My new CJR column considers the argument that the pressure for partisan balance in factchecking made 2012 campaign coverage worse. Here’s how it begins:

Factchecking made great strides during the 2012 campaign, but were those advances compromised by the pressure to maintain partisan balance?

Two respected Washington think tank scholars say yes. Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, who have recently argued that Republican extremism is to blame for many of the pathologies of Washington, told The Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin last week that journalistic factchecking of the 2012 campaign may have been counterproductive…

Read the whole thing for more.