What is going on under the watch of Paul Tash and Angie Holan is intellectual dishonesty. It is obvious intellectual dishonesty. It is undeniable intellectual dishonesty. All intelligent people recognize this. That intellectual dishonesty undermines the credibility not only of Paul Tashs mentally flaccid operation but of newspapers categorically, which is one of the reasons I object so strongly to it. (I will be giving a speech on intellectual dishonesty in a few weeks at Hillsdale, where I am teaching a seminar in which I will instruct students how not to be embarrassing buffoons such as Louis Jacobson, Angie Holan, the editors of Rolling Stone, et al.) Newspapers have very little capital other than their reputationsa press, a building, and a distribution network can become worthless with shocking speed in the absence of institutional credibility.
One way to ruin a newspapers reputation is to make the news subservient to politics, which is what has happened at Politifact. The Obama administration is dear to Democrats, and the ACA, being threatened from several directions at once, is something that Democrats and so-called liberals feel the need to defend. Politifact, and by extension the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute (which owns the newspaper), is deploying rank and obvious intellectual dishonesty in the service of narrow, partisan political sympathies. It is detestable, and it deserves to be condemned by all those who care about newspapersnot only by the conservatives against whom its intellectual dishonesty is directed.
For the record, I made no attempt at all to contact Paul Tash, Angie Holan, or Louis Jacobson before writing this. I cannot imagine that any one of them has anything of any interest to add on this or any subject, and my capacity for enduring lies and stupidity is not unlimited.
