Resources to Fact-Check the Presidential Candidates

With a month and a half to go before the election, the campaigns are getting pretty intense (no matter who you’re voting for I hope we can disagree well). New accusations, gaffes and bizarre stories seem to surface every day. It’s hard to know who to believe, so I offer three fact checking resources:

Truth-O-Meter
Offers a ratings for ‘True,’ ‘Mostly True,’ ‘Half True,’ ‘Barely True,’ ‘False,’ and ‘Pants on Fire.’ In investigating 114 of Obama’s statements and 113 of McCain’s, Obama gets 18 ‘false’ claims and 0 ‘pants on fire’ claims, while McCain gets 22 ‘false’ claims and 6 ‘pants on fire’ claims. It’s run by the St. Petersburg Times and the Congressional Quarterly.

Lie Count
I came across this one today and it offers a straight count of outright lies from each campaign. As of right now the tally is Democrats: 6 lies, Republicans: 11 lies. This one is run by two web guys with some spare time.

FactCheck.org
This one is the most thorough and has the least spin. They don’t have any counters of who’s “winning” and sometimes they’re overly careful in their fact-checking and statement splicing. The one downside is all that careful truth-finding takes time. They’re backed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. (Curiously, FactCheck was even used in a McCain ad, which they then fact-checked and called a distortion.)

Also of interest, though not for fact-checking, is Every Moment Now, which shows the level of media coverage of both candidates. Perspctv is another good visualizer of McCain/Obama coverage, though it’s much wider in scope (web searches, blog mentions, etc.). Both links via two cents.

It’s sad that we have to call out either candidate for lying or stretching the truth, but that’s the reality. Boo politics.

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