Kurtz recapped the public response to Brisbane’s column as “Yes, you moron!” and asked him if he had any regrets about writing the piece. Brisbane admitted he could have made his wording a little clearer, but insisted that his piece fueled “a lot of good discussion” on the role of the press even if he ended up being a “piñata.” Kurtz thought that critics were misrepresenting Brisbane’s argument by suggesting he thought journalists should just be stenographers for politicians and public figures, but admitted that was the media narrative that has emerged.

RELATED: Timesman Thomas Friedman Wishes More Reporters Could Be Like Anderson Cooper

Brisbane thought he was treated unfairly as a result of his post, because all he wanted to do was “ask a question,” but people started to make all sorts of assumptions about what he believes. He claimed his initial column was not about the simple act of fact-checking, which should be the job of any journalist, but to call out someone who blatantly lies and distorts factual information.

Both Brisbane and Kurtz differentiated between simple fact-checking and active challenging of what public officials say. Brisbane worried that journalists might become “argumentative” and make statements that are “largely subjective,” and the danger there is that it would damage the credibility of a straight news reporter.

Watch the video below, courtesy of CNN:

After watching Romney at Saturday’s ABC News debate, Kessler came back with a new ruling: the claim now merits three “Pinocchios,” while the rationale doesn’t appear to have changed.

RELATED: ABC News Debate Ignores Mitt Romney’s Admission That His Bain Jobs Claim Is Bunk

It’s one thing to challenge claims based on their merits, and even to apply some reasonable subjective judgments, but too often, these fact-checking outfits fall down when it comes to delivering their “Pinocchio/Pants On Fire/So Full Of Shit Your Eyes Are Brown” rating. Since that rating is often the only thing people end up seeing (candidates have taken to citing the ratings on the trail and in debates), sticking the landing is important.

RELATED: Politi-f**ked: Why Politifact’s ‘Lie Of The Year’ Is Not Just Wrong, It’s Irresponsible

In this case, Kessler concluded, last week, that Romney’s claim to have created 100,000 jobs was based on a selection of only three businesses that Bain was involved with, and that it “does not include job losses from other companies with which Bain Capital was involved — and are based on current employment figures, not the period when Romney worked at Bain.”

To me, that sounds like “Romney’s claim is pure crap,” which should have merited at least three Pinokes: “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”

Instead, he gave it one: “Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods.”

So what changed?

According to Kessler, Romney’s performance at Saturday’s debate changed everything. His new conclusion? (emphasis mine)

Romney certainly has a good story to tell about knowing how to manage a business, spotting opportunities and understanding high finance. But if he is to continue to make claims about job creation, the Romney campaign needs to provide a real accounting of how many jobs were gained or lost through Bain Capital investments while the firm managed these companies — and while Romney was chief executive. Any jobs counted after either of those data points simply do not pass the laugh test.

This was as true last week as it is today. As I noted Saturday, Romney simply sharpened the relief on an already obvious subterfuge. Kessler got it right both times, but only scored it right once.

Kessler did make an excellent, familiar-sounding point about the broader issue of Romney trying to claim jobs creation at Bain:

High finance is a difficult subject to convey in a sound bite, so Romney evidently has chosen to focus on job creation.

This is a mistake, because it overstates the purposes of Bain’s investments and has now led Romney into a factually challenging cul-de-sac.Romney never could have raised money from investors if the prospectus seeking $1-million investments from the super wealthy had said it would focus on creating jobs. Instead, it said: “The objective of the fund is to achieve an annual rate of return on invested capital in excess of the returns generated by conventional investments in the public equity market and the private equity market.”

Indeed, the prospectus never mentions “jobs,” “job,” or “employees.”

That sounds a lot like what I wrote on Sunday:

By all accounts, arriving at a net jobs figure for Romney’s tenure at Bain is impossible, and while that unknowable number is somewhat relevant, the real point is that people’s jobs are incidental to Bain’s mission. Indeed, the firm’s modus operandi, buying companies and extracting maximum short-term profit by cutting costs (i.e. layoffs), then selling them before they either collapse or are fixed by the next guy, tends to encourage job losses, not gains.

Now, I’m not one of these people who see partisan bias under every rock. I think the agenda of the fact-checking game is to burnish their own credibility, and in service of that, they seem to err on the side of the counterintuitive. That’s fine when it comes to their commentary, which can be evaluated on its merits, but their ratings can be somewhat arbitrary, and as a result, misleading. They should tighten them up, or get rid of them.

One the surface, the tension seems to be the product of simple upstart concerns among new Pakistani journalists. Pakistan has witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of media outlets in recent years. Television, for instance, has grown from one state-owned station in 2002 to over 90 today, to say nothing of the explosion in print media as well. Consequently, the media market is more competitive than ever and journalists are willing to capitalize on stereotypes. Huma Yussef, a columnist for one of Pakistan’s largest English-language newspapers, tells the Post:

If you can take even the slightest thing and turn it into a story that proves the U.S. is the evil demon, it’s going to sell papers.

However, the Post also notes that the secretive nature of Pakistani-U.S. relations does little to dissuade the stereotypes.

Some observers, though, say the real problem is the two nations’ spy novel-like relations. Secrets surround so many aspects of the relationship that the resulting vacuum is easily filled by rumors.

The problem of misinformation is further exacerbated by the fact that the U.S. embassy’s media staff is too small (they hope to expand their media staff to five people next year) to chase down all errors in the Pakistani media. Moreover, the embassy staff focuses mainly on refuting articles in Pakistan’s English-language newspaper, yet these newspapers occupy only a small portion of Pakistan’s media market. Television is far more significant to public opinion, but with 90 plus channels, the embassy team rarely touches tackles that medium.

It’s difficult to write about foreign media without drawing attention to the differences between it and our own media. While the U.S. Embassy’s media staff numbers in the single digits, America’s domestic media comes hand in hand with a veritable army of individuals and organization fact checking its every word. And while a Pew Research Center poll finds that 77% of Pakistanis believe their media has a positive influence on their country, one suspects Americans, despite (or perhaps because of) the polarized nature of American media, are far more skeptical of what they encounter in the media.

The ABC anchor was in studio for an interview, and to defend Sunday shows in general.

Before turning to Tapper, Colbert took NBC’s Meet the Press anchor Gregory to task for his dismissal of the fact-check idea (“people can fact-check Meet the Press every week on their own terms,” said Gregory). “A fact-check on Wednesday?” asked Colbert. “Is he really suggesting David Gregory work two days a week? If it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press. Every other day, it’s me time.”

He then laid out the case for why a fact-check is needed on Sunday, with a compilation of Sunday show guests from all across the political spectrum throwing out “facts” and ending their sentences with “or something like that.” Then it was time for Tapper, who called himself the “first line of defense” when it came to fact checking. Colbert gave his take on what these guests get out of going on Sunday shows – “to drive through their ideas through repetition.” (He then put that theory in practice as only Colbert can.)

“You’re right, they come on these shows, and too often these guys and gals get away with saying the things that are not factual,” said Tapper.

So, asked Colbert, “what purpose do you think the Sunday shows serve?” Tapper: “To elucidate, to provide information for the viewer so they can determine what’s going on in Washington.”

It was a big opportunity for Politifact too, as editor Bill Adair sat across the desk from Tapper and fielded a few of Colbert’s questions as well. Obviously, it’s clear Colbert is Team Tapper.

Here’s the full segment:

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But he also notes an interesting trend in the 2.0 world of citizen journalism: Fact-Checking. According to Silverman, who has called fact-checking “one of the greatest pastimes of the Internet age,” fact-checking of the media by the public, as well as by their press colleagues, is the Trend of the Year:

Everybody loves to call bullshit. Thanks to the Internet, it’s easier than ever before.

The irony is that this trend emerges at a time when professional fact checkers, who traditionally worked at magazines, are being laid off. As a result, it appears as though the future of fact checking is in open, public and participatory systems and organizations, rather than the closed, professional systems traditionally used by large magazines. The Internet has made this shift possible.

He goes on to cite a few examples, which I lift with full attribution (written by Craig Silverman!) here:

• Even before Sarah Palin’s book was released, the Associated Press engaged in a significant internal effort to identify factual errors in the text. Meaning: they fact checked her book before it was on shelves.
• The Daily Show dedicated numerous segments to fact checking media reports and the questionable declarations of talking heads. As noted by this Poynter Online story, the Daily Show actually employs a full-time researcher/fact checker. The show’s big coup this year was twice exposing that Fox News mixed old and new crowd footage of conservative events, thus creating the impression that attendance was significantly larger than it was.
• The value of fact checking for journalists was perhaps best demonstrated by a group of students in the Netherlands. A new program at the Tilburg School of Journalism sees fourth-year students spend a three-week stint fact checking the work of Dutch media. When I wrote about the program in October, I was told that roughly 80 percent of the stories they’ve checked included some form of factual error.
• We reached a strange milestone this year when CNN fact checked a comedy sketch from Saturday Night Live (their story was inspired by a similar report by PolitiFact).

Those are just a few of the examples he cites. In this sped-up world where water-cooler TV moments are being uploaded even as they happen and thumbs are now hard-wired to hit the “post” button on Twitter, fact-checking is needed more than ever before. So will somebody tell me which is the right way to spell it, “fact checking” or “fact-checking?” Craig does it the first way, I do it the second. I hope I’m right, it would be extra-meta-fun to fact check that piece. Or fact-check it.

Anyway, as usual he has collected a lot of just kee-razy corrections from over the past year. A good read, and an excellent, cautionary reminder.

Crunks 2009: The Year in Media Errors and
Corrections [Regret The Error]
2009 Plagiarism Round-Up [Regret The Error]

Kurtz asked Wilbon about the shortcomings of his fact-checking and the resultant false attribution of a “bogus quote about slavery” to Limbaugh on his ESPN show Pardon the Interruption:

WILBON: That’s a journalistic no-no. What? If I had checked and found out the information that we had basic access to every day on deadline, I might have done it anyway. Still, that’s wrong and a journalistic no-no, and I said that to him.

But Wilbon put the brakes on the pity party there, saying “Let’s not make it seem like Rush Limbaugh has not insulted black people on his radio show… millions of black people know that.”

Meanwhile, Limbaugh has taken to the Opinion page of the Wall Street Journal to, as usual, decry the hypocrisy of his critics — most notably Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. He also singled Wilbon out by name:

Mr. Wilbon wasn’t alone. Numerous sportswriters, CNN, MSNBC, among others, falsely attributed to me statements I had never made. Their sources, as best I can tell, were Wikipedia and each other. But the Wikipedia post was based on a fabrication printed in a book that also lacked any citation to an actual source.

At this point the discussion of Limbaugh’s role in bidding on a stake in the Rams has moved so far away from the actual news: On Fox News it’s turned into a discussion of racism within the black community that emerges when black people try to defend people like Limbaugh; elsewhere, and on Reliable Sources, it’s turned into a discussion about journalistic ethics. And if Rush Limbaugh has his way, it will turn into one hundred other things (including good ratings) before it leaves the news because he’s had one crazy week of publicity.

ESPN’s Michael Wilbon on Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz this morning: