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Dan Kennedy on the limits of factchecking

LINK: www.huffingtonpost.com ➚ | Posted by: Joshua Benton | December 13, 2011

On the recent complaints, from left and right, about Politifact:

Now, I don’t pretend to know what the folks at PolitiFact make of these complaints. Perhaps they’re celebrating on the grounds that if both sides are upset, they must be doing something right. But if that’s the case, then they really ought to hold off on popping the corks. Because what’s really at issue here is not the power of fact-checking but, rather, its limits. The problem is that there are only a finite number of statements that can be subjected to thumbs-up/thumbs-down fact-checking.

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