Last week I tried to make the point that PolitiFact was wrong to label as lies what are really useful phrases of political shorthand to signal passionately held differences of opinion:
All three disputed claims are what the rest of us might consider hyperbolic hysteria, if not downright lies, but which politicians think of as a routine component of their debate speech. There would really be no “death panels,” of course, but there would of necessity be rationing by the government of some sort or another, which would require people to do the rationing. “Death panel” thus becomes useful shorthand to signal how far the crazy other side is willing to go. Likewise, Republicans aren't really going to “end Medicare,” but saying so is shorthand for pointing out how radical the changes to it might be. The government really wasn't going to “ban” our current cheap light bulbs, either, but it was going to set the efficiency standards for them so high that they'd be too costly to make, so “ban” was good shorthand for excessive government interference.
Now, Ramesh Ponnuru of The National Review makes essentially the same point, and better than I did:
One of the worst features of contemporary politics is the tendency -- found on the right, on the left and in between -- to label our opponents liars, often without a shred of evidence that the person we're attacking is saying something he knows to be false. PolitiFact makes that problem worse, not better, by giving a supposedly authoritative imprimatur to such loose accusations.
he reason we have politics at all is that we disagree, sometimes deeply, about how to promote the common good, and we need a peaceful and productive way to resolve or at least manage these disagreements. We disagree about how to improve U.S. health care, and we disagree about how each other's proposals to change it should be characterized. The pretense of PolitiFact, and other media “fact checkers,” is that many of our political disputes have obvious correct answers on which all reasonable people looking fairly at the evidence can agree -- and any other answer is “simply not true.”
This pretense really is false, and like dishonesty, it is corrosive.
I still contened, though, that PolitiFact is providing a valuable service, however misguided its intent and whether or not we agree with a specific lie label. By calling out excessive rhetoric and calling it a whopper, the "fact checkers" force partisans to go beyond the shorthand and fill in some of the context and nuance
