Having gently kicked in the teeth of the Associated Press today, I'll now say something nice about it. As the Washington Post's Greg Sargent points out, the AP is earning itself a reputation for top-flight fact-checking. And significantly, its work in that area is becoming quite popular:
I asked AP Washington Bureau Chief Ron Fournier about this, and he told me something fascinating, if not all together unexpected: Their fact-checking efforts are almost uniformly the most clicked and most linked pieces they produce.
This is good news for people who like good news. For a long time, organizations like Politifact and FactCheck.org plied their trade, all the while being treated like alien visitors who were occasionally invited to alight on the media landscape. But at the end of 2009, NYU's media guru Jay Rosen made fact-checking a cause celebre, and this spring, ABC News joined forces with Politifact and made its work part of the DNA of the network's Sunday morning political show, "This Week". Since then, interim host Jake Tapper enthusiastically carried the baton, waging a public campaign for better factchecking in the news.
So we have the AP as well, blazing its own trail. And while Sargent readily points out that Fournier is a guy who's "taken no shortage of lumps from the left, with some still accusing him of being in the tank for Republicans," I doubt that anyone would deny that this is, at the very least, some refreshing-sounding Real Talk:
"What we tend to forget in journalism is that we got in the business to check facts," Fournier says. "Not just to tell people what Obama said and what Gingrich said. It is groundless to say that Kagan is anti-military. So why not call it groundless? This is badly needed when people are being flooded with information."
Fournier doesn't bite on Sargent's follow-up question on "which side tends to dissemble more," saying "Misleading the public is a bipartisan habit."
Still, the most significant news is that the AP's factcheck operation is prevailing in the link-click economy. This doesn't immunize anyone from skepticism (one of the virtues of the Politifact/ABC relationship is that Politifact maintains a certain independence), but what it suggests about where the minds of news consumers are on the matter, it's a pretty positive trend.
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