After ten years of fact-checking journalism at the ABC, the verdicts given to politicians say a lot about our political system
After ten years of fact-checking journalism at the ABC, the verdicts given to politicians say a lot about our political system
This week marks 10 years of Fact Check at the ABC and the 600 verdicts offer an insight into our political system, writes RMIT ABC Fact Check's Matt Martino.
Human genrated tl;dr :
Politicians lie.
10What!? Since when?
3
This is the best summary I could come up with:
An analysis of all verdicts delivered by Fact Check across the last decade shows that Labor and the Coalition notched up similar proportions of red (negative), green (positive) and — most commonly — in between.
They shift start and end dates, omit and over-inflate data, leave out key context, or simply make invalid, apples-and-oranges comparisons.
In a doorstop interview, Katter said people were "entitled to their sexual proclivities, let there be a thousand blossoms bloom" before his demeanour darkened and he declared he would spend no more time on the topic.
And during the 2019 election campaign, then-prime minister Scott Morrison's assertion that an electric vehicle couldn't tow a boat or trailer was found to be in need of a tune up.
Enter CheckMate (originally CoronaCheck): a weekly newsletter produced in partnership with RMIT FactLab, published on the ABC News website and sent directly to subscribers' inboxes every Friday.
Take, for example, former Liberal turned United Australia Party politician Craig Kelly, whose pronouncements about vaccines and unproven COVID-19 treatments have been covered regularly since Australian cities were first locked down.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
6
6One Nation and UAP, what a disgrace.
4I actually think that graph is much less useful than the other ones shown further down the article. A blunt three-point scale has nowhere near the necessary nuance compared to the full 9-point one. And the fact that it breaks apart median and mean is pretty handy too. For example we can see that Christian Porter, Clive Palmer, and Pauline Hanson occasionally say things that are very true (enough to bring up their mean) but that the majority—as in literally, at least half of the things that have been checked—are 100% made up, the worst possible score.
3