Dick and Dave are both pointing to Sarah Carey’s blog where she fact-checks Eddie. I do so love Dick’s title “Hobbs nobbed on Trim”. Made me smile.
Hobbs is widly popular at the moment and Fianna Fail and the PDs are making an issue of his program which seems to come from the Michael Moore school of presenting facts. There is a good deal of chatter about him on the Consumer Issues forum on boards.ie too.
So, we have IndymediaWatch, how soon before we have an Eddie Hobbs Watch?
To get people started here are two rss feeds which search PubSub and IceRocket for the phrase Eddie Hobbs.
Sarah’s blog entry like Tom’s Googleshaming one is a good example of the power of the blog. Everything you write online gets crawled by a whole host of different search engine bots which cache and archive your page possibly forever.
An army or even a country of people reading papers, listening to the radio, watching TV reports and then going online to point out inconsistencies is a mighty powerful thing. Perhaps we can see more of this fact-checking as a collective effort when the election comes around next year? How hward would it be for a politician to lie and spin AND get away with it when not only is the research machine of the opposition watching what you say but a huge proportion of bloggers too.
EDIT: Ah hah! It is already happening with a bad Irish Times piece about Google Talk. Planet Potato fact-checks the Irish Times and so does Dick.
Another Edit: Why not tag any fact-checking posts with irishfactcheck