PolitiFact's "border czar" two-step

 Unfortunately it surprises us not at all to see faux fact checkers PolitiFact aligning with the media denial that presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and current Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed "border czar" under by President Biden.

What is this "border czar" Republicans speak of?

PolitiFact hilariously avers that Republicans invented the title as applied to Harris (bold emphasis added):

Vice President Kamala Harris might soon get a new official title: 2024 Democratic presidential nominee. In the meantime, Republicans have revived a title they gave her in 2021: "border czar."

But it wasn't all that long ago that PolitiFact knew that it was okay to call somebody "czar" regardless of whether the president specifically bequeathed that title. PolitiFact gave Republican John McCain a "True" rating for claiming President Obama had more czars than the Romanovs.

But Obama appointed all those people as czars, right?

Eh, not so much:

So who exactly qualifies as a czar? As best we can tell, it's whenever someone in the media says so. You can identify a guy as "Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology," but it's a lot easier on everyone to just say "Science Czar." And "Special Master" sounds like Richie Rich's best friend.

So the title of czar is largely arbitrary media shorthand for "It's this person's job to make sure (blank) goes right." And we think everyone can agree that "Terrorism Czar" sounds way cooler than "Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security." 

PolitiFact spent several paragraphs explaining how "czar" counts as an imprecise term that the administration tended to avoid, culminating in the two paragraphs we quoted. Back in 2009 a person was a czar if the term was applied, albeit PolitFact hints that it's a media prerogative.

Let us circle back and try to find out out Harris ended up with the "czar" title. PolitiFact now says Republicans did it.

BBC (March 24, 2021):

Announcing Ms Harris's appointment as his immigration czar, Mr Biden told reporters and officials at the White House: "She's the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle [Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador], and the countries that are going to need help in stemming the movement of so many folks - stemming the migration to our southern border".

The BBC was calling Harris the "border czar" immediately after Mr. Biden put her in charge of "stemming the migration to our southern border." Does PolitiFact have evidence the BBC took its cue from Republicans?

It was natural to link Harris to the "border czar" title. Why? Because Harris' appointment to her role in March 2021 barely preceded the departure of "border czar" Roberta S. Jacobson at the end of April 2021. If the media would decline to see Harris as the new "border czar" replacing Jacobson, then we have the Biden administration leaving the "border czar" position open while the border problem only worsened.

 This seems like an easy analysis. The "border czar" was going to look bad because the border would not get fixed. So, Harris took on a role fairly called "border czar" but insisted from the first that it wasn't really the "border czar" position.

So far as we can tell, the Biden administration didn't call Jacobson its "border czar" any more than it did Harris. And, though their official titles differed, Jacobson's job description was pretty much the same as Harris' (via Jewish Insider, bold emphasis added):

Now, Jacobson has joined President Joe Biden’s National Security Council as the administration’s “border czar,” tasked with stemming the increasing tide of migrants arriving at the United States’s Southern border. As the special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Southwest border, Jacobson is tasked with engaging diplomatically with Mexico and the “Northern Triangle” nations of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, from where most migrants originate. 

Harris took over the highlighted part of the job the "border czar" was doing. But Harris didn't want the "border czar" title and the baggage that carried. And the media today are eager to oblige, including PolitiFact.

PolitiFact's Humpty Dumpty act on 'abortion'

It was Lewis Carroll's fictional character Humpty Dumpty who gave us one of the classic quotes regarding word games:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.’ 

Sadly, it's fact checkers who are doing their Humpty Dumptiest to play games with the term 'abortion.' A fact check by "Science Feedback" gave us a definition of abortion a few years ago that encompassed cesarean section, a procedure that regularly results in living babies. A July 10, 2024 fact check from PolitiFact in effect asked Science Feedback to "Hold my beer."

PolitiFact executed a "False" judgment on GOP senatorial candidate Tim Sheehy for saying "Elective abortions up to and including the moment of birth. Healthy, 9-month-year-old baby killed at the moment of birth. That's what Jon Tester and the Democrats have voted for."

Yes, the whole fact check was essentially bunk (we'll explain later), but we were particularly struck by PolitiFact's word game chutzpah in his concluding paragraph (bold emphasis added):

These statements are rooted in Tester’s support for the Women’s Health Protection Act. That bill, however, doesn’t open the door to abortion on demand later in pregnancy. Instead, it allows for the role of medical judgment. In addition, CDC data indicates that late-term pregnancies are rare. Also, the term "elective abortion" is a political rather than medical phrasing.

So far as we can see, PolitiFact fact checker Matt Volz relied entirely on one of his expert interviews for that judgment.

That expert was Katrina Kimport, yet another in a long line of PolitiFact-cited neUTRal experts who give heavily to Democratic Party politicians and causes. PolitiFact readers don't need to know that Kimport gives to the "pro-choice" group EMILY's List ($3,500 since 2020):

Kimport ... also criticized Sheehy’s use of  "elective abortion." In her view, that terminology reflects a political colloquialism that’s come to mean an abortion that is optional. That’s different from the medical definition, she said, in which an elective procedure is one that may be necessary but is not an emergency and can be scheduled for a particular date, such as knee surgery. 

She says it's her view, so PolitiFact just runs with it. PolitiFact didn't just run with it, they twisted it into the term being political and not medical as a matter of fact. That's despite many medical sources (textbooks, professional journals, etc.) using the term. Rather, the evidence suggests that the term has fallen into political disfavor, fostering a movement to stop its use.

Image from ACOG.org

PolitiFact is down with that.

"Elective abortion" means an abortion not done for therapeutic reasons. In the simplest terms, it's an abortion done because the patient doesn't want a baby. Politically, it's advantageous for the pro-choice movement to blur such distinctions.

Of course it's amusing to see fact checkers do their part to empty words of their meaning. The pro-choice movement would have us believe that the choice to have an abortion is automatically therapeutic and that "elective" is a misnomer. Review a few more words from Kimport:

Women have abortions later in pregnancy either because they find out new information or because of economic or political barriers, Kimport said. 

"I have never spoken to somebody whose abortion decision was not informed by deep thought and consideration," she said. 

Kimport's talking point doubtless has its genesis with information parallel to this:

The reasons people need third-trimester abortions are not so different from why people need abortions before the third trimester: 

1. They received new information—including that they were pregnant—that made the pregnancy not (or no longer) one they wanted to continue
2. They tried to obtain an abortion before the third trimester but faced insurmountable barriers (including policy restrictions and stigma) that delayed them into the third trimester.

Did Kimport and PolitiFact forget to tell you that the "new information" included patients learning they were pregnant? Oopsie! We are so sorry (not sorry!)!

At PolitiFact Bias we're not here to tell our readers whether to take a pro-choice or pro-life stance. We're here to show you how PolitiFact stops short of fully checking the facts when the facts don't favor the pro-choice view. And maybe the spin is intentional, which is naughty.

As For The Rest of This Steaming Pile of Fact Check ...

We might quibble with Sheehy's mention of abortion "at" the moment of birth. Other than that, it would seem he's right despite PolitiFact's protestations to the contrary.

Here's the key part of the (most recent version PolitiFact linked) of the bill Sheehy's prospective Democratic opponent signed:

After fetal viability, governments may not restrict providers from performing abortions when necessary to protect a patient's life and health. The same provisions that apply to abortions before viability also apply to necessary abortions after viability. Additionally, states may authorize post-viability abortions in circumstances beyond those that the bill considers necessary.

The federal bill has a somewhat narrower pathway to elective abortion than the Florida bill PolitiFact cited in this piece, but it's there. "After fetal viability" obviously doesn't have anything to do with abortion before viability. It's specifically addressing post-viability abortion.

The opening comes with the "health of the mother" language. When it isn't defined, it can mean nearly anything. And, as we have noted before, the medical profession can claim (Harvard.edu) that every pregnancy carries risk. If every pregnancy carries risk, then an abortion can be "necessary" to avoid that risk for any pregnant patient.

PolitiFact can't figure that out because it's inconvenient for the ideology PolitiFact favors. Plus by sticking with the opinions of liberal experts the inconvenient stuff gets suffocated with a pillow.

And of course there's the last line, explicitly allowing states to go as far as they wish in allowing post-viability abortion.

So, no truth at all to what Sheehy said. Or something.

Fact checkers. 

Meh.

Afterword

Gemini AI to the rescue?

I could not resist a follow up question. 

Find the abortion conversation with Gemini AI here. Gemini's got its own Humpty Dumpty going on.

PolitiFingers on the scale: Presidential debate edition

 As we have documented over the years, PolitiFact's supposedly objective system affords its writers and editors myriad ways of inserting political bias into their work.

One popular method employs story focus to skew fact check findings. If a political figure utters a compound statement, PolitiFact affords itself the flexibility of focusing on the whole statement, just one part of the statement, or by evaluating multiple parts of the statement and averaging out the results. That's not to rule out a random mixture of all three approaches. See this vintage version of PolitiFact's statement of principles.

It's a highly unscientific and non-objective process, and PolitiFact provided a good pair of examples in its analysis of the debate between President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump.

PolitiFact on Biden

Biden: While talking about a bipartisan border bill, "by the way, the Border Patrol endorsed me, endorsed my position."

Half True. The National Border Patrol Council — the U.S. Border Patrol’s union endorsed a bipartisan border security bill in February. But it didn’t endorse Biden.

Biden made a compound claim consisting of two parts. With part 1, Biden claimed to have the endorsement of the Border Patrol. With part 2, Biden claimed the Border patrol endorsed his position. PolitiFact allowed that Biden hadn't received the endorsement of the National Border Patrol Council, but gave Biden half credit because the border patrol union favored a failed bill Biden had said he would sign into law. As to why PolitiFact would come to rest on that instead of Biden's position on the border generally, perhaps the Texas sharpshooter fallacy explains it best.

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy involves taking note of where one finds a bullet hole and then drawing a target around it with the bullet hole at its center.

PolitiFact took a false statement and averaged it out with a vague statement that might have some truth to it to reach a "Half True" conclusion. But even that leaves out part of the story because many of these evaluations never become part of a politician's "Truth-O-Meter" record.

PolitiFact on Trump

Trump: "The problem (Democrats) have is they're radical, because they will take the life of a child in the eighth month, the ninth month, and even after birth."

False. Willfully terminating a newborn’s life is infanticide and is illegal in every U.S. state. 

 Here we have another compound claim, this one made up of three parts. Democrats, Trump claims, would permit abortion in the eighth or ninth month (part 1, part 2) or even after birth (part 3).

PolitiFact focuses entirely on part three, and rules solely on that basis.

To be fair in a twisted sort of way, PolitiFact tends to rule it "False" that various "Pro-Choice" laws permit abortion up until the moment of birth even though they would permit abortion up through the moment of birth. The explanation? Abortions up until the moment of birth don't happen. That's supposed to mean it's not legal to do one, we suppose.

Why It's PolitiFingers on the Scale

As noted above, no objective process accounts for this willy-nilly drift of story focus. PolitiFact focuses on what it pleases. And if the rulings fall more harshly on conservatives or Republicans, hey maybe Republicans just lie more, right?

That's a post hoc justification for a slanted fact-checking process.

Snopes (indirectly) calls out PolitiLie

On twiX (X, formerly known as Twitter) I learned today that Snopes now calls it false that Donald Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people."

Better late than never! And extra sweet in that we have yet another opportunity to pit fact checkers against each other. That's because PolitiFact, despite initially dodging the issue with an "In Context" feature, later dropped the context and helped spread the "very fine people" lie:

As president in 2017, Trump said there were "very fine people, on both sides," in reference to neo-Nazis and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.

It's notable that the hotlink in the quotation goes right to PolitiFact's "In Context" article, suggesting the neutral-ish article was a dog whistle telling readers, yes, Trump called neo-Nazis and white supremacists "very fine people." 

The more recent article, which superficially gave President Biden a "False" rating for saying no U.S. president before Trump was racist was actually giving Biden a "True" rating for saying Trump is a racist. PolitiFact used the remarks about Charlottesville in making its case that Trump is a racist.

Also of note, my Zebra Fact Check project reported this case as an error to PolitiFact back in July 2020. When PolitiFact made no correction I eventually reported the case to the International Fact-Checking Network and a failure to uphold its standards. Again, no change resulted in PolitiFact's reporting.

The Poynter Institute owns both the International Fact-Checking Network and PolitiFact, of course.

PolitiFact says "Biden trial" means orchestrated by President Biden--but why?

 Remember last post I reminded readers that a "False" or "Pants on Fire" rating on the "Truth-O-Meter" serves as a red flag for incompetent fact-checking?

Here we go again:

What does "Biden trial" mean? If it was our fact check (Zebra Fact Check), we'd spend time carefully figuring that out.

For the liberal bloggers who produce PolitiFact fact checks, the answer's so easy it requires no discussion:

"This trial that I have now, that’s a Biden trial," Trump said April 16 in front of a New York City bodega on the second day of jury selection.

...

"As you witness this Biden trial, I ask all Americans to remember that this is not just about me, this is about our country and this is about you," Trump said in an April 15 video.

These statements are wrong. There is no evidence that Biden orchestrated the charges against Trump. 

See? Easy-peasy.

We should note that just before the section we quoted, PolitiFact said "Trump has made the claim many times in many places." No, PolitiFact's claim includes no hotlink.

On TwiX (X formerly known as Twitter) we asked the author, Amy Sherman, what led her to conclude Trump was saying Biden orchestrated the trial and not merely that the trial was intended to serve Biden's electoral interests. We'll update this post should Sherman offer a reply.

Fact-Checking Without Evidence

Unfortunately it's nothing new for PolitiFact to arbitrarily decide what words and phrases mean.

The meanings left-leaning fact checkers use likely come from the Bubble. People on left understand these things intuitively, therefore they require no explanation. Conservatives and moderates who cannot understand these simple truths are biased or something.

PolitiFact's source list did have a bubbly source, in fact. Daniel Dale, a CNN fact checker, wrote up a fact check: "Fact Check: Trump repeats baseless claims about Biden orchestrating his trials."

Is it fair for us to call Dale's fact check Bubble information? We say yes. Dale took Trump's comments out of context.

Dale/CNN:

Trump claimed that “this is all Biden-run things” and that “these are all Biden trials.” He also claimed that Matthew Colangelo, a former senior Justice Department official who now works for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, had been “put into” the district attorney’s office by Biden.

Readers, when you see short quotation snippets put together like that, suspect funny business. Such cases plead for fact-checking.

And here's what we found (at the Never Trump Bulwark, of all places):

 “Colangelo is a radical left [prosecutor] from the DOJ who was put into the state working for Letitia James and was then put into the District Attorney’s office to run the trial against Trump,” Trump said at a press conference Monday, in the third person. “This is all Biden-run things [sic], meaning Biden and his thugs.”

Trump defined "Biden-run" to refer to "Biden and his thugs." Dale omitted that context, as did PolitiFact. Note also Dale, uh, illuminated the context of Trump's "put into" comment.

It's what one does in the Bubble. It works because those in the Bubble aren't likely to challenge it, and who cares what people think outside the Bubble?

And, a farcical "Pants on Fire" for Donald J. Trump

 As our "Pants on Fire" bias study regularly points out, PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" rating counts as substantially if not wholly subjective. Surveying PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" ratings serves as one of the most direct routes for finding flawed fact checks. And that brings us to April 1, 2024 and Donald J. Trump.

We'll grant that Trump lost the state of Wisconsin to Joe Biden in 2020. That doesn't make PolitiFact's rating or its reasoning correct, however. PolitiFact spent considerable effort trying to lump in Trump's claim that his campaign "did much better" in 2020 than in 2016. 

PolitiFact:

Let’s tackle the first part of Trump’s claim: That he performed better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016. 

That is unequivocally false. And it’s something PolitiFact Wisconsin has checked on multiple occasions, including in 2021. 

Is it "unequivocally false" that Trump did better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016?  What's false is that PolitiFact debunked the claim with the article linked in the second sentence. The link leads to a fact check examining whether Trump won Wisconsin in 2020.

PolitiFact itself provides the evidence that Trump's claim is not unequivocally false (bold emphasis added):

We noted then, and we’ll repeat here, that President Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020. Biden took 1,630,866 votes compared to Trump’s 1,610,184 in the state, so Trump lost by 20,682 votes. 

Trump did win the state in 2016, taking more than 22,000 votes over Democrat Hillary Clinton. He netted 1,405,284 votes in Wisconsin in 2016.

So, according to PolitiFact, Trump received 1.4 million votes in Wisconsin in 2016 and 1.6 million votes in 2020 but he "unequivocally" did not do better in 2020 than in 2016.

That's 2+2=5 level logic.

Trump's vote total in Wisconsin was better in 2020 than in 2016. That means that in a real sense Trump did better in Wisconsin in 2020 than in 2016 even if he lost the state in 2020. By analogy, it's like a sprinter winning the 100 meter dash at one meet with a time of 9.99 seconds but subsequently losing the event with a time of 9.97 seconds. The runner performed better in terms of time but worse in terms of the competition.

The runner did not "unequivocally" perform worse in the second meet.

If PolitiFact wanted to fairly call Trump's claim false, let alone "Pants on Fire," it should have stuck with the claim Trump won Wisconsin in 2020.

How does a fair and objective fact checker make an error like that?

We say it doesn't.

PolitiFact isn't fair and objective.

PolitiFact's farcical "Pants on Fire" for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Updated)

Robert F. Kennedy's presidential bid has taken its toll on our "Pants on Fire" bias study.

Kennedy claimed half the two "Pants on Fire" ratings given to Democrats in 2023 and just received the only one so far awarded in 2024. It distorts the bias numbers.

This April 5, 2024 rating of Kennedy, by the way, is ridiculous:

It's just another instance of the liberal bloggers at PolitiFact elevating narrative way above facts.

Kennedy was making a point about the protests not counting as an insurrection. PolitiFact narrowed its focus down to "protestors carried no weapons" and broadened "weapons" to count things not all that helpful in taking over the government of a superpower. PolitiFact also (again) ignored the principle established by founding editor Bill Adair that the most important aspect of a numbers claim is its underlying point.

PolitiFact:

Kennedy’s statement goes further than Trump, because he said protesters "carried no weapons." A weapon doesn’t have to be a gun.

Sure, PolitiFact, but insurrectionists armed with flagpoles and fire extinguishers aren't going to be able to take and hold the United States government.  PolitiFact did offer evidence of protesters charged with possession of firearms, but none of them were used to threaten or harm police or security forces. In other words, the firearms weren't used to carry out any "insurrection."

Imagine the headline:

Insurrectionists using flagpoles, bear spray and fire extinguishers take over federal government

It's completely absurd.

Here's what Kennedy said, via PolitiFact:

"I have not examined the evidence in detail, but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection," Kennedy said in his April 5 statement. "They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that (former President Donald) Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.’"

The obvious point is the protesters were not armed befitting a serious attempt to overthrown the government. PolitiFact cites one person charged with firing a gun into the air twice before packing it away again. Other gun charges were related to possession.

Here's PolitiFact's fact check in terms of X's Community Notes:

In terms of our "Pants on Fire" bias study, this "Pants on Fire" given to a Democrat is actually attacking a conservative viewpoint. We kept this data point in the study at face value, but it actually deserves an asterisk.

Strikethrough explanation April 9, 2024: We neglected to note that Kennedy is now listed as an Independent at PolitiFact. So, Kennedy does throw a spanner in the 2023 PoF percentages, but our chart now removes him from consideration for his one PoF in 2024, as a Democrat anyway.

PolitiFact's "no spin" lie

 Apparently PolitiFact's hot new method for getting people to trust their work is to lie to them.

I see it at the top of every fact check these days. PolitiFact posts a summary of its fact check near the top of the story, and at the bottom of that summary lets readers know "No spin, just facts you can trust."

"No spin."

Really?

That howler accompanied a PolitiFact fact check I ran across today, published on Feb. 23, 2024.

PolitiFact's "no spin" approach added spin to the article deck, even before the assurance that PolitiFact has a "no spin" approach: "Do immigrants crossing the US southern border take union jobs? Fact-checking Donald Trump."

The deck claim doesn't match the headline quotation.

So, why the spin?

The second paragraph counts as the key to the fact check:

"The biggest threat to your unions is millions of people coming across the border, because you're not gonna have your jobs anymore," Trump said at the Feb. 17 rally, later adding "The truth is, though, when you have millions of people coming in, they're going to take your jobs."

PolitiFact cited a CSPAN video that clocks in at over an hour. PolitiFact is also the organization that claims it constructs its fact checks to make them replicable. Clue to PolitiFact: If you're trying to allow people to fact-check your work, you tell them where to find key quotations taken from a long video.

 

It's even possible at CSPAN to create a snippet of limited length to include both quotations. We did that.

Trump's making the common sense point that importing millions of low-skilled laborers makes it easy for employers to hire low-wage workers instead of high-wage union workers. PolitiFact turns that point into a straw man, visible at the top of PolitiFact's summary section "If Your Time is Short": "Economy and labor experts told PolitiFact immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border likely aren't taking Michigan's union jobs."

Did Trump say immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border were taking Michigan's union jobs? As though an immigrant can run up to Michigan, accept a union job and thereby displace the former holder of that union job? No, that's no what Trump's talking about. He's talking about the general depression of wages that undercuts the stability of an established high-wage union job. Low wages in Kentucky, for example, can eliminate union jobs in Michigan if the employer relocates to Kentucky and hires non-union workers.

If somebody thinks PolitiFact was actually treating Trump's claim exactly the way I suggested it should be taken, the corrective is no further away than the next bullet point in PolitiFact's summary: "(N)ewly arrived migrants are likelier to work in jobs Americans don’t want to do, such as day laborer positions. These aren’t union jobs."

PolitiFact missed Trump's point, whether intentionally or otherwise. The point is immigrants taking jobs Americans don't want to do depresses the value of labor. Cheap labor works its way through the economy, affecting jobs Americans do want to do by making labor cheaper for those jobs as well.

We see a hint of that point in PolitiFact's third bullet point: "There is a correlation between an increase in immigration and a drop in unionization. However, experts said that’s not evidence that immigrants are taking union jobs."

So, what do we do with this claim that an increase in immigration correlates with a drop in unionization in conjunction with the claim that it's not evidence immigrants are taking union jobs?

As noted above, there's ambiguity here. If immigration lowers unionization, that's certainly evidence, albeit not definitive proof, that lower wages from immigration cost the economy union jobs.

It looks like the fact check hinges on an equivocal phrase, "taking union jobs."

But taking Trump's point as we suggested, the fact check affirms Trump's accuracy. PolitiFact included this in its story summary:

(E)xperts agree immigration and union membership numbers move in concert: as immigration rises, unionization drops.

"As immigration rises, unionization drops." That's what earns Trump a "Mostly False" rating instead of "Pants on Fire," I suppose. It arguably makes Trump's claim "Mostly True." 

We consider it unforgivable for a fact checker to leave ambiguity around what is meant by "taking union jobs," and the problem is magnified when the fact checker opts for the interpretation most damaging to the person it is fact-checking.

It's yet another case of uncharitable interpretation, violating the basic interpretive principle of charitable interpretation.