Truthiness

Stephen Colbert coined my favorite word of the last 10 years: truthiness.
A few media orgs have started actually trying to decide whether a public statement is true (imagine that).
- the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly have launched Politifact to verify the claims of presidential candidates
- the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn has FactCheck.org
- the Washington Post has started a blog called The Fact Checker, with a reporter and researcher applying a "Pinocchio test" to public statements of interest (check out the post earlier this week on the "General Betray Us" ad)
Jack Shafer does a good job rounding them up in a new piece in Slate. Here's a bit of it:
Why can't the press drop the pretenses and call people who lie liars?
On the Media co-host Bob Garfield, exasperation filling his voice, asked that late last month on his show. Garfield's prime example of a public figure deserving the label was Alberto Gonzales.
"In the major institutions of the media, hardly a soul has invoked the term that best describes [Gonzales'] failure to tell the truth," Garfield said. "The word is lying."
So should the news media call a liar a liar? Who decides whether something is "true"? Check out some current controversies. Can we objectively say what is true and what is untrue? If it's a news organization's job to inform the public when someone is lying, what's taken them so long?