PolitiFact addresses the massive liberal criticism after PolitiFact named the "lie of the Year 2011" to be the Democrats' statement that "Republicans voted to end Medicare."PolitFact, in the same piece, provides links to two other fact check organizations that found that very same statement to be untrue. One being The Washington Post's The Fact Checker which named that statement and others from both Republicans and Democrats in their "The biggest Pinocchios of 2011," piece and the other was FactCheck.org who named it a "Democratic Whopper."
Via PolitiFact:
PolitiFact had its latest brush with the Echo Chamber Nation this week. We gave our Lie of the Year to the Democrats' claim that the Republicans "voted to end Medicare." That set off a firestorm in the liberal blogosphere, with many saying that claim was not actually wrong. We've received about 1,500 e-mails about our choice and only a few agreed with us.
Some of the response has been substantive and thoughtful. The critics said we ignored the long-term effects of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan and that we were wrong to consider his privatized approach to be Medicare. In their view, that is an end to Medicare.
We've read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.
Our competitors FactCheck.org and the Washington Post's FactChecker had also said the Medicare claim was false — and this week both picked it for their biggest-falsehoods-of-the-year lists.
Some of our critics wrongly attributed our choice to our readers' poll and said we were swayed by a lobbying campaign by Ryan. But our editors made the choice and the poll was not a factor.
Predictably, their piece addressing their critics, is being criticized by the very same people that howled over their choice to begin with.
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