An interesting development in politics and journalism has been the rapid increase in reporting on the accuracy of politicians’ statements during campaign season. Generally speaking, that’s a very welcome development, since it provides a means of keeping candidates a bit more honest and improving the level of political discourse.

However, for fact-checking to live up to its potential, journalists need to be asking the right questions about the candidates’ statements. Asking “is it true” may be less important at times than asking broader questions that get to the heart of a candidate’s use of the facts, such as whether the statement is deceptive and whether it’s relevant. Unfortunately, it appears that the fact checking sometimes allows the accuracy of a candidate’s factoid to trump any consideration of the accuracy of that candidate’s arguments or inferences. As a case in point, take a look at a recent fact-checking article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which examined the veracity of a statement by a candidate for the Wisconsin Senate, Leah Vukmir. In one of her brochures, Vukmir uses a Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce (WMC) talking point to paint a negative picture of our state’s economy: “For the first time in history, Wisconsin has more government jobs than manufacturing jobs.” The article does a pretty thorough job of examining the accuracy of that statement, and concludes that the statement is “mostly true” because “at various points in 2009, that was indeed the case — though for the year as a whole, manufacturing jobs narrowly led.”

However, the Journal Sentinel article was disappointing because it didn’t address the very misleading implications of Vukmir’s point. She was suggesting that this job shift indicates something is seriously wrong with the Wisconsin economy. The implication seems to be that Wisconsin is no longer attractive to manufacturing and that there has been significant growth in the public sector. But the fact-checking article doesn’t explore any of those issues; instead it seems to implicitly accept her inferences.

A Wisconsin Budget Project blog posted today by Tamarine Cornelius examines the key facts regarding the broader context that the Journal Sentinel article steered clear of. Those facts show that Wisconsin ranked first in the nation last year for the percent of our jobs that are in manufacturing; our state has a lean public sector; and in 2009 the ratio of manufacturing jobs to government jobs was higher in Wisconsin than in any other state. In other words, if the ratio of manufacturing to public sector jobs is an important measure of the health of a state’s economy, as Vukmir suggests, we ought to be championing Wisconsin’s number one ranking!

In general, the fact-checking journalists provide an important public service, and I certainly understand that they want to take great care to be objective. But let’s hope that they don’t make it a practice of being so narrowly focused on the veracity of the specific assertions they are checking that they can’t also provide objective facts that shed light on whether the statements in question are misleading or even relevant to the political debate.

Jon Peacock,
WCCF research director