As we enter the final weeks of the presidential campaign, the negative rhetoric is flying fast and furious.  Whether it is Sarah Palin accusing Obama of consorting with terrorists or the Obama camp claiming the McCain voted to jeopardize Social Security, the distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies are confusing and disturbing.

Factcheck.org is a non-partisan website that fact checks the assertions made by each candidate in their ads, during debates, and while making stump speeches.  All candidates gave erroneous information about each other and their own initiatives during the debates.  Health care plans, votes, and the cost of various initiatives were mischaracterized, inaccurate, or simply made up.  You can find it all at the following: Factchecking Debate No. 1, Factchecking Biden-Palin debate, and Factchecking Debate No. 2.

Another site that helps weed out false information about the candidates is Truth or Fiction. This site focuses mostly on email rumors.  Again, this site is non partisan and uses a variety of sources to validate or invalidate email rumors.  There are a series of Sarah Palin emails that have been debunked as have several Barack Obama emails.  Be careful though, the site covers more than just politics and it is easy to get caught up in the email rumors that turn out to be true like Molly, the Horse with an Artificial Leg-Truth! and Women’s Suffrage Movement, Why Women Should Vote and the “Iron Jawed Angels”-Truth!.

The final site, Snopes.com, is probably the best known site for debunking email rumors, urban legends and other such flotsam.  In the left sidebar, they have the hottest urban legends listed by person rather than by email rumor.  You can find all the rumors going around about Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden and John McCain. Each politician’s page contains multiple rumors contained in emails and by using a form of color coding, identifies the status of a rumor at a glance – Green = true, Red =  false, Red and Green overlapping = multiple truth values, Yellow = undetermined, and White = unclassified veracity.

Why do politicians and those that support them spread so many half truths, misrepresentations, wild conjectures and hyperboles?  Well The Washington Post published an article on September 15, 2008 by Shankar Vedantam entitled The Power of Political Misinformation.  New experiments conducted at Yale and Duke University show that misinformation, even after debunking, have lasting negative effects on those that were exposed to the misinformation in the first place.  Enough said.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, October 9th, 2008 at 5:31 pm under Adult content, Internet, Scams, Technology, Tips and advice, Tutorials.

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