When you are immersed in truthiness, time flies.
It was five years ago this week that The Atlanta Journal-Constitution launched PolitiFact Georgia, a unique journalistic attempt to parse political truth from political fiction.
To do that, we married old-fashioned investigative reporting and fact-checking with a cartoonish device known as the Truth-O-Meter, which rates statements by politicians and other power brokers on a scale from True to Pants On Fire.
More than 1,000 fact checks later — we publish five a week — we decided to ponder the past a bit to see what we’ve learned.
Here are five takeaways as we celebrate our fifth:
1) Readers are hungry for an unbiased source of information. Many of our fact checks are now suggested by readers, confused by incendiary and often contradictory statements on key issues.
2) We’re known for the Pants On Fire label. But most of the statements we fact-check end up near the Half True stop on the Truth-O-Meter scale. These are statements that contain an element of truth or might be technically accurate, but are also misleading to the average person.
3) The political landscape is increasingly strident, stoked not only by talking heads on radio and TV, but magnified by unfiltered and often outrageous postings on social media.
4) Politicians pay attention to our rulings. An aide to one local politician told us his boss made staffers run key parts of all major speeches through the Truth-O-Meter. Another political operative complained loudly to editors that since PolitiFact’s inception “we have to watch everything we say to make sure it’s accurate.” We took that as a compliment.
5) Folks focus on the meter, even though it’s only a piece of what we do. Readers rarely disagree with the reporting but are sometimes less than fond of the Truth-O-Meter rating.
We live in a world of political spin. PolitiFact Georgia attempts to let readers know when and how they are being spun.
PolitiFact was created by the Tampa Bay Times and, in addition to Georgia, has a Washington office and affiliates in Florida, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin. California comes on board this summer.
Stay tuned, keep reading and keep those suggested fact checks coming.
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