The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple has this interesting nugget from a fact-checking panel at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. earlier this week:
Jim Drinkard, an Associated Press (AP) editor who oversees the wire service’s fact-checking work, said, “We had to have a self-imposed Michele Bachmann quota in some of those debates.”
After the session, Drinkard said that there wasn’t an actual numerical quota on Bachmann at the AP. It’s just that if the AP had gone back and vetted all her claims that looked dicey, the result would “overload” the debate story. “Often she was just more prone to statements that just didn’t add up,” said Drinkard.
In related Bachmann news, ABC News reports that the Minnesota congresswoman’s path to re-election is looking a little more difficult of late, thanks in large part to the fact that her Democratic challenger, hotel magnate Jim Graves, appears to have convinced the relatively popular Independence Party to sit out the race. In two of Bachmann’s past three races, the third party’s vote tally has exceeded her margin of victory. More from ABC here.
