Do the Facts Matter?
Beth Fouhy of the Associated Press is also making the erroneous claim that Palin and Biden “Both said they supported partnership rights for gays and lesbians”. This is an especially egregious error since AP articles are quoted in many other news stories. In fact, earlier in the exchange on that subject, Palin said she didn’t even support the same kind of rights afforded to gay couples by her home state of Alaska. Palin: “not if it goes closer and closer towards redefining the traditional definition of marriage between one man and one woman. And unfortunately that’s sometimes where those steps lead”. That’s significantly different than Joe Biden’s answer to the question. Biden: “Do I support granting same-sex benefits? Absolutely positively. Look, in an Obama-Biden administration, there will be absolutely no distinction from a constitutional standpoint or a legal standpoint between a same-sex and a heterosexual couple.” and “We…support making sure that committed couples in a same-sex marriage are guaranteed the same constitutional benefits as it relates to their property rights, their rights of visitation, their rights to insurance, their rights of ownership as heterosexual couples do”. Again, that response is a far cry from Palin’s (non) answer.
Fouhy’s AP article also gets it wrong in stating, “Biden reaffirmed his position that it was “patriotic” for people who earn more than $250,000 to pay additional taxes”. What Biden actually said in the debate was that he felt it was unpatriotic for “people to take their post office box off-shore (to) avoid taxes”. It may be too subtle a difference for a reporter of a major news organization to get, but it is an important distinction and not the same as saying it is patriotic for people to pay more taxes.
If our professional journalists can’t get it right, how can we expect the general public to decipher fact from fiction? I guess what I’m asking is, who fact checks the fact checkers?
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by David Boaz or 
by David Bergland, both excellent books on libertarian thought.
Comment by Bink | October 3rd, 2008
Of course, most of the time facts don’t matter — to most people — where politics is concerned. It’s all about feelings and beliefs shared among the like-minded. Fouhy was doing what a lot of folks do, I suspect: remembering things as she would’ve expected them to be, not as they were. Sad and irresponsible, since she presumably had a transcript at hand as she wrote.
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