Fact-checking columnists
I understand why opinion columnists are not put under the same fact-checking scrutiny of regular reporters. After all, their writing is comprised of opinions which can never definitively be proven right or wrong, correct?
Not really. Though it is true that the opinions can not be fact-checked, the events upon which they are based can. This is why I can’t wrap my head around how hack columnists like Bill Kristol can make egregious error after error every week in a publication like the New York Times without an editor at least requesting that Kristol turn in a sheet listing his sources so a college intern can skim over them.
Take this week’s screw-up for instance. Kristol writes:
On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary – by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.
Really Bill, you can’t find a single instance?
As others have documented, Mitt Romney won 90% of the vote in Utah and Huckabee beat McCain in Arizona (his home state, mind you) by 40 points and in Kansas by 36 points.
But the news here isn’t that Kristol was wrong. After all, he’s wrong all the time. The news is that the New York Times is aware that he has made several significant, easily-fact-checked errors during his brief stint at the Times and they haven’t done anything to correct this. When I said that a mere intern could fact check his columns, I wasn’t kidding. Most of his mistakes could have been caught with a simple Google check.
So how many more weeks are going to go by before an editor starts taking the heat for not fact-checking Bill Kristol? If this isn’t proof that the neocon was a an affirmative action hire (to try to deflect criticisms of liberal bias), I don’t know what is. They’re letting him play in his little corner and then pat him on the head and give him a lollipop once he turns in the latest column of drek.
