Monday, March 9, 2009

Better Factcheckers, Please

WaPo: "Partisan Fights ahead on Stem Cells, Omnibus"

Okay, the Omnibus bill I'll give you. But 20% of Republican House members voted for the 2007 Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act. As did 30% of Republican Senate members. It's true that a number of those members have since retired or lost reelection (see Shays, Chris), but it's simply not true that Stem Cell research is a partisan issue.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure a fact-checker could do much about defining "partisan." After all, if 80% or 70% of one party opposes a policy with broad support on the other side, it's not a partisan issue?

More important: Newspapers don't have fact-checkers. The reporters (and editors, if they smell something fishy) are the "fact-checkers."

Nick Beaudrot said...

Yeah, we seem to have this problem, which is that of course House Conservatives are significantly more conservative than even the Republican primary electorate at this point. I mean, if I wrote the headlines they'd say something like

"Republican Death Cult continues to ignore reality"

but I realize the post can't print that.

The real issue with the framing of all these headlines is that it places the blame for the lack of bipartisanship pretty squarely on Obama/the Democrats.