It’s not true that Obama’s books weren’t fact checked. They just don’t contain any inaccuracies. It’s not like people didn’t try to find them.
Why do her lies have to be ranked in order of egregiousness?
It would have. But a few of the points raised here are valid, and nobody expected news organizations to fact check the campaign books of close to 20 candidates a year and a half to two years ago. Palin hasn’t committed her story to book form before, and she is more controversial now than Obama was at a similar point in 2006. That helps to drive up interest.
Looking back at it, the New York Times did fact check his claims about smoking weed in college. Must’ve been a slow news day.
It would seem to me the whole ‘debate’ on this is rather sterile. A news organisation may run through a book if it seems controversial and a eyeball attracting subject, but if the end result is a snooze…
The real comparison is not Obama to Palin - who has clearly a deserved reputation for having a troubled relationship with facts (judging by the clear contradictions between own accounts) - but say Palin and a universe of others.
It already seems from above that other conservative politicians were published and did not get the fact checking. So, it is specific to her. Why the unseemly gnashing and moaning?
This. The AP is fact checking the book in no small part because the articles written as a result will get picked up by lots of papers and attract a lot of attention. People have already heard various versions of what went on during the campaign, and have seen the Newsweek article which seems to have sources from within the McCain camp. No one is going to devote a lot of attention to the standard campaign bio by John Q. Candidate, which of course is going to make him look good and which will be remaindered five minutes after he drops out of the race (if not before.)
Reviews of political memoirs often cover areas where the writer has an interesting version of the facts, but detailed fact checking is left to the historians.
The interesting thing about these is that so many of the items which she gets wrong can hardly be called lies, but are more examples of total cluelessness. The bailout is a good example. Practically anyone with a pulse remembers what happened and when. Why did she get it wrong? I can’t imagine she thought that very many people would get fooled. Did she forget? Is she more senile than Reagan? Or is she so out of touch that even in the middle of the campaign she didn’t keep up with what was going on. Which is very odd given that McCain suspending the campaign to deal with the bailout vote should have made some impression. Any Palin fans want to try to speculate on her motives?
Who the hell ever announces fact-checking unless they’ve already done it, and scored? OK, that’s a trick question, nobody does that. Reason being obvious, if you announce you’re going to fact check and everything comes up roses, whaddaya say?
“Well, we’ve thoroughly checked Mr Obama’s book and it turns out that everything he said is God’s own truth without so much as a hint of mendacity or the slighest shading of truth. Fuck us, we are so screwed…”
I dunno, with Palin you’re not taking much of a risk.
Well, bert, dontcha know, you gotta watch out for those who come like sheep but inside they’re raving worms, you betcha…
I think most likely a reporter started reading the book, had a few “that’s not how I remember it” moments, and then decided to do a thorough fact-check to see if he could get a good story out of it.
And, if you have 11 reporters on it, you can get the fact-checking done very quickly - everybody reads a couple chapters, identifies any factual claims, and does a quick search of the AP archives to see if they check out. This could probably all be done in one day. If you had only one reporter on it it could take a week or two.
Oh, and another thing! According to what I hear, she spends a lot of time slamming McCain’s campaign people for screwing her up. That has an impact on these peoples lives, esp their employment potential, the chance they may work again on the next campaign.
I personally will vigorously defend them from any slander than may force them to early retirement! It would just be so…so wrong!
Shodan, I think you’re still missing the point. I wasn’t claiming that Obama’s 2006 book wasn’t about politics. I was just pointing out that Obama in 2006 was nowhere near as well-known a public political figure as Palin in 2009. So you don’t really have to invoke nefarious liberal media bias to account for the fact that a new Palin book in 2009 would get more media attention than a new Obama book in 2006.
I think one of the major reasons that AP went fact checking is that when the book was leaked, a bunch of Republicans involved in the campaign came out on the record and called her a liar.
I also think it’s interesting that the AP story dealt with virtually none of those contradictions. It seems they more or less boil down to he said/she said stories that can’t necessarily be verified by independent fact checkers. They can only tally up the number of people who say ‘A’ versus the number of people who say ‘B’, and AP chose not to do that.
I believe this is inherent to the nature of fact checking – look at what she said against what the public record shows. As I noted above, a controversey like whether Steve Schmidt screamed at her over the phone, or sent a more polite email, can’t be verified by the public record. So, according to the McCain staff, Sarah told a lot more lies than the AP was able to verify as lies, and hence didn’t include them in the article.
I’d say Sarah is getting off real easy, based on what the AP found. Of couse, I understand this is a biased opinion, as I tend to have more faith in the honesty of McCain’s staff than I do of Sarah.
The McCain staff actually did provide internal emails from the campaign which contradicted Palin’s revisions of history – emails from Palin herself in which she was saying the exact opposite of what she’s saying now.
I saw that they did, but as they could be easily altered or fabricated, my guess is that AP decided not to rely on them.
Can you provide cites where Obama has been caught in outright lies?
He said he was born in Hawaii, didn’t he?
Why is it conservatives think truth has a liberal bias?
Look at the phrase “fact check”. This is not a criticism of ideas. There are facts. They are verifiable. They want to check to see if the words match the facts.
This is 2+2=4 stuff or the sun comes up in the east stuff. If Palin says the sun rises in the west and the AP reports it doesn’t and actually rises in the east what is wrong or inappropriate about that? Why is it unfair to point out the error? Why is it clear liberal bias for doing so?
As has been noted while we did not see the AP announce they fact checked Obama’s books I would happily bet dollars to dimes that the AP and a few thousand other people (including the McCain/Palin campaign offices) poured over them with a microscope to see what they could glean from them (once he became a serious candidate…before that no one gave a shit since he was not news). If Obama had said some stupid shit in them you can bet it would have been dragged out and put on display for the whole world. Obama, love him or hate him, is just not a stupid person to get caught out so easily. Palin is. More, Palin has shown herself to be that person numerous times in the past. Frankly it is shooting fish in a barrel and AP was just getting the scoop they knew a million bloggers would be dragging out in short order.
So, for the AP, it just made good business sense. They get a lot of press and a lot of people reading this. If I put out a book that was full of idiocy they wouldn’t give a shit. I am not newsworthy. Palin is newsworthy and what is more she intentionally puts herself in that spotlight. If she wants to avoid scrutiny she can step off the public stage anytime. Then no one will care.
It should also be noted that when liberals get their facts wrong, they do get called on it, as evidenced by the current Pit thread on Al Gore getting the temperature of the Earth’s core wrong. If it’s appropriate to fact-check Al Gore (and I agree that it is), why isn’t it also appropriate to fact-check Sarah Palin?
Yup. Statements by very prominent public figures, both liberals and conservatives, do attract media scrutiny for factual errors, as the following examples show:
AP fact check of Joe Biden speech, Sept. 2009
CBS fact check of Biden/Palin VP debate, Oct. 2008
Washington Post fact check of Obama’s statement about his father’s funding from Kennedys, Apr. 2008
MSNBC fact check of Obama speech, Feb. 2009
You know, I can’t help wondering what conservatives would be saying if the mainstream media didn’t give Palin’s book any coverage in news reporting, considering its controversial nature and high sales figures. We’d probably be hearing a lot of pissing and moaning about a media “conspiracy of silence” and “abdication of journalistic responsibility” by “ignoring one of the major political publishing events of the decade” and so on.
That or “You don’t see anyone factchecking her! That’s because she’s right and they know it!”