Truth Telling in the Media and the Fall Elections

Kathleen Hall Jamieson from the Annenberg Public Policy Center talks with Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org and Bill Adair of PolitiFact.com about the impact their organizations' fact-checking has had on politics and the 2008 Elections in particular. The panel expresses particular concern about the prominence of e-mail chain letters in influencing public opinion; in particular, the widely-circulated rumors that Barack Obama is a "secret Muslim" or "the Antichrist" are especially troubling to these political referees because they are nearly impossible to track back to their origins. For further highlights on this panel, read the live blog.