New Site Aims to Hold Pundits Accountable

[babylonsister]

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=weeklyreport-000002684428

Site Aims to Hold Pundits Accountable
By Shawn Zeller, CQ Staff


Pundits are keen to enforce accountability on politicians who have changed their position on important issues, made errors in judgment or cast a foolish vote. Now a new Web site is turning the tables, featuring some of the bad calls pundits have made in the run-up to the 2008 election.

The Pundit Accountability Project is the brainchild of Jared Young, the chief executive of a new Web site called CampaignCircus.com.“In news, controversy sells, and so it’s funny at times when political pundits who are paid to make predictions and handicap the races go out on a limb and get it blatantly wrong,” he says.

Among the bigger gaffes Young has captured with video footage on the site is a description by Newsweek senior Washington correspondent Howard Fineman in early January; on MSNBC, Fineman said former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was in “perfect” position headed into the Florida Republican primary. (At the end of that month, Giuliani finished a distant third.) Campaign Circus also touts this call by former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle in early January on Fox News: that the campaign of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton would be “over, here in the snows of New Hampshire.” Clinton, of course, shocked almost all the pundits with her win in that state’s primary.

In the interest of fairness, Young also features some good calls, such as the Bill Kristol prediction on Fox that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney would use his post-Super Tuesday speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference to drop from the GOP race.

Young, a 30-year-old former aide to Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, is hoping his Web site will take off and become an inside-the-Beltway version of YouTube focused on political videos of all sorts: from political debates to “Saturday Night Live” skits. Since its December launch, he says, the site has racked up 132,000 page views by 23,000 unique users. The unusually contentious campaign thus far, he says, has helped a lot.

And while Young says he has yet to get much backlash from the pundit class, he is getting good feedback from rank-and-file voters: “A lot of people are saying this has been a long time coming.”

[renate]

1. I'm sure it'll be fair and balanced

A former Inhofe aide would never be biased.

(Of course, I'm flashing my bias by assuming that he'd be biased.... :) )

[babylonsister]

2. You're not alone; in theory it's a good idea, but

I also remain skeptical considering the source.

[Winterblues]

3. IMO anyone that would work for Inhofe is not a reliable person

Great idea though......Pundits say the damndest things and no one ever calls them on it. Especially from FOX News...

[tom_paine]

4. Imperial Amerika is a nation in whichthere are no such things as lies or truth

only who has the loudest megaphone.

Further, the idea that any Loyal Bushie could be trusted to tell the truth about lies and truth (such as they are, detached anachronistic things that have little to do with modern life in the Empire) is as laughable as trusting the Nazis to tell the truth about the Jews.

We have allowed tyrants tro make our beds, now we are lying in them. Hell, if we try to get up, Homeland Security will come over and clout us one on the head.