Do you love watching Sunday news shows featuring out-of-touch politicians and stuck-on-repeat pundits? No? Well, maybe you will like them better now that Politifact.com will be checking one of them for lying liars telling lies:
The guests on ABC’s “This Week” will be fact-checked by the editors at PolitiFact.com this weekend, in an experiment first proposed by the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen.
Mr. Rosen wrote in December that the Sunday public affairs shows like “Meet the Press” and “This Week” were broken in part because they allow guests to evade questions and distort facts without sufficient follow-ups from the hosts.
“The midweek fact check (in the spirit of Politifact.com, which could even be hired for the job…) might, over time, exert some influence on the speakers on Sunday. At the very least, it would guide the producers in their decisions about whom to invite back,” Mr. Rosen wrote.
Contacted by Mr. Tapper, PolitiFact was happy to help out. The PolitiFact editor Bill Adair said the Web site will post “a couple” of fact-checks on Sunday and “one or two more on Monday or Tuesday.” They will be posted both on PolitiFact and on ABCNews.com.
“Our output,” he cautioned, “will depend on how many facts we hear during the show.”
This can only be good for America, and for facts, which have been sorely abused these many years.