Marley23, you know you owe me a drink for giving you a straight line like that, right?
I think it takes some time to check out the statments politicians make. I wouldn’t expect them to be able to thoroughly analyze all the claims in time for the post-debate roundtable. Of course, even if they had all the facts checked by the next day, the news cycle has moved on.
I remember catching an error once. I think it was Bush the Elder in '88. There was talk at the time of reducing the military budget, and someone asked him which specific programs he would cancel. A minefield question, to be sure. Bush mentioned 3 or 4 programs that had already been cancelled. I remember he called one of them the DIVAD, instead of the Sgt. York, as it was popularly known. Utterly brilliant! He looks tough on the budget, cutting Pentagon waste, and nobody will think that their own job is in peril. I watched the talking-heads afterward; nobody called him on it.
I once thought of doing a website similar to factcheck.org, but something like answer-the-fucking-question.org. I’d grade all politicians on how well they answer the questions that are put to them.
All this does is piss people off, especially when they block based on political alignment of of the sites. It doesn’t prevent people from finding embarassing information. The furor over blocking itself ensures that whatever tawdry story the governors want to cover up gets noticed by the dead-tree press, plus the governor gets slammed for his authoritarian approach to the media.
The nerve of Christopher Dodd, claiming that O’Reilly said on his TV show that al Qaeda should attack in San Francisco! That’s preposterous and slanderous! He said that on his radio show!
O’Reilly mentions one of his other favorite Web targets as well, Media Matters for America. MMFA makes no bones about their mission–they are out to counteract conservative misinformation in the media. They don’t purport to be “balanced”. But they counteract that misinformation by posting long, in-context clips and quotes and presenting the facts.
O’Reilly and Mike Savage (among others) consistently accuse MMFA of taking their statements “out of context”, but I don’t think that term means what they think it means. (Savage also routinely calls them “homosexuals”, presumably because he is in the sixth grade.)
Of course, there’d be some potential for abuse of the system, along the same lines as ebay’s feedback system (which it seems similar to.) “If he gives me the answer I want to hear, I’ll do thumbs-up, otherwise not.”
Of course, if the audience is watching critically, they’ll be able to make their own judgements about that stuff… if they think that the answer is relevant, and the questioner goes thumbs-down, then it looks better for the candidate and worse for the questioner.
I personally believe that the YouTube debate was a step in the right direction, but true democracy can’t exist until the people have a chance to pelt the candidates with raw eggs.