Via Media Shift
As the U.S. elections near the finish line, the presidential campaigns are throwing around enough verbal attacks and inflammatory advertising to make the average voter’s head spin. Fortunately, there are now three excellent sources for fact-checking political discourse online: Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly’s PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog. And on the local level, there’s a new crowd-funded effort from Spot.us, Newsdesk.org and Public-Press.org to fact-check local political mailers in San Francisco.
While these sites have grown in name recognition and popularity over the past few months, they still lag behind the efforts of partisan groups who fact-check the media themselves at Newsbusters.org (for conservatives) and Media Matters (for liberals). A scan of web traffic, as measured by Compete.com, and links from the blogosphere, as measured by Technorati, shows how far the non-partisan efforts lag behind the partisan ones:
Newsbusters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 472,489 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 67
Google News mentions: 79
Media Matters
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 312,728 unique visitors
Technorati rank: No. 47
Google News mentions: 58
FactCheck.org
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 277,555 unique visitors (up 1,000% in the past year)
Technorati rank: No. 89
Google News mentions: 1,254 (though this includes syndicated stories by FactCheck)
PolitiFact
Compete.com traffic (August ‘08): 87,602 unique visitors
Technorati rank: None (2,560 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 190
Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog
Compete.com traffic: N/A
Technorati rank: None (2,357 blog reactions)
Google News mentions: 171
