James Taranto: The 'Fact Checking' Fad

In a September 1984 campaign speech, Walter Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee and former vice president, asked,"Do you really want Jerry Falwell to pick the next two judges to the Supreme Court?" What reminded us of this was a story from yesterday's New York Times, written by Patrick Healy, which begins as follows:

There is no way, of course, that Senator Barack Obama would ever nominate three controversial figures from his past to serve on the United States Supreme Court: the convicted felon Antoin Rezko; the former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers; or Mr. Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Yet the names and faces of the three men appear in a new television advertisement--running in Michigan and Ohio this week and nationally on Fox News on Monday, at a total cost of $500,000--arguing that Mr. Obama's judgment about his associates shows that he cannot be trusted to pick justices for the Supreme Court.

We wondered if the Times had thought it necessary back in '84 to point out that only the president has the power to make nominations to the federal bench, that Falwell was not running for president, that there was no way he would end up holding any office that would put him in the line of presidential succession, and, therefore, that the premise of Mondale's question was false.

Nope. Times reporter Fay Joyce merely quoted Mondale, apparently confident that her readers would be smart enough to distinguish political hyperbole from fact.

So why, a generation later, does the Times begin an article by rebutting an assertion that the ad in question (watch it here) does not even make? Because 2008 is the year in which"fact checking" of political ads and statements became a full-blown journalistic fad. May it soon go the way of streaking and Mexican jumping beans.

The"fact check" is opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report facts but to pass a judgment. The Washington Post'sFact Checker blog ends each assessment with between one and four"Pinocchios," just like movie reviewers giving out stars....