The Fact-Checker, by Michael Dobbs

About the Fact Checker

"Comment is free, but facts are sacred." -- C.P. Scott, editor Manchester Guardian, 1921

Our Goal

The purpose of this website, and an accompanying column in the Post, is to "truth squad" the national political debate in the period leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Our goal is to shed as much light as possible on controversial claims and counter-claims involving important national issues, such as the war in Iraq, immigration, health care, social issues, the economy, and the records of the various presidential candidates. When we come across a statement or claim that is at variance with the facts, as best we can establish them, we will point that out.

We see fact checking as a collaborative, rather than a competitive, effort. News organizations, including the Washington Post, routinely fact check the claims of political candidates. Fact check Web sites have been established by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, www.factcheck.org , and the St. Petersburg Times, www.politifact.com. We will draw on the expertise of these organizations, and report on their most significant findings. But we differ from them in one important respect: the success of this project depends, to a great extent, on the involvement of you, the reader.

We rely on our readers to send us suggestions on topics to fact check and tips on erroneous claims by political candidates, interest groups, and the media. Once we have posted an item on a subject, we invite your comments and contributions. If you have facts or documents that shed more light on the subject under discussion, or if you think we have made a mistake, let us know. We also want to make sure that the authors of questionable claims have ample opportunity to argue their case. We plan to issue our own opinion on factual disputes (see Pinocchio Test below), but it can be revised and updated when fresh evidence emerges.

This website will be continuously updated. Over the next fifteen months, we hope to establish a searchable database of questionable statements by all the leading candidates and their most prominent critics. If new facts come to light on an issue that we have already covered, we will report those too. If necessary, we will revise our conclusions. The process of establishing an accurate historical record never ends.

A Few Basic Principles

• This is a fact-checking operation, not an opinion-checking operation. We will not attempt to call candidates to account for exaggerated political rhetoric. We are interested only in verifiable facts.

• We will focus our attention and resources on the issues that are most important to voters. We cannot nitpick every detail of every campaign speech.

• We will stick to the facts of the issue under examination and are unmoved by ad hominem attacks. The identity or political ties of the person or organization making a charge is irrelevant: all that matters is whether their facts are accurate or inaccurate.

• We will adopt a 'reasonable man' standard for reaching conclusions. We do not demand 100 percent proof.

• We will strive to be dispassionate and non-partisan, drawing attention to inaccurate statements on both left and right.
  

The Pinocchio Test

Where possible, we will adopt the following standard in fact-checking the claims of a political candidate or interest group.

One Pinocchio

Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.

Two Pinocchios

Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people.

Three Pinocchios

Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.

Four Pinocchios

Whoppers.

The Geppetto Checkmark

Statements and claims that contain "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" will be recognized with our prized Geppetto checkmark.

Withholding Judgment

There will be many occasions when it is impossible to render a snap judgment because the issue is very complex or there are good arguments on both sides. In this case, we will withhold our judgment until we can gather more facts. We will use this website to shed as much light as possible on factual controversies that are not easily resolved.

All judgments are subject to debate and criticism from our readers and interested parties, and can be revised if fresh evidence emerges. We invite you to join the discussion on these pages and contact the Fact Checker directly with tips, suggestions, and complaints. If you feel that we are being too harsh on one candidate and too soft on another, there is a simple remedy: let us know about misstatements and factual errors we may have overlooked.

The Fact Checker

Michael Dobbs has had an eclectic, event-filled career at the Washington Post. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he began working full-time for the Post in 1980, during the Solidarity upheavals in Poland. He witnessed the collapse of communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as bureau chief in Warsaw and Moscow, and was in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square upheavals. He has worked in various positions on the national desk, including diplomatic reporter and education reporter. He had a passion for historical stories, such as this 1997 account of how Madeleine Albright's family was caught up in the Holocaust. During the 2004 election, he fact-checked the claims of Swift Boats Veterans for Truth and John Kerry's record in Vietnam. He also reported on the controversy surrounding President Bush's military service and the use by CBS News of unverified, probably fraudulent, memos. In December 2004, he was on vacation in Sri Lanka, swimming in the sea, and filed this eyewitness dispatch on the Asian tsunami. He has published three books, Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey, and Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America. He has just finished a book on the Cuban missile crisis, to be released in June 2008. He has held fellowships or visiting professorships at Harvard, Princeton, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Chief Researcher

Alice Crites has been the crack researcher for Post's investigative department for the better part of the last decade, where she worked on three Pulitzer-winning series: reckless shootings by DC police (1999), DC's homes for the mentally retarded (2000) and the Abramoff lobbying scandals (2006). Among her other accomplishments as a sleuth, she also helped find the Unabomber's first girlfriend, spy Robert Hanssen's exotic dancer and Ann Coulter's real age. She has covered the financial backers of the Bush and Kerry presidential campaigns of 2004 and was the researcher for Robert Kaiser's extensive series on Cassidy & Associates and the lobbying in DC. She previously worked at Congressional Research Service.

Posted on September 1, 2007 at 6:07 PM ET
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