Zell Miller, Pulitzer inspiration

Wayne Garcia at our sister rag in Tampa has an interesting post about PolitiFact, an online fact-checking project by the St. Petersburg Times that earlier today was bestowed with a Pulitzer Prize. Turns out Zell Miller, the former Georgia governor and senator who once told Chris Matthews he wouldn’t mind engaging the pundit in a friendly gentleman’s contest, inspired the keep-‘em-honest news hub.

Garcia spoke with Bill Adair, the Times’ D.C. bureau chief who launched the site in 2007, about Politifact.  And Miller, of course.

“It was at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York, and it was the speech by Sen. Zell Miller making claims about John Kerry,” recalled Bill Adair, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Times who came up with the idea for PolitiFact. “I was thinking, that’s not true. But I didn’t do anthing about it.”

Adair had other stories to write that night, not covering a minor speaker at a speaker-laden national convention, and documenting lies in politics must have seemed like trying to count water molecules in the Atlantic Ocean for reporters seeking a traditional news story on deadline. But the problem of letting politicians get away with lying stuck with Adair.

“A lot of things that Zell Miller said went unchecked,” Adair said late Monday afternoon from the Times‘ newsroom, where a celebration was winding down. In spring 2007, Adair and Times editors were planning coverage of the 2008 elections, and he suggested they do a website that looked at truth in politics. “It was based on my own and others’ sort of shortcomings, that we didn’t do a lot of fact checking in the past and we let a lot of candidates get away with misstatments,” Adair said. “This is penitence for those shortcomings.”

Check out the rest of Garcia’s post on PolitiFact’s roots and mission.