Fact Checkers and False Balance

Fact checkers complaining that Mitt Romney makes false claims during his campaign have a point. But because most of them have hewn to the ridiculous idea that "both sides do it" provides necessary balance, these fact checkers have neutralized themselves.  It explains why the Romney campaign can say, "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

Case in point, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post.   Kessler has correctly pointed out that the theme of first night of the Republican National Convention, "We Built It," was based on the distortion and truncation of a speech by Barack Obama, lifting it from all context and changing its meaning.  Writing on July  23rd, Kessler opined.

 [B]y focusing on one ill-phrased sentence, Romney and his campaign have decided to pretend that Obama is talking about something different — and then further extrapolated it so that it becomes ridiculous. That’s not very original at all.

After the first night of the convention, Kessler "upgraded" his rating to 4 Pinocchio's because: 

[I]n light of the GOP’s repeated misuse of this Obama quote in speech after speech, we feel compelled to increase the Pinocchio rating to Four.

Fine.  The GOP repeats a debunked lie and he upgrades it.  But in his piece, Kessler describes the complaints generated by the original 3 Pinocchio rating and that the original rating was a "compromise"

We originally gave Romney’s use of the phrase Three Pinocchios, a ruling that did not seem to please anyone, with Democrats complaining that Obama’s words were clearly taken out of context and Republicans arguing that even in context, his words exposed a philosophy that was deeply suspicious of — even hostile to — the private sector...So we believed Three Pinocchios was a reasonable compromise, given the ungrammatical nature of Obama’s phrasing. [Emphasis added]

Kessler goes on to write, "As we have often said, a gaffe can become an effective attack when it reinforces an existing stereotype about a politician. Democrats would have a stronger case for a complaint if they did not also yesterday release two videos that made ample use of gaffes by Romney that reinforced the stereotype of the GOP nominee being an uncaring corporate executive." [Emphasis added]

And there's the point.  Kessler does not independently think about whether the claim is true or not. Embedded in his analysis is the thought about how political actors use the claims.  For purposes of a "fact check" it does not actually matter whether the Democrats would have a "stronger" case if they did something different. If they are complaining, yet doing the same thing, it makes them hypocrites, but it doesn't make the statement any less false.   Yet that is not how Kessler treats the claim.

And thus the problem. The idea that you have to ding both sides is so embedded in the ideology of reporters who cover politics that even "fact checkers" do it when it is totally irrelevant to the "fact" they are trying to "check."