Sorting out the "truth" may seem a treacherous endeavor in such a politically polarized time. But we believe our journalists can play a greater role as an honest broker for voters bewildered by the barrage of campaign talk.
So in a move rare for a news organization, we're dedicating a team of reporters and researchers to meticulously examine the rhetoric of candidates and their partisans, and then make a call: Is the claim true or not?
You might think such work would be standard journalistic fare. But many news organizations can spend less money and get less grief if their political reporting sticks to stenography and puffery.
It's easier to record the words and claims of competing candidates than to vet their accuracy. It's easier to write about the strategy of using negative advertising than to do the painstaking research to sort out whether the claim is actually true or false.
— Neil Brown, Executive Editor of the St. Petersburg Times, announcing Politifact, a new project to determine whether candidate statements are actually true.
What is appropriate? Is it appropriate for Rudy Giuliani to pimp the dead of 9/11 in a bid for the White House? Is it, for that matter, appropriate for the young republicans to scream terrorism when they're accosted at a bar, more or less (no, it's not)?
What is appropriate, frankly, is to point out one stark fact: the man who ordered, by his own admission, the attack on New York is still free. Osama bin Laden remains beyond the reach of American justice. 
