There’s been no shortage of fact-checkers this campaign season. But Washington Post columnist Shankar Vedantam explains that a number of new studies suggest people don't let go of political misinformation after hearing a correction. In fact, the misinformation spreads.
You can take the politician out of Washington, but you can’t take Washington out of the politician. It’s the hottest rhetorical device of campaign ’08 says Slate assistant editor Juliet Lapidos. And it’s called antimetabole.
Email is the easiest and cheapest way to tell political lies. And you can’t blame the campaigns, or even journalists because these emails rarely cross the desks of editors. Bill Adair, editor of Politifact.com, weighs in on what’s true and what’s not from the latest crop of smear emails.
At the Republican National Convention this week, politicians and their spokespeople levied harsh criticisms at the
elitist, "
left-wing" media. The main complaint seemed to be reporters'
insistence on asking questions about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Will the media fall for it? Brooke and Bob weigh in.
During the presidential campaign, media hang on the results of nearly every poll. But David Moore, former senior editor for the Gallup Poll, says polls inaccurately portray a consensus on issues the public often knows little or nothing about.
Nate Silver created a remarkably accurate computer system that projects stats for baseball players and teams. Now he's turned his attention to polling data for the presidential election with his website Five Thirty Eight. Silver explains how his site can out-perform the polling firms, whose data he relies on.