet each time, significantly more Republican mistakes were pointed out.

Factcheck.org does point out mistakes by the Democratic ticket. They are not pure propaganda. However, to me, they fail the nonpartisan sniff test. Their information should be taken with a grain of salt.