Liar, Liar... pants on fire...

[Rorschach]

Pinocchio: The future of Australian politics
Laurie Oakes
10 Nov 06:00am

Back in March, when the US presidential election campaign was in its early stages, the Washington Post newspaper awarded Barack Obama four Pinocchios.

This signified that, in the eyes of the newspaper’s full-time political fact-checker, the president had been caught out telling a blatant porkie.

Obama had claimed that Grover Cleveland, who served two terms as president in the late 19th century, disliked technology and was opposed to the telephone.

Actually - as the fact-checker found when he checked with the White House’s own historian - Cleveland was the bloke who installed the first telephone in the White House.

In the final week of the campaign, Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, alleged the president had “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build jeeps in China”.

Another fact-checking website, PolitiFact.com, ruled that the statement “throws reality into reverse” and awarded it “Pants on Fire!” status.

Up went Romney’s picture on the “Pants on Fire!” web page beside a truth-o-meter being consumed by flames.

Over at the Washington Post‘s Fact Checker site, a Republican TV commercial based on Romney’s false claim of jeep production being moved to China scored four Pinocchios.

Since Obama’s victory there’s been a fair bit of stuff in the media about aspects of the US campaign that might have an impact on Australian politics.

I reckon it’s the fact-checker development that will travel across the Pacific most easily. One can only hope...

As Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott shape up for the 2013 federal election, we can expect local versions of the Post’s “Pinocchio Tracker” and PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire!”

Certainly no-one could credibly claim that the need is any less here than in the US. When it comes to fibs and fabrication our politicians are up there with their American counterparts.

Gillard deserves the full complement of Pinocchios for “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”.

And Abbott surely deserves to feel flames flickering – figuratively-around the seat of his trousers over his outlandish claims about the impact of carbon pricing.

According to Steven Ginsberg, national political editor for the Washington Post , the Pinocchio rating - in association with an election app - has been one of the most popular new forms of campaign coverage in the US this year.

He explained a few months ago: “The Post employs a fact-checker whose only job is to verify the accuracy of politicians’ statements.

“If a politician lies, the app rates the lie on a scale from one to four using Pinocchio icons.”

One Pinocchio signifies a small lie. Four means a whopper.

“On the iPad app, a politician’s claims can be seen…alongside a growing Pinocchio nose,” Ginsberg said.

“The moment the politician starts lying, Pinocchio’s nose starts to grow.”

According to Ginsberg, the fear of getting a Pinocchio has at least inspired some politicians “to stop telling the same lie over and over again”.

If it can achieve that here, bring it on. Amen to that brother...

A Pinocchio rating system or a version of “Pants on Fire!” would have been useful this week in the argument over leaked Treasury costings of coalition policies.

We now know that Treasurer Wayne Swan’s office instructed Treasury to do the work, and then leaked it to a Fairfax journalist.

Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey tried to portray what had happened as unprecedented, telling a news conference: “I spoke with Peter Costello last night and he could not recall a single occasion when he was Treasurer when a Treasury minute was deliberately released to the media in order to score political points against the Labor Party.”

In fact, all governments do this sort of thing.

Costello on several occasions released Treasury material, including costings of opposition policies, to embarrass the Labor Party.

A couple of Pinocchios for Costello right there; hot pants for Hockey.

There was a case for similar fact-check naming and shaming on the Labor side,too.

Trade Minister Craig Emerson told journalists: “It is not unusual for the Treasury, when there are clearly articulated policies, to release costings of them.”

That clearly implied that the Treasury department, not the government, had made the costings public.

It was a grossly misleading statement, and very damaging to Treasury’s reputation. Worthy of four Pinocchios without a doubt.

The Washington Post has been trying to get funding to develop the whole fact-checking thing further through a high-tech project called Truth Teller.

It would involve a phone app that parses audio from a political speech or TV ad and determines in real time whether what is said is true or false.

The Post reported in August that the system would use speech-to-text technology to gather the audio and compare it against a database of statements, stats and other data that had already been fact-checked.

The app could immediately report back to the user that a statement was untrue and provide details. Costly to develop, and a way off—but work has started. Can't wait for it... maybe we should start one of our own... but who checks the checkers?

Laurie Oakes is the political editor for the Nine Network.

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