May 31, 2011 - 7:08 am
Josh Trevino does a nice job of turning PolitiFact’s methods of analysis back on themselves. The particular PolitiFact unit he is dealing with is the one based on Austin and run out of the Austin American-Statesman, known as PolitiFact Texas. I had a few episodes with them when I worked for the Texas GOP. They’re the only PolitiFact unit I’ve ever seen that can take a story, fail to refute a single fact in it, yet brand it “Pants on Fire.” They’re the only PolitiFact unit I’ve seen that can take a story, find it true by applying generally accepted standards of logic and analysis, then apply their own special brand of analysis to determine that some part of the story is false — when in reality, all of it is true.
I have read quite a few “Politifacts” like that. It is really no different than the MSM pretending to be unbiased. When they come across something that clearly favors conservatives they have to go through all kinds of contortions to try and disprove at least part of it and label it as “half true” or “barely true”. In this case they totally failed. Net jobs is the only thing that matters. What good does it do to say we created 1 million new jobs if at the same time you lost 1.2 million jobs?
I live in Austin and was amused when it came to the Statesman, knowing that it was really going to be ‘Politifarct Texas’… which it has runed out to be.
Sadly, the Austin American-Statesman is not a very good paper… Like so many others, it takes a hard left tilt and looks the other way on nearly everything that D.C. does to hurt America…
Just as sad, Austin itself is the Texas version of San Francisco, libber heaven…
I blog about many Texas topics and I rarely use the Austin American-Statesman as a source for anything…
Word on the street is that W. Gardner Selby was a Democrat political staffer for a number of years. Would that impact his fact-checking at all, and do readers deserve to know about his recent partisan affiliations in his career?
I do wish you or some other intrepid reporter or blogger will cover Selby’s past.