Here's a collection of all of Dagbladet's fact checking articles, just about the only election coverage that has been worth reading this year. Amusingly, Dagbladet credits bloggers with having rediscovered fact checking, which is perhaps true, but this article series proves that nobody does real journalism better than journalists .. when they try.

And if journalists can not do much better than what they have done in several of those cases; well, then frankly I do not have nuch belief in neither them nor the bloggers.

Øyvind: "And if journalists can not do much better than what they have done in several of those cases"

Well, if by "several" you mean fact checks that weren't as good as others, then by definition they can do better than that, and did. Anyway, feel free to be specific. Fact checking the fact checkers, it's all part of putting objective truth in the center.

Sorry about not being specific, I do not always have time to write long posts.

I think their fact-checking of the Labour Party and the whole "stopclock" debate was... well, I believe some Labour Party politician used the word "quantum leap", and I believe quite rightly so. Here they could in fact have looked at the use of the word stopclock instead, but nah.

But it was not much better when it came to the Conservative Party attack on Labour, where Dagbladet concluded that Erna Solberg (C) was in fact lying about Labour Party not coming with a single suggestion on how to fight poverty that was different from what the government already was working on. Her claims were hardly lies. She was in my opinion wrong, but it all came down to political disagreement, and not much else, as Høyres rebuttal also should show.

When Dagbladet "exposed" how the Socialist Left had paid much more for a school meal than they claimed, it seems like it is mostly because Dagbladet hasn't bothered listening to what the Socialists actually did say.

All-in-all, it is not so strange that they point to bloggers for inspiration. Bloggers have also a tendency to take a quantum leap or two when they do both their "fact-checking" and their "fisking"; and the facts that are disputed are often not disputed out of factual reasons, but because there is political disagreement.

To me, several of these articles, seem to be the results of overeager looking for "something we can get them on, har-har-har" than actual deep factchecking work. That they got it right in some cases does not remove that whiff of laziness from my nose. In short; I am not impressed.

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