Bloggasm

“People can fact-check Meet the Press every week on their own terms,” Meet the Press’ David Gregory told the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, shrugging off the suggestion that the Sunday show should follow the lead of ABC’s ‘This Week,’ which recently received heaps of praise for teaming up with PolitiFact to fact-check each week’s guest so no untruth slips through unchallenged. The original idea for a fact checking counterpart stemmed from NYU journalism prof Jay Rosen who, along with others, showed disdain for Gregory’s flippant dismissal to a formal fact-checking process.

Chas Danner was one of the many annoyed by Gregory’s comment. As a 31-year-old undergraduate journalism student in NYC, Danner is a regular reader of Rosen’s and not long ago set off to find out whether there was a Facebook group trying to pressure Gregory to change his mind. “This would be a pretty easy thing to get a group going to help pressure Meet the Press,” he told me during a phone interview. “And so I went on and it turns out there was already a group started by this guy named Paul Breer. All I knew about him is that he’s a guy from Kansas. So I joined the group, made a couple quick graphics and then gave him some advice.”

Those back-and-forth messages led to the formation of Meet the Facts, which describes itself as a “non-partisan grassroots effort to encourage the NBC television program Meet The Press to incorporate a formal fact checking procedure for all statements made on air by its guests.” Though the main gist of its effort is to get NBC to take this burden upon itself, this week the group published a detailed analysis of the most recent Meet the Press episode, weighing the accuracy of the assertions on the show much in the same way as you’ll see Politifact and Factcheck.org assess statements. “We got a volunteer who emailed us and said, ‘if you need help, let me know,’” Danner said. “And he ended up being great helping us do research, and the three of us looked over the episode, tried to find stuff to check, and went out and dug into it.”

This task, they found out, was not easy. Danner estimated that between the three of them it took 12 hours to research and he spent the better part of a day trying to format it into a digestible blog post. It turns out that fact-checking an episode is a time-consuming process, which is especially important when you consider that all three were doing so without getting paid. If the group wants to continue this from week to week, they’ll likely have to amass more volunteers and devise an efficient way to split up the work.

Understandably, Danner would like to hand off much of this work to a third-party group, perhaps a university journalism program, and he’s open to anyone who wishes to team up with the group. He said it’s up in the air right now whether they’ll actually be able to fact check every week, so this is why the main thrust of Meet the Facts is to get Meet the Press to take its own initiative in organizing a fact checking organization, either from an outside group (what Danner prefers) or in-house.

“I think that’s certainly the essential goal right now, to get as many people as possible to take action, and do whatever they can and get [Meet the Press and other Sunday shows] to change course. This isn’t a hard sell, it’s a pretty simple thing. And beyond that, if Meet the Facts needs to turn into some kind of counterpoint to Meet the Press, where we provide that service, I think we’re ready to take it to that level. But it’s a matter of finding the resources, the human resources … I don’t imagine my life’s calling is to fact check Meet the Press forever, but this may change the culture of Sunday talk shows.”

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When listing the accomplishments of the conservative blogger, the fall of Dan Rather seems so far to be their crowning achievement. Greg Sargent at the Washington Post wonders if lefty blogs deserve similar credit for Lou Dobbs’ resignation, seeing as they provided a constant drumbeat for his firing, systematically and tediously reporting his more outlandish and inaccurate statements.

The only difference, of course, is that the right blogosphere was able to seize upon one particularly large error while the left had to settle for a series of incremental ones, making credit harder to assign. While they certainly lobbed quite a few stones, the right was able to use a catapult to bring down the entire fortress wall in one fell swoop.

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TVNewser is reporting that CNN’s Susan Roesgen is out at CNN after the network declined to renew her contract. Roesgen faced harsh criticism a few months ago because of her on-air reaction to a group of tea party protesters, and the videos of the encounter received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. In fact the YouTube video was getting so much traction within the blogosphere that CNN used copyright claims to get one of the earliest versions removed from the site.

I predict a lot of schadenfreude in the conservative blogosphere today. They kept he issue alive for weeks after it happened, and permanently tarnished Roesgen’s reputations until she was likely viewed as damaged goods.

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After several weeks of trying, Gawker finally caught up to Fox News’ Chief Ambush Journalist, Jesse Watters, to interview him about his ambush tactics. Unfortunately, the confrontation was rather anti-climatic.

At about 8:45 a.m., Watters walked out on to his driveway with his wife, Noelle, and we hopped out to talk to him. When Watters ambushes people, he rushes at them in a deliberate attempt to rattle them, and asks hostile questions. Not being complete dicks, we decided to approach it differently. We introduced ourselves, said hello, and calmly approached him. He got in his car and drove away. We could have engaged some of the tactics that Fox has used in these situations—by say, running to meet him at his car and positioning ourselves so that he couldn’t close the door—but we didn’t want to, because we weren’t trying to engineer a confrontation. We were trying to engineer an interview.

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FNC’s Bill O’Reilly is known for his ethically-challenged ambushes of media personalities, whether it’s following bloggers for hours while they’re on vacation or claiming that the ambushees were given the opportunity to come on the show when they weren’t. But his latest ambush has reached a new low; the reporter he sent to interview comedian Janeane Garofalo not only didn’t say right away who he was, he lied when asked directly by Garofalo:

GAROFALO: What are you doing here?

JENKINS: I’m just a blogger [who] reads blogs. He’s a radio host.

GAROFALO: But what do you do with all those blogs?

One can debate the merits of following a Think Progress blogger for hours in a car and running up to her while she’s on vacation, but failing to disclose your employer and claiming you’re a “blogger” even when confronted directly? I know that O’Reilly is a ratings draw and so therefor holds a lot of sway at Fox News, but executives should in this case step in and lay down some ground rules, especially since this involves underling correspondents and producers at Fox News more than O’Reilly himself.

How random. A “psychographic-research company” called Mindset Media has performed personality tests on thousands of individuals, all in order to ascribe personality traits to different kinds of media consumption. Like horoscopes, I think personality tests lure people in with the irrational tendency to gravitate toward confirmation bias — especially if all the personality traits are positive — but some of the consumption trends for different mediums were interesting. For instance, did you know that heavy internet users are “153% more likely to always buy organic products and 104% more likely to drive a hybrid car”?

Oh, and we now know where the conservative blogosphere’s readership comes from:

Low-level consumers of the internet tend to rank high in dogmatism, and are described as socially conservative people who tend to look to a religious or moral authority for guidance. “People who are more liberal are more likely to have the internet as the most consumed media,” Ms. Welch said.