The Political Whore

The St. Petersburg Times can thank former Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia for its most recent Pulitzer Prize, because as it turns out, the right-wing Democrat is the one who inspired the creation of PolitiFact, the fact-checking website that won the 2009 National Reporting category award.

“It was at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, and it was the speech by Sen. Zell Miller making claims about John Kerry,” recalled Bill Adair, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Times who came up with the idea for PolitiFact. “I was thinking, that’s not true. [But] I didn’t do anthing about it.”

Adair had other stories to write that night, not covering a minor speaker at a speaker-laden national convention, and documenting lies in politics must have seemed like trying to count water molecules in the Atlantic Ocean for reporters seeking a traditional news story on deadline. But the problem of letting politicians get away with lying stuck with Adair.

“A lot of things that Zell Miller said went unchecked,” Adair said late Monday afternoon from the Times‘ newsroom, where a celebration was winding down. In spring 2007, Adair and Times editors were planning coverage of the 2008 elections, and he suggested they do a website that looked at truth in politics. “It was based on my own and others’ sort of shortcomings, that we didn’t do a lot of fact checking in the past and we let a lot of candidates get away with misstatments,” Adair said. “This is penitence for those shortcomings.”

During the 2008 political season, PolitiFact checked 750 statements by candidates, special interest groups or anonymous chain e-mails.

I recall working at the St. Petersburg Times in the early 1990s, before my then-colleague Adair went off to Washington to cover politics. He was the transportation writer, just at the start of a career in which he became an expert especially in the area of airplane crashes.

In a cutthroat world of reporting, Adair stood out as a nice guy. A really nice guy. Preternaturally nice.And happy. Far too happy for a newspaper reporter. It makes perfect sense for him to be bugged about the Zell Miller thing for three years, to keep that notion of reporters owing readers the real truth in politics in the back of his mind.

From his initial idea, Adair began assembling a team that worked on PolitiFact. Matt Waite, a “news technologist” with the Times, was the one who pushed for the site to be constructed as a database, using the Django platform. He wrote in his own blog at the time of PolitiFact’s launch:

The site is a simple, old newspaper concept that’s been fundamentally redesigned for the web. We’ve taken the political “truth squad” story, where a reporter takes a campaign commercial or a stump speech, fact checks it and writes a story. We’ve taken that concept, blown it apart into it’s fundamental pieces, and reassembled it into a data-driven website covering the 2008 presidential election.

The whole site is inspired by Adrian Holovaty’s manifesto on the fundamental way newspaper websites need to change. Adrian’s main theme was that certain kinds of newspaper content have consistent pieces that could be better served to the reader from a database instead of a newspaper story. I built PolitiFact with that in mind.

For Adair, the site’s structure as a database rather than as a traditionally constructed set of news stories published online makes all the difference for PolitiFact. Winning a Pulitzers shows the importance of nontraditional news constructions for the future of journalism.

“I think it shows journalism is turning the corner from where we’re just thinking about ink on paper,” Adair said. “The web is not a death sentence but this great opportunity. What we’ve done with Politfact is take advantage of those opportunities. A lot of what we have done in the past is pasting newspaper stories onto the web and creating blogs. Now we’re realizing the web can be so much more in presenting journalism.”

As for winning the Pulitzer, Adair was clearly reveling in the recognition but kept coming back to the lesson of PolitiFact.

“The Pulitzers every year are a factor in getting a lot of people to do a lot of great work,” he said. “You think, oh man, wouldn’t it be great to win one. Of all the things I’ve done in journalism, [PolitiFact] is my favorite. It’s the most fulfilling thing I’ve done in journalism. What’s cool is this lives on as a tool for anyone to use to sort out the truth in politics. That’s more satisfying than any award. The real accomplishment is we’re helping pelople really make sense of it all.”

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