Today’s 2010 Knight-Batten Symposium gave me visions of political debates and speeches transformed from exercises in sound-bitery and emotion into civic lessons and conversations.
It gave me visions of political news stories that provide context not just about the issue at hand, but also context about the people at hand.
(Also, it gave me the vapors. But mostly just visions.)
Here’s one vision:
On TV, political debates display a fact-check tally for each candidate (how many true, truthy, lying-liar, etc. statements each candidate has made). Fact-check details about a particular statement are displayed as soon as they’re available.
No more useless meters showing allegedly uncommitted voters’ emotional reactions:
Instead, imagine if the debate screen looked like this (well, imagine a non-crappy-mockup version that looked vaguely like this):
Here’s another vision:
Online, any streamed speech, debate, or hearing displays a combination of fact-checking material, aggregated contextual material, real-time commentary and public reaction. Any story or video that mentions politicians displays some combination of:
- Fact-checking details for that person’s recent statements (any of their statements and/or recent statements related to the story being viewed)
- Campaign contributions to that person from individuals/organizations related to the story’s subject.
- The candidate’s biggest contributors (individuals/organizations and industries).
- Lobbying information for the person and/or their staffers
- If in office, recent votes the person has taken related to the story’s subject.
- Biographical information about the person.
Now here’s the great thing about these visions: The Sunlight Foundation and PolitiFact have pretty much already fulfilled them!
Korr Values 
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