The growing war against fact checkers
And what of the 2012 presidential campaign? Have Obama and Romney been swayed by the work of the professional fact-checkers? Bill Adair, who runs PolitiFact, points to a few instances—just a few—when Obama shifted rhetorical direction in response to fact-check rulings. In 2008, he ceased saying that gas prices were “higher than ever” after PolitiFact reported that this was false when accounting for inflation. Later, when the president was pushing for health care reform, PolitiFact challenged his statement that consumers could keep their current plans under the new law. (Market upheaval, it contended, might knock out some existing insurance policies.) The president then tweaked his language, saying that nothing in the bill would force consumers to switch, but he has since relapsed and used the original formulation. Asked for an example of Romney altering an assertion or ad in response to a fact-check, Adair, after a long pause, remarks, “I don’t recall one offhand…They have quoted us a lot—when it boosts their case.”Simon Owens is an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Email him at sowens@usnews.com
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