Keller @ Large: Why We Need Fact-Checkers

BOSTON (CBS) - After a week in which our top politicians were once again preoccupied with gratuitous partisan bickering, at the end of a year filled with more of the same, let us pause to reflect on what we might all do to somehow make our political debate in 2012 less depressing and pointless.

Listen to Jon's commentary:

Here's one idea – what if we all renewed our personal commitment to honor facts and truth over partisan and ideological point-scoring?

OK, that's enough time spent dreaming, because it isn't going to happen.

Not if the backlash against the fact-checking group Politifact's choice for political lie of the year is any indication.

Politifact is a Pulitzer-prize winning project in which reporters and researchers take public claims by political figures and check them against the facts, publishing their findings and rating the statement on a scale of truthfulness or falsehood.

And they have found health care to be a prime breeding ground for glaring political distortions.

In 2009, their "Lie of the Year" was the infamous Sarah Palin claim that Obamacare would set up "death panels."

Last year, it was the Republican claim that the new law would bring a "government takeover of health care."

And this week, Politifact picked the Democratic charge that the GOP House plan for Medicare reform would "end Medicare."

But their thorough debunking of that political attack has infuriated its true believers and partisan hawkers, who've been busy excoriating Politifact and claiming that the very notion of "balanced" fact-checking was absurd.

Of course!

One side if the political debate is always right and the other, always cruelly wrong, why didn't I realize that sooner?

Says the editor of Politifact: "This is life in our echo chamber nation. We protect ourselves from opinions we don't like and seek reinforcement from like-minded allies."

He doesn't care for that, and neither do I.

Long live Politifact.

And may the hyperpartisan echo chamber run out of oxygen soon.

You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. and 12:25 p.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.