Reason
Greg Beato's "Welcome to the Golden Age of Fact-Checking" is an excellent meditation on the technological and cultural changes that have contributed to our ever-more-transparent society.

But screw it, let's get to the parts where he nails Jonah Lehrer. (more...)

It has been one month since CNN’s Soledad O’Brien spent just under four minutes interviewing Mitt Romney adviser and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu.

Paul Ryan had just emerged as the vice presidential nominee. And O’Brien and her “Starting … Read more

Politico | Associated Press | The Washington Post | The Wall Street Journal | Associated Press

Most likely Poynter Online's last roundup of material about the major parties' political conventions until 2016

Last Thursday night's Democratic National Convention lineup got four million tweets flying, double Twitter's weekly average for political tweets, Emily Schultheis reports. Less data-y, but maybe more important:

“I wouldn’t be shocked if a fair amount of the attention paid to the convention was through Twitter primarily,” said GOP strategist Patrick Ruffini of EngageDC, a digital advertising firm. “If you’re like me, someone who hangs on every word someone is saying, you have far fewer options for TV apart from C-SPAN.”

Maybe we should focus more on how the 15 percent of adult Internet users who are on Twitter use the service rather than on statistics whose utility is not exactly clear? Or maybe we should focus on the 85 percent of voters who are not on Twitter? (more...)

FactCheck.org | The New York Times | Bloomberg | The Washington Post | Time
Bill Clinton's speech to the Democratic National Convention Wednesday night was "a fact-checker’s nightmare," write FactCheck.org's Lori Robertson, Eugene Kiely, Brooks Jackson and Robert Farley, with "lots of effort required to run down his many statistics and factual claims, producing little for us to write about."

Clinton offered a defense to the broad points of Republicans' case against re-electing President Obama, even mentioning Mitt Romney pollster Neil Newhouse's recent broadside against fact-checkers.

Their campaign pollster said, we are not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers. Now, finally I can say, that is true. I — I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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CNN | TPM | The Associated Press | The Washington Post | NPR | The Atlantic
Paul Ryan's speech to the RNC Wednesday night "pushed the debate onto a higher plane," David Gergen told CNN. It also, as the Associated Press put it, took "factual shortcuts." Josh Marshall says members of the news media must now decide whether Ryan's higher plane is so high the truth can't possibly be expected to take root there:

The real question to watch over the next 24 hours is whether that lying thing breaks through into its own issue, as something reporters who are afraid of getting smacked around by campaigns are actually willing or feel they need to discuss.

It's not any great feat Thursday morning to find fact-checks and blog posts strafing Ryan's speech. (Here are a few: 1, 2, 3). What's rare is The Washington Post's excellent "Say What" feature about the speech, which breaks it down line by line and has a collection of popular tweets about the speech and in-line links from Post writers, the paper's fact-check blogger and others. There's also one of those charts that shows how many tweets were sent at various times during the speech. (more...)

University of Northern Iowa | PolitiFact | The Huffington Post
Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin's study about the term "job killer" takes the news media to task for letting a partisan talking point slip by un-fact-checked:

The cavalier nature in which the “job killer” allegations are reported suggests that term is used loosely by those who oppose government regulations, and they can get away with it because news organizations fail to ask—or at least report – whether they have any evidence for the claims they make, and also fail to seek opposing views to counter the “job killer” claims.

Dreier and Martin write an engaging, thorough history of the term, from 1922 until its enshrinement in a Republican "framing strategy" in 1993. Since then, the academics write, it's been smooth sailing for the term, which they find has little correlation with actual unemployment. They studied its use in four news organizations -- The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press -- since 1984.

Some interesting tidbits emerge: The term's almost always used toward policies, usually those favored by the Democratic Party, and rarely toward individuals. Democrats and labor union officials, they note, each accounted for about 5 percent of its uses. And the term's use is higher during Democratic administrations. "In fact, the year 2011 was the biggest year yet for 'job killer' allegations," they write. "Given that Republicans and business organizations were the leading sources of 'job killer' allegations, this political explanation makes sense."

Between 1984 and 2011, the phrase “job killer” appeared in 381 stories from the four news organizations studied. "Associated Press news service had 115 stories, the New York Times 55 stories, the Wall Street Journal 151 stories, and the Washington Post 60 stories" using the phrase, according to the research.

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