Actually, I have no idea if you’re wrong, or how wrong you might be. I just really want you to read this column. On the other hand, I know that if you talk to friends about politics, especially in this very contentious election year, you will sometimes be wrong because—as always—we are being deceived. Some of the deceptions may be mistakes. Many clearly are not. You need to know where and how to check. If you don’t, you may be wrong, you may call someone else an idiot (when you’re the one with unchecked facts) and you may even regret your vote.
Remember when most everyone believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? On the days you believed that, you were wrong, and there were—from the beginning—people, Websites, columns and other resources that could have made you doubt it. Did you check with any of them? OK. That’s ancient history at this point. The election in November will have a lot to do with determining how we will deal with the war that started (at least in part) because Americans in high places believed the WMD argument, which was wrong.
Here are some questions from the election front: Did you believe Hillary Clinton when she said she arrived in Bosnia under sniper fire and didn’t get a welcoming ceremony on the tarmac? Did you believe Barack Obama when he said his healthcare plan really will provide “universal coverage” to Americans? I’d give you a McCain example, but he’s been pretty quiet recently, leaving the Democratic candidates to batter each other as a way of making his own campaign look shinier and cleaner by comparison.
You can check. The nightly news isn’t going to check for you—not reliably and, depending…, maybe not in an unbiased way. So, here are some Websites to get you started on the search for the facts behind the statements made by candidates. The list could practically go on forever, but after you have the a few paragraphs from one of these Websites, choose your keywords carefully and dive into a straight Web search for more details.
Factcheck.org (www.factcheck.org) is the most famous and most frequently quoted fact-checking site. When I read the listings there on April 5, they seemed to be going pretty easy on Clinton and kicking pretty hard at Obama. I’ve seen the scale tipped the other way, too.
For an absolutely nonpartisan political perspective, especially useful when the fact you want to confirm is about the election, election law/procedure and the like, ask the Hawai‘i chapter of the League of Women Voters (www.lwv-hawaii.com). We’ll be talking more about the league later when we talk about the Hawai‘i Constitutional Convention question on this year’s ballot.
The Washington Post has a lot of reporters out covering the election, but once the stories come in, they also have fact checkers looking into the reports. Was that speaker really in that place on that date? Was that woman really in the hospital and denied care? Were snipers firing on that day? Where did those figures originate and how reliable are they? Better yet, they have a Web-reader-driven fact-checking blog. If you want to know what’s the truth and what’s the source, Michael Dobbs, the writer of the Washington Post fact-checking blog (http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/), will check it out for you. However, chances are very good that anything you think of to have checked, you’ll find has already been checked and blogged here.
Barack Obama’s campaign has a fact-check site (http://factcheck.barackobama.com) of its own. Or you can go to the campaign’s main site (www.barackobama.com) and jump to fact-checking. Use the Obama site if you are generally inclined to believe Clinton, and vice versa.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign site (www.hillaryclinton.com) includes plenty of data meant to confirm her facts and deny Obama’s, but the closest thing here to a fact-checking page is under the Newsroom heading, and it’s called the Fact Hub. The Hillary Hub page on the site has been more productive for me, actually.
Sometimes, the fact-checks are funny, even when they are also accurate. For instance, FactCheck.com has this to say: “Obama also said an employer has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than of being prosecuted for employing an immigrant who’s in the U.S. illegally. That turns out to be pretty close to the truth.” See, fact-checking, these days, doesn’t have to be dreary work. You can enjoy it, especially when you dig up proof of your candidate’s accuracy or the opponent’s inaccuracy. [For “accuracy” and “inaccuracy,” let yourself see “honesty” and “lying.”]
Here’s one last important piece of advice about getting the facts: Asking friends and neighbors is not fact-checking. Neither is your gut reaction, for that matter. Facts are facts, not slogans or toys, and you want to base your vote on facts that are not sloganized or toyed with.