No Army of 'Fact-Checkers' for AP's Stimulus Watch

Media bias? What media bias? A week after unleashing 11 so-called "fact-checkers" to dissect Sarah Palin's book, today the Associated Press unveils an item called STIMULUS WATCH: Did White House overplay job data?

The government watchdog overseeing economic stimulus spending said Thursday that, in its rush to take credit for saving hundreds of thousands of jobs, the Obama administration was overly confident in its job-counting and did not acknowledge significant errors in the figures.

Numbers released last month identified more than 640,000 jobs linked to stimulus projects around the country. Despite warning signs that the numbers were flawed, the White House said the public could have confidence in them and they proved the administration was on track save or create 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

Since then, tens of thousands of problems have been documented, from the substantive to the clerical. Republicans have been able to use those flaws to attack what so far is the signature domestic policy of Obama's presidency.

I love the newspeak from the first paragraph. Lying is now overly confident.

So now with tens of thousands of documented problems, one would imagine a battalion of "fact-checkers" would be poring through the unmentioned website that posted all the phony numbers, right?

Uh, no. This report has one lonely reporter. Nobody else. It seems having 11 people rush through a couple book chapters of someone not currently in office is more important than devoting the time to exposing why the "signature domestic policy of Obama's presidency" is riddled with (to put it gently) misinformation.

The criticism has resonated, even though economic data shows that overall government efforts, from President George W. Bush's bank bailout to President Barak Obama's stimulus, have improved the economy. Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans think the stimulus has created any jobs so far, according to a CBS News poll this week.

Seems the reporter also forgot to run spellcheck. They can't even get Barack correct.

They actually already have a correction to someone's name at the bottom, but not Obama's.

(This version CORRECTS it was Devaney, not Deseve, who said: "I like that statement.") )