Thursday, June 2, 2011

NewsBusters: "Politifact Invokes Misleading Employment Numbers to Rate Conservative Group's Claims 'Half True'"

Lachlan Markay from NewsBusters hits PolitiFact over the same story Joshua TreviƱo critiqued recently:
This just in, by way of St. Petersburg Times fact-checking website Politifact: when considering irrelevant and misleading employment statistics, Texas has not, in fact, created more jobs in the past five years than the rest of the country combined.

Sure, when considering the relevant numbers - the ones that most honest observers would use - the claim, made by the Texas Public Policy Foundation in a recent ad, is perfectly factual. But through an exercise in pure semantics, Politifact was able to draw out a meaningless retort to TPPF's claims.
One wonders why PolitiFact did not consider the importance of gross job creation numbers back when Rep. Carolyn Mahoney (D-N.Y.) was claiming that Democratic Party presidents create more jobs than do Republican presidents.

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