America - Fact Checking the Washington Post

Remember how big media said no one fact checks bloggers? In fact, the blogsphere is probably the best fact checked media on the planet. Tim Blair proves it. Check out these clangers from the Washington Post.

Nothing puts a country on the map like a good, old-fashioned riot—practically everybody has heard of France nowadays—so let’s see what foreign types are saying about Australia in the wake of our beachside violence:

* The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola is a big-picture guy (the riots “have sparked an extraordinary level of soul-searching across this island country”), which is just as well, because he sure sucks on the details.

For example:

Cronulla Beach, a suburb ...

The suburb is Cronulla.

Authorities arrested 18 Islamic radicals in Sydney and Melbourne last month ... Among their plans, according to testimony and evidence presented in court, were a bomb attack on a nuclear power plant in Sydney ...

They’d have to build one first. Australia doesn’t have a nuclear power plant; there’s a small research reactor out Lucas Heights way, but that’s it.

At least one man in the crowd wore a shirt that read, “Osama Bin Laden Doesn’t Surf."

I’ve seen that shirt. It actually reads: “Osama Don’t Surf.”

Members of Howard’s Conservative Party ...

John Howard leads the Liberal Party.

Stick to uncheckably vast generalisations, Anthony (“The dispatch of soldiers to Iraq has jarred the national psyche”).

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