An interesting article from Editor and Publisher. Very timely given the topics on this site:
NEW YORK The fact-checkers have gone wild in the past two weeks, but even before Barack Obama and John McCain were officially selected for the final leg in the race for the White House, political editors and reporters had done some soul-searching, leading many to a new commitment to studying, and maybe correcting, the record when needed.
Bill Adair is the Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times — and godfather of PolitiFact, a joint venture with Congressional Quarterly. It grew out of an idea that is so basic, yet not widely employed. "We felt that we had done a disservice to voters [in 2000 and 2004] where we were passing along claims about candidates that were not true, and feeling that it was up to the voters to decide," he says. "So, about a year ago, my editors came up with the idea of a Web site that would be a sort of daily journal and archive where voters could look things up and see if these claims were true."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_con...
