Thoughts on the Pulitzers: validation for Bill Adair’s big idea
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.”
