[faeriechangling]

I feel "fact checking" as first pioneered by politifact (if you don't count snopes) was a significant advance in journalism and I recall they did hold a substantial number of left wing journalists and talking heads to account, bias or not. The biggest change was that journalism traditionally expected you to trust the veracity of a story based on a journalists reputation. After journalists reputations largely got smashed by the Iraq War, I really appreciated Politifact's commitment to at least stating what their sources of information actually were. It felt like a more transparent form of journalism you could "Fact check" yourself. The articles WERE still fundamentally subjective opinion pieces, but they were at least based on sources you could actually look up yourself, and often with these fact check articles I treat them like wikipedia use them as an index of sources.

I'm not against fact-checking persay, I'm more against the artificial promotion of certain parties influence through forced editorialisation. I feel birdwatch holds the promise of a better way to accomplish the same end.