Saturday, March 31, 2012

PolitiFarce Gets Recalled

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the largest corporate media blocs in the state, is, oh so proud of their PolitiFact, even though it misses more than it hits.

But I don't know what good it does anyone, since it is so skewed so often.

Take for instance, the issue of how many recall signatures were turned in.

The recallers claimed that it was more than one million signatures.  The GAB said that the actual number was 931,042.  That would mean that the recallers were off by a 7%.  For this, PolitiFarce gave them a "false" rating.

And that's it.  They didn't check out any other single claim that was flying around out there regarding the recalls.

For if they had, they might have found that the MacIver (Anything but a) News Service and the teahadists that were hosting the "Verify the Recall' McCarthyism revival were lying through their teeth when they claimed that a third of the signatures were invalid.  In reality, it was about one thirtieth.

If they had look further, they might have heard Charlie Sykes echoing these ridiculous claims.  They could have given him yet another "Pants on Fire" rating to go with his collection. (And it's not lost on me that Sykes has never been found to be telling the truth.)

If they looked even minimally, they would have found Sykes' pal, Jeff Wagner, who predicted the final number would be around 600,000 and sometimes predicted that the recall would fail outright.  Wagner was off by almost 50%, but he doesn't even warrant a mention.

They could have looked at Vicki McKenna and the Koch-sponsored Wisconsin Reporter who claimed that someone forged her name on a recall petition.  Yet according to their own Verify the Recall database, neither her professional name or her real name appear.  That would put them at 100% off.  But PolitiFarce won't even give them a smoldering ember much less a pants on fire.

The excuse that it was too hard to look around doesn't hold water either.  They could have just looked at their own bloody paper and found that they were off by five times the actual number of invalid signatures.  Maybe they could torch their own pants?

But since PolitiFarce chose not to look at the other side of the guessing game, I'll give them a rating:  Corporate Media:



Cross posted at Whallah!

5 comments:

  1. Citizen media, is the only media.

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  2. Now you know why they hate the blogs.

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  3. I've spent a pretty good amount of time looking at the 'findings' that VTR has posted. I won't into detail (though I certainly can) but two things some might have missed: 1) while they originally said there were only 830K signatures (before duplicates, etc.), just before 'submitting' to the GAB that was 'updated' to 860K, and 2) when I 'parse' the file underlying that 860K number, I can identify at least 8500 petition pages that appear to be missing from the file. Not 8500 names, 8500 pages, so something in the neighborhood of 50K signatures.

    (and of course their duplicates, 'bad dates', 'incompletes', etc contain thousands of perfectly good or 'substantially compliant' signatures.)

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  4. Re: Sykes, Wagner, MacIver, Mckenna(Pyzynski)

    Joseph Goebbels: "Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred."

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  5. Don't forget that Charlie Sykes and Jeff Wagner work for a radio station owned by the Journal Sentinel's parent company. Or that the newspaper has on a number of occasions registered its editorial dislike of the recall process as unduly burdensome for democracy -- as if too much voting is a bad thing.

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