Bloggers Argue over ‘Lie of the Year’

When a Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking site announced its "Lie of the Year" for 2011, it set off a partisan firestorm in the blogosphere triggered by liberal critics of that choice.

According to PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan watchdog organization owned by the Tampa Bay Times, the assertion by many Democrats that "Republicans voted to end Medicare" earned the dubious honor as Lie of the Year. Democrats had claimed the plan that passed the GOP-controlled House would have ended the popular health program for seniors. PolitiFact determined that while the Republican plan would alter Medicare, it would not "end" or "kill" the popular program. Some liberals, notably New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, disagreed, asserting that the GOP plan for private vouchers changed Medicare so much that it would, in fact, end the program. For the week of December 19-23, the debate over the Lie of the Year was the No. 3 subject on blogs, according to the New Media Index from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Most of the links went to a post called "PolitiFact R.I.P." by Krugman who said the so-called lie was actually true, and charged that PolitiFact was terrified of being considered partisan if they were to "acknowledge the clear fact that there's a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than the other." [Dec 26]