Ethical Website of the Month October 2004

The Ethics Scoreboard will momentarily veer from its practice of naming an Unethical Website of the Month in order to salute a most ethical web site at a time when we need one most. The site is the Annenberg Political Fact Check web page, www.factcheck.org.

This superb site meticulously documents the misstatements, deceits, misleading ads and lies embraced by both major parties' presidential and vice-presidential candidates as well as other advocacy groups, including the infamous "527" groups. If there is a partisan slant to its efforts, I can't detect it, and the service it provides to citizens is incalculable.

Among the campaign whoppers debunked on the site:

• John Kerry isn't "the most liberal Senator" as the GOP claims. He is the 11^th most liberal senator.
• President Bush had said nothing to indicate that he plans to cut Social Security benefits, contrary to Kerry's recent speeches.
• Kerry's proposed health plan does not "put bureaucrats in charge" of medical care, as Bush has stated.
• Vice-President Cheney does not gain financially from the contracts awarded to Halliburton.
• Most of Bush's tax cuts did not go to middle class and lower income taxpayers, as he has claimed, but…
• Kerry's statement that "the middle class is paying a bigger share of America's tax burden" is deceptive, because it is paying a larger share of a smaller burden generally, and the richest Americans still pay more.
• The NRA's claims that Kerry plans to ban shotguns and deer-hunting ammunition are factually unsupportable.

True, it doesn't document the dubious nature of John Kerry's claims to be a rabid Red Sox fan, but there are other web sites for that.

As information becomes more and more distorted by spin and partisan bias, and as the mainstream media increasingly forfeits our trust in their claims of impartial reporting, the Annenberg site is truly an oasis of fairness and accuracy. Tell everybody about it, and do it quickly.

See unethical sites from other months