Politifact

Politifact has an interesting problem.  They'd probably like to be fair and accurate. But they know that today's political reality is completely one sided.  People from both sides lie, but it's a 90-10 thing.  For one side, lying is a central part of their policy.  Their economic programs, their foreign policy programs, their social welfare programs, even their military programs, have been consistently somewhere between poor and catastrophic, so they have to lie.   And they've been allowed to get away with it.  The other party rarely calls them on it, and when they do, it's always timid.  Politicians have always known that if you show confidence, it doesn't matter how brazen the lie, a lot of people who don't know any better will believe a confident liar over a softspoken truthteller.

Politifact is trying to be a fair arbiter of this situation, but they know that if they call it as they see it, the Republicans will come after them and probably destroy them.  So they twist.  Here are a couple of examples, on the ACA's administrative overhead requirement:  http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/30/barbara-boxer/barbara-boxer-says-medicare-overhead-far-lower-pri/  http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/jul/24/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-millions-benefit-insurance-compa/.  The background: ACA requires that individual and small company insurance policies spend 80% of client revenue providing them health care, 85% for big companies.  Historically, single payer programs like Medicare, VA, and big companies "self insuring" etc, spend 95-98%.  Private insurance averages 93% for big companies, 74% for medium sized companies, and 70% for individuals and small companies.  Payers would be rebated any excess administrative costs.  Each of these two articles are discussing an ACA supporter describing this, completely accurately, and if you read the whole article, you get that.  Yet they rate both supporters statement as "Half True", because there was some aspect of their statement that could be misrepresented.   Sen. Boxer said that Medicare and other single payers have 1-5% overhead, and the single payer part of medicare does indeed achieve that.  But there's a private insurance part of Medicare, called "Part C" or "Medicare Advantage", that does not, but has the usual private insurance high overhead.  Taken together, the private and public parts net about 11%.  Proof, really of the point the Senator was saying.  The other one, Obama says that 13 million rebates averaging $100 had been paid.  In fact, the numbers were 12.8M and $98.  Politifact admits that the rounding is acceptable but insists that because the majority of the rebates went to companies and not individuals, it's only half true.  The rebate went to whoever had paid for the policy and the president didn't suggest otherwise.

Every year, Politifact rates the President's State of the Union speech and the rebuttal.  They're very good at picking on slight oversimplifications in the Democrat's speech, and ignoring gross lies in the Republicans.  This one actually provoked me to try to get a response from Politifact but in their replies to me they dissembled.  In 2011, Paul Ryan's rebuttal included the statement "Depending on bureaucracy to foster innovation, competitiveness, and wise consumer choices has never worked – and it won’t work now".  Well, nobody except Ryan is suggesting solely depending on bureaucracy.  But government bureaucracy created the internet, the interstate highway system, the national hydroelectric grid, nuclear power, medicare, social security, and thousands of other innovative, successful programs, many of which promoted private innovation many times the value of the government investment.  Ryans statement, very much the central thesis of his speech, is worthy of Politifact's "Pants on Fire" rating.  But it got crickets.

The history of the Lie of the Year is interesting.  In 2009, it was Sarah Palin and others' completely false statement calling end of life counciling "Death Panels"
In 2010, it was the often repeated and nonsensical claim that ACA represents a government takeover of healthcare.
In 2011, it was the completely true claim by Democrats that Paul Ryan's proposal to privatize Medicare was in effect a proposal to end Medicare as we know it.
In 2012, it was Romney's completely false claim that Chrysler/Fiat was moving Jeep assembly lines from Ohio to China. (In fact, they started doing a small amount of assembly in China for the growing East Asian market for Jeeps)

Politifact is playing a game of statistics.  They report that Republicans lie three times as often as Democrats (note that the Lie of the Year statistics match that), and the Republicans scream about this indicating a leftward bias. In fact, they are being extremely generous to Republicans.  They tend to soft pedal outrageously false screeds from the right, and ignore many of the worst, and are overly harsh on slight misstatements and even things that are pretty much true from the Ds.  

update 25 Jan 2014
I just stumbled on this.  Alternet and Salon are not necessarily bastions of neutrality but they are better than Politifact.