[Air-l] fact checking

[rtynes at u.washington.edu]

Cheney Blunder Lauded Anti-Bush Web Site

By Joanne Kenen

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney probably did not intend to 
direct millions of television viewers to a Web site calling for President 
Bush's defeat but that's what a slip of the domain achieved. 
Anyone who heeded Cheney's advice and clicked on "factcheck.com" was greeted on 
Wednesday morning with a message from anti-Bush billionaire investor George 
Soros entitled "Why we must not reelect President Bush." 
"President Bush is endangering our safety, hurting our vital interests, and 
undermining American values," Soros' message said. 
Defending his record as Halliburton's chief executive, Cheney said in the 
Tuesday night debate that Democratic vice-presidential challenger John Edwards 
was trying to use Halliburton as a smokescreen. Any voter who wanted the facts, 
Cheney said, should check out factcheck.com -- which led to the Soros site. 
The Web site Cheney had in mind, factcheck.org, was not amused when the vice 
president proved that he was not master of the factcheckers' domain.

Factcheck.org, run by the Annenberg Center of the University of Pennsylvania, 
said on its site on Wednesday that Cheney not only got the domain name 
confused, he had mischaracterized its fact-finding.

"Cheney ... wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making 
about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton," the site 
said on Wednesday.

"In fact we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited 
personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely 
implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility 
for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right."

The White House Web site annotated the debate transcript, parenthetically 
noting that Cheney meant factcheck.org, not factcheck.com. It linked the 
transcript to factcheck.org.