Thursday, February 29, 2024

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.

Thursday, February 22, 2024

PolitiFact's how-to primer on improperly fact-checking an analogy

There's so much wrong with this Feb. 22, 2024 PolitiFact fact check that I'm bound to go way beyond the scope of the title.


How To Wrongly Fact Check an Analogy

PolitiFact's summary/quotation of Trump's statement counts as reasonably accurate. He drew an analogy between the fine imposed in the New York fraud case to the political persecution of Alexei A. Navalny, who notably opposed Vladimir Putin in Russian.

At its most basic level, the analogy says Navalny and Trump were treated unfairly in court over politics. But PolitiFact affords nearly zero attention to the basic comparison. Instead, PolitiFact focused on differences as though differences can erase similarities.

Karl Malden's nose remains Karl Malden's nose even if you put it on Emma Stone. And Emma Stone with Karl Malden's nose is Emma Stone having a point of similarity with Karl Malden.

PolitiFact classed Trump's statement (wrongly, we think) as hyperbole, but then justified revoking Trump's license for hyperbole because "we determined there were enough factual elements at play to rate his statement on the Truth-O-Meter."

We're not sure how that's supposed to work. As we noted on X, PolitiFact could use a similar approach to find a vegetarian "Pants on Fire" for comparing vegetarian bacon to regular bacon. The bacon example came straight from a dictionary definition of "analog."

Here We Go Again: "Experts"

Part of PolitiFact's schtick comes from its interviews of experts. Typically the pool of experts leans left, and often has a record of giving politically to Democrats. For some reason PolitiFact doesn't see that as a mark against its own credibility.

Let's take a look, shall we?

Harley Balzer
Highly partisan political giving. One of the most partisan records we've encountered, and that's really saying something.

Erik Herron
We found no political giving under Herron's name. But we did find an X post by Herron that appears to acknowledge the legitimacy of analogies where the comparison may seem strained.


Ric Simmons 
Simmons (employed at The Ohio State University) has two political donations listed. One was to Democrat Joe Biden and the other to the anti-Trump group "The Lincoln Project."

Scott Gehlbach
Gehlbach's partisan political giving fails to challenge that of Balzer, but it's solidly behind Democrats with the exception of one nonpartisan figure, now a (liberal) judge in the Wisconsin court system.

Stephen Sestanovich
Sestanovich has six donations, minimum $250, all going to Democrats.

Kathryn Hendley
Hendley has only one political donation listed, with a Democrat listed as the recipient of the $200 gift.

Mark Osler
Osler has given exclusively to Democrats, with six donations in the range of $50-$250.

What are the chances a fact checker can find seven expert sources and six out of seven have given exclusively to Democrats? It's as though PolitiFact intentionally seeks out Democrats to serve as its experts.

Of course, the mere fact that the experts give to Democrats should not discredit their expertise. But PolitiFact simply uses the experts to underscore that the Navalny case is different than the Trump case. We don't need experts to prove that, and as we pointed out above, differences are irrelevant to the similarities, The former cannot erase the latter.

PolitiFingers on the Scale

As if distracting from the point of Trump's argument and using partisan experts wasn't enough, we have PolitiFingers on the scale of this fact check.

PolitiFact omits all mention of two significant aspects of the fraud case against Trump. Both aspects tend to support the Navalny analogy.

First, the trial judge found that Trump's fraud did not damage anyone financially. That makes the prosecution and the judgment unusual. The fine represents higher conjectured interest charges from lower valuations of Trump properties. We doubt such a basis has ever before been used in the United States to support a fraud penalty.

USAToday:

(Gregory) Germain, the Syracuse professor, said the government did a good job of showing Trump inflated the value of his properties, but noted that sophisticated financial institutions didn't require a third-party appraisal like they do for a typical mortgage on a home.

"There are no cases like it," Germain said.


An Associated Press story makes a related point:

And though the bank offered Trump lower interest rates because he had agreed to personally guarantee the loans with his own money, it’s not clear how much better the rates were because of the inflated figures. The bank never complained, and it’s unclear how much it lost, if anything. Bank officials called to testify couldn’t say for sure if Trump’s personal statement of worth had any impact on the rates.

“This sets a horrible precedent,” said Adam Leitman Bailey, a New York real estate lawyer who once successfully sued a Trump condo building for misrepresenting sales to lure buyers.

Second, PolitiFact's fact check misrepresents the ease of appealing the ruling. 

CNBC:

Former President Donald Trump is gearing up to fight a massive fine in the New York business fraud case that threatens to erase most of the cash he says he has on hand.

But first, he has to secure a bond — and that might not be so easy.

Why doesn't PolitiFact tell you any of that?

Because they're biased.

They make sure there are no observations from a conservative such as Andrew C. McCarthy:

Afters:

PolitiFact is on a real tear against Trump early in 2024. It's almost like they're trying to retroactively make true their false claims about Trump's "Truth-O-Meter" record.

In fact it was Louis Jacobson, listed first on the byline of PolitiFact's fact check, who recently endured two corrections from Slate after it published an interview with him. Jacobson made two flatly false claims about Trump's record on the "Truth-O-Meter."


One wonders whether publicly making false claims about Trump should disqualify Jacobson from working on fact checks involving Trump.

Note: Huh--Looks like Slate botched its editor's note: "It has also been updated to clarify that among major politicians frequently fact-checked by PolitiFact, Trump has the highest percentage of Pants on Fire ratings." I gave them the example of Michele Bachmann, who has had 72 "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.

Hmm. Looks like it's time for another correction request, if there's no clear justification for that claim.

Thursday, February 8, 2024

The "Pants on Fire" bias study updated through 2023

 We have updated our "Pants on Fire" bias study with data from 2023.

What is it? We use a spreadsheet to track all "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings given to partisan Republicans or Democrats whether candidate, officeholder or appointed administration official plus party officials or organizations. We then calculate the percentage of false ("False" plus "Pants on Fire") ratings given the "Pants on Fire" rating.

Why do we do it? Because PolitiFact has never offered an objective means of distinguishing its "False" rating from its "Pants on Fire" rating, we infer that the difference is either substantially or wholly subjective. Assuming the substantial subjectivity of the ratings, we expect that differences in the percentages will help identify PolitiFact's partisan bias, if any.

Here's the updated chart:


What have we learned so far?

We've learned that national PolitiFact after 2007 shows a consistent bias for Democrats/against Republicans. That trend shows poorly on the graph above because this graph includes ratings from PolitiFact's various state operations. Before PolitiFact changed its website making it far less clear which franchise was responsible for what, we kept track of each part of the organization separately. The years from 2010 through 2015 show a moderation of bias thanks to state operations that sometimes were legitimately tough on Democrats. PolitiFact Wisconsin was notably tough on Democrats during that period, for example.

By looking at the total number of various ratings given to the political parties, we've also noted that Republicans (after 2007) receive far more of PolitiFact's bottom two ratings. That effect may stem from Republicans lying more or simply because of bias in story selection and ratings. We've documented enough of the latter two factors to reasonably prefer the second option. That's where the evidence leads.

If, as the available evidence suggests, PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" rating has no objective basis, "Republicans lie more" carries no objective explanatory value respecting the percentages on our graph.

We've also learned that harsh ratings for both parties are on the decline, in terms of raw numbers. The most obvious explanation for that trend stems from PolitiFact's social media partnerships. If PolitiFact fact checks a politician, revenue consists of donations, grants and ad revenue. But if PolitiFact fact checks something for its social media partners, there's a payday for that. PolitiFact discloses that more than 5 percent of its revenue comes from the social media company Meta. The Chinese social media company TikTok likewise accounts for over 5 percent of PolitiFact's revenue.  

Why doesn't PolitiFact offer more transparency than that regarding its income? Good question, but we don't have an answer free of conjecture.

As for our study of PolitiFact's numbers in 2023, the Republican average fell well below its historic norm, establishing an all-time low for the GOP. PolitiFact's ratings of Democrats pulled their historic average down for the eighth straight year.

A potential weird Trump effect?

The percentages for Republicans haven't really changed much over the years, defying the existence of any Trump effect in terms of increasing Republican dishonesty (in PolitiFact's data, anyway). But the percentages for Democrats have declined noticeably since around 2016 as Trump ascended politically.

Could Trump help explain an increase in Democratic Party honesty?

More likely those changes happen because the makeup of PolitiFact's franchises has shifted over time. State franchises no longer take the edge off the pro-Democrat bias of national PolitiFact. 

Saturday, January 20, 2024

PolitiFact Wisconsin, Glenn Grothman and uncharitable interpretation

 The principle of charitable interpretation is pretty simple. It consists of offering a claim the interpretation that best favors the speaker or writer without undue acrobatics.

Mainstream media fact checkers, when not reviewing the claims of Democrats, often experience difficulty with the concept. And that brings us to PolitiFact Wisconsin and Wisconsin Republican Glenn Grothman.





Grothman's statement offers two readily apparent interpretations. He may think the United States Constitution does not afford birthright citizenship on persons in the country illegally. Or, he may think that the birthright citizenship the Constitution affords to illegal residences counts as a bad policy due for a change.

PolitiFact opted for the first interpretation.

Why did PolitiFact opt for the first interpretation instead of the second one? That's the part that's of interest to those of us who want to see fact checkers do a better job of fact-checking. We looked for PolitiFact to give reasons to prefer one interpretation over the other but this was the best we could find:

Grothman didn’t respond to our inquiry seeking clarification and backup for the claim, which is known as "birthright citizenship." But his statement aligns with that of some other conservatives, who argue birthright citizenship does not apply to children of people living in the country illegally. 

PolitiFact later points out that some other conservatives propose changing the Constitution to disallow birthright citizenship for illegals, but fails to note that Grothman's ambiguous statement aligns with both positions. It depends on whether Grothman used "wrongly" to mean "unconstitutionally" instead of it representing a moral wrong even if in accord with the meaning of the Constitution.

A fact checker ought to iron out that question before proceeding with the fact check. PolitiFact didn't do that. Instead, PolitiFact asked Grothman's office what he meant, received no reply and took it on themselves to supply Grothman's meaning without apparently considering one of the two main alternatives. 

PolitiFact's fact check thus counts as journalistic malpractice.

Double Helping of Afters

PolitiFact invented the context of Grothman's speech (bold emphasis added):

During his speech Dec. 1, 2023, Grothman expressed contempt for ways foreign nationals and their children are illegally getting into and living in America.

When listing legal ways migrants can become U.S. citizens, Grothman pivoted and said citizenship is incorrectly granted to their children born in America.

Check the audio. Grothman did not list ways migrants can become U.S. citizens (3:25 transcript ours).

"I, one more time, attended a ceremony in Milawaukee of over 250 people in one day in one city, who were sworn in to be new citizens. We are now swearing in over a million people a year that do things right. Taht are vetted, we know they're not breaking the law, that, uh, they almost always have jobs, sometimes have opened up businesses by themselves. So it's not like America is saying you can never get into America, or we're so xenophobic that we're no longer a country of immigrants. No, we have, uh, over 1 million people every year coming here are sworn in. And that's not including children who are born here to parents who are not immigrants because right now our government wrongly is saying that if you're born in this country you're automatically an American citizen."

Second Helping

Refer again to the second sentence from PolitiFact we highlighted in the "afters" section. PolitiFact said Grothman "said citizenship is incorrectly granted to their children born in America." That's before PolitiFact's paragraph about reaching out to Grothman to ask what he meant. We see in PolitiFact's choice of words that it already decided what Grothman meant. What did Grothman mean by "wrongly"? Not a moral wrong in PolitiFact's eyes. PolitiFact switches to the term "incorrectly," fitting with their interpretation that Grothman said the government applies the Constitution incorrectly.

Last Word

As for whether PolitiFact's legal experts settled the question correctly regarding the Constitution, it seems PolitiFact's work was again careless. PolitiFact said the cases setting precedent disregarded immigration status in affirming birthright citizenship. Yet the English Common Law cases on which the U.S. court relied in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark places some importance on the alien offering allegiance to the sovereign. Thus the children of enemies of the Crown were not accepted as natural born citizens regardless of their place of birth.

 PolitiFact's fact check offers no whiff of that sentiment from the decision. That aspect of the common law throws a potential spanner in the works of PolitiFact's simplistic explanation.

Here find more about the "certificate of residence" expects of Chinese migrants, which in the late 19th century lacked a clear concept of illegal immigration. The Ark case was from 1898.

PolitiFact appears to count Plyler vs. Doe as a birthright citizenship case ("The issue came up again in the Supreme Court's 1982 Plyler v. Doe case"), but we could find no evidence in support of that notion. That decision hinged on residence within the state affording the resident equal protection under the 14th amendment, regardless of citizenship:

Held: A Texas statute which withholds from local school districts any state funds for the education of children who were not "legally admitted" into the United States, and which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Example Umpteen Showing How PolitiFact Goes Easier on Democrats

We only wish we had the time and money needed to document as much as 10 percent of PolitiFact's flawed and biased work.

We've documented a number of times PolitiFact's penchant for ignoring its central principle for grading numbers claims. PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair declared that the most important part of a numbers claim is its underlying point. But PolitiFact will ignore the underlying point at the drop of a hat if it will benefit a Democrat.

Newsom vs Haley

Newsom and "per capita" interstate migration

Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, defending himself from the charge that California is losing population while Florida gains population, said  "Per capita, more Floridians move to California than Californian's moving to Florida." PolitiFact rated the claim "Mostly True."

What's the underlying point of Newsom's claim? Does it address California's population loss compared to Florida's population gain?

No. Newsom's claim instead distracts from the issue with a pretty much meaningless statistic. Experts PolitiFact cited in the fact check underscored that fact. Note this line from PolitiFact's summary:
Experts gave varying answers about whether the margin was statistically significant, but they agreed that the slim differences make this argument technical, and not necessarily meaningful.
So, PolitiFact effectively ignored Newsom's underlying point (distracting from Sean Hannity's question) and gave him nearly full credit for telling the truth about a meaningless statistic.

Haley and ship counts as a measure of military strength

Contrast PolitiFact's treatment of Newsom to its treatment of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Haley said China is building up its military, and illustrated her claim by noting China has the largest naval fleet in the world. PolitiFact said she was right with her numbers, but faulted her for her underlying point. "Half True!"


PolitiFact's summary recounts the objections of the experts it interviewed:

Numerically, she’s on target with both countries’ ship counts. But experts say that simply counting ships omits context about a country’s true military capabilities. 

Ship counts ignore overall ship size, specific warfighting capabilities, and overall geographic reach, all of which are metrics where the United States maintains an edge over China.

It's worth noting that Haley made no claim about China's navy possessing more power than the U.S. navy. So why are tonnage and military capability relevant in rating the claim she made?

They're not. But PolitiFact has its excuse for giving Haley a lowball rating compared to the favor they did Newsom. PolitiFact focuses on Haley's underlying point and gives a poor rating for a true claim. PolitiFact ignores Newsom's underlying point and gives him a favorable rating for a claim that might not even be true (check the fine print).

It's part of the baseless narrative PolitiFact weaves: Republicans lie more.

The truth? PolitiFact is biased, and proves it repeatedly with examples like these.

Friday, November 10, 2023

Facebook Perfidy

This week I have it from PolitiFact Bias co-founder Jeff D. that Facebook accepted my protest of its move unpublishing the PolitiFact Bias page on Facebook.

Facebook unpublished our page back in April of 2021.


I appealed the decision near the time it was made. Our FB page always had a disclaimer in the description distinguishing us completely from PolitiFact and stating that we criticize PolitiFact. To no avail, and for two years the appeal had no noticeable effect on the status of our Facebook page. We are aware of no legitimate complaint that we transgressed Facebook standards.

I deleted my Facebook account this past summer, largely in protest of Facebook's biased decision to squelch the criticism of its corporate fact-checking partner.

Jeff tells me he only logged into his Facebook account to delete it. He says he got an undated pop-up window announcing that PolitiFact Bias was again made visible to readers after the success of our two-year-old appeal of the decision.

That's apparently after more than two years of silencing our speech based on our imaginary violation of Facebook's community standards. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed a pop-up or email announcing the reversal if it had happened before I deleted my account.

We're not going back to Facebook.

Afters:

Readers may be interested in the work I have done at Zebra Fact Check showing that Facebook's fact-checking partners are not held to account for errors. Whether it's too much work to do that or else interferes with their efforts to control information I cannot say.

Perhaps both.

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

PolitiFact aids President Biden's post hoc ergo propter hoc deception

 What can PolitiFact do to help President Biden?

BOOM!:



"But wait," our liberal or progressive friends might object. "That's just PolitiFact reporting the facts. There's no pro-Biden bias there."

On the contrary! And it's completely obvious how PolitiFact favored Biden, particularly in comparison to parallel fact checks of Republicans (and even some other Democrats).

Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

What is "post hoc ergo propter hoc"? It's a common logical fallacy that says, in effect, "After this, therefore because of this." For example, if one goes to the doctor and receives a cancer diagnosis, the cancer did not necessarily occur because of the doctor visit.

Politicians love using these types of fallacies. The flawed reasoning allows them to claim credit for pretty much anything that happened after they took office, so long as there's a recognizable correlation of events. And, of course, they're careful to emphasize the good things and downplay the bad things.

So, how did Biden play Hispanic unemployment?

Let PolitiFact explain it:

In one spot, titled "It’s Us" ("Nosotros" in its Spanish version) a narrator says Biden has helped the Latino community by lowering its unemployment rate.

"Since he has taken office, unemployment in our community has been cut in half," the narrator says in the ad, which the campaign says is part of a 16-week, $25 million advertising push. Hispanic Heritage Month began Sept. 15.

The framing is standard politics. Note when your guy took office, note something good that happened and take credit either implicitly or explicitly. In this case, the ad gives Biden explicit credit as communicated with PolitiFact's summary/paraphrase "Biden has helped the Latino community by lowering its unemployment rate." You can't get much more explicit than that in terms of simply taking credit.

So, PolitiFact reports the fallacious framing well enough, but does PolitiFact explain the fallacious reasoning involved?

PolitiFact does take a minor stab at it, almost like a footnote (bold emphasis added):

Unemployment in this community spiked at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, following national trends. The current Latino or Hispanic unemployment rate is similar to what it was in 2019 before the pandemic.

Although presidents can influence economic policies, the factors that contribute to unemployment are complex. The effects of pandemics such as COVID-19 carry more weight than whoever is in the White House. 

So, what happens when a politician tries to trick an audience with a logical booby trap (post hoc ergo propter hoc)? Well, if the politician is Joe Biden and there's an election coming up, the fact checker can offer a rating that ignores the plain deception and dock Mr. Biden a point for saying the rate was reduced by half when the reduction was a bit short of half.

Addressing the 'Crucial Message'

Non-partisan PolitiFact (to be clear, there's no such thing in the sense of lacking bias) would have docked Biden for both deceptions, ending up at "Half True" at best.

Now, how do I know that PolitiFact should take the claiming of dubious or illicit credit into account?

PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair wrote an article about it, and it was published at PolitiFact.com.
About a year ago, we realized we were ducking the underlying point of blame or credit, which was the crucial message. So we began rating those types of claims as compound statements. We not only checked whether the numbers were accurate, we checked whether economists believed an office holder's policies were much of a factor in the increase or decrease.

 Apparently the change in methodology Adair led did not lead to consistent practice. The "crucial message" in the Biden ad is the credit Biden deserves for helping the Latino community. That's explicit. Yet PolitiFact ignored the compound claim for purposes of the rating, gifting Biden with a "Mostly True" where "Half True" would have made PolitiFact appear consistent in this case.

But PolitiFact is not consistent. PolitiFact is biased. Its bias bends its principles with ease.

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

Married gays thrown out of restaurants? PolitiFact biased again

Quite a few conservative outlets hit the story of PolitiFact defending President Biden's gays thrown out of restaurants claim:


Newsbusters, Infowars, and Breitbart (among others) ran stories on PolitiFact's ruling. 

The Big Issue: Inconsistency

We did not find the biggest issue dealt with in those stories. PolitiFact used a totally different approach with Biden's claim than it has used in other cases, such as with respect to the legality of abortion up through the moment of birth.

Iowa Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks, for example, received a "Mostly False" rating after claiming the "Women's Health Protection Act of 2022" would allow abortion "up until delivery."

PolitiFact justified the ruling by claiming that such late abortions would only be allowed in limited cases (bold emphasis added):

The bill, which passed the U.S. House but is considered unlikely to win approval in the Senate, would permit abortion up to delivery, but only in limited cases — when medical professionals determine that an abortion is necessary to save the life or the health of the mother. Such situations account for a tiny fraction of all abortions, federal data shows. Ignoring this qualifier is misleading. 

PolitiFact, for its part, misleadingly ignores the fact that the "health of the mother" represents an easily accessed loophole for achieving the effect of elective abortion.

We found an abortion story at FactCheck.org that emphasized the conflict over the "Mother's health" ambiguity:

The disagreement centers on what each side interprets the “health” exception to mean, Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California, Davis and the author of six books on the abortion debate and the law, told us. “Republicans view those health exceptions as sort of like a blanket permission to have an abortion whenever you want.” Democrats say “it’s an exception for life or health.”

Of course, saying "it's an exception for life or health" fails to resolve the ambiguity of the term "health." The bill in question in both fact check articles, in fact, refers to risk to the life or health of the mother. Pregnancy is inherently risky. The law the Democrats proposed draws no lines on those risks, apparently leaving it entirely to the discretion of health providers.

PolitiFact's fact check offers no parallel to the key information included in the FactCheck story.

Does the proposed abortion rights law then allow abortion up through the moment of birth? Yes, it does. PolitiFact admits as much in its summary paragraphs. But PolitiFact rules that claim "Mostly False" because the ambiguous language of the bill blurs the line between elective abortion and an abortion intended to save the life of the mother.

Of note, the article from FactCheck.org reports the majority of third trimester abortions are done because of fetal abnormality. To be sure, a fetal abnormality may represent a risk to the life of the mother. But the statistic doesn't allow us to distinguish between those cases and ones where the mother simply elected not to birth an abnormal baby.

Issue Two: Anecdotal proof?

It seems PolitiFact has never looked for examples of late-term elective abortion to stack up against Democrats' claims about the legality of elective abortion up through the moment of birth. But if PolitiFact could find examples of restaurants denying service to gays, even if unmarried, it could use those to support Biden's claim. Or something.

PolitiFact claimed it found examples supporting Biden's claim:

It’s unclear how frequently people are denied service based on their sexual orientation. PolitiFact found several news stories detailing such reports between 2014 and 2021.

Breitbart questioned it:

When it came to actually citing instances of discrimination, Politifact offered questionable anecdotes. One in Florida, for instance, centered on a transgender person being kicked out of an establishment for trying to use the women’s restroom. Another story allegedly happened in Texas close to a decade ago in 2014 while another anecdote allegedly happened in the ultra-progressive bastion of New York City in 2021. Politifact also failed to note that the New York restaurant apologized to the couple and fired the employee who reportedly kicked them out.

How do PolitiFact's "several" examples stack up?

"Several" News Stories "Detailing Such Reports" 

The NBC News story offers only one line to support the claim the gay couple was kicked out of the restaurant:
A gay New York City couple say they were harassed and asked to leave a restaurant this month because of their sexuality.

Bizarrely, the article fails to offer any reporting in support of the claim the couple was asked to leave. The story reports that an employee used "homophobic" language, land later apologized. And the employee was later fired while the gay couple was offered a meal. But the story has no description of anyone asking the couple to leave the restaurant. It just has the summarized claim from the lede. That's it. It's "He said" without the "She said."


This is the same case as the one above. The gay couple is named, and the names are the same as the NY couple in the NBC News story.

The News12 version at least contains reporting bearing on the "kicked out" part of the headline, even if the support only counts as partial:

They say although the female employee asked them to leave the restaurant, none of the other employees enforced it. 

So one employee asked them to leave, but without support from other employees (including the manager or owner?). The couple canceled their order and left on account of offense, not because the restaurant kicked them out.


 "Allegedly." Seriously. It's in the story. But that's good evidence in PolitiFact's eyes.

Also (bold emphasis added):

Dana Kozlov, with CBS 2, attempted to interview the employee identified by the students, but he said he was just a customer. Another employee told the station to turn off their cameras.

Does this count as an example supporting Biden if it was merely another customer kicking the gay couple out of the restaurant?


It should go without saying that a trans woman getting kicked out of a nightclub for using the women's restroom is not getting kicked out for being gay. Presumably PolitiFact is able to distinguish between "gay" and "trans."


The details: Two customers harassed an LGBT+ group at the bar. The bar kicked out all of the disputants, and forcibly removed those who refused to leave--with the transgender (gay, PolitiFact?) ejectees claiming they received rougher treatment when forced to leave.


This example appears legit. It features an interview with the bar owner that at least partially confirms details reported by the ejected couple.


Was the transgender woman gay?


This is the same case as above: ""Florida trans woman kicked out of nightclub for using women’s restroom," attributed to WFLA-TV. Bold emphasis added:

CAPE CORAL, Fla. (WFLA/NBC) — A transgender woman in Florida said she was kicked out of a nightclub after she used the women’s restroom, according to a report by NBC affiliate WBBH.

The stories are identical, in fact. Why include two links to the same exact story by Nathaniel Rodriguez? And why not cite the story Rodriguez cited as his source

The primary source confuses matters with its reporting (bold emphasis added):

But that fun didn’t last long. Ayers said after she used the restroom, things quickly went wrong after security told her she had used the men’s restroom.

The reporting is inconsistent with the story's headline. So it's most likely a typo or transcription error.


Perhaps anti-gay and anti-trans mean the same thing if you're a fact checker? So a 75-year-old with a walker, a fellow customer, yelled at a transgender woman. In fact-checkerese, that means the restaurant kicked out a patron for being gay(?).


Despite the April 15, 2011 date PolitiFact put on this citation, the link leads to a 2018 video report about a gay couple kicked out of their UBER ride after they shared a kiss. The link has "kicked-out-of-uber" embedded. How did PolitiFact's version get "pub" in the headline?

We found no evidence at the Internet Archive that the story's title had changed. We did find a story with a matching headline and 2011 date, but the events took place in London, England. Getting booted out of a pub in England doesn't help Biden's point much, as far as we can see.



This one's another version of a story PolitiFact already listed. See ""Video shows transgender woman being aggressively kicked out Los Angeles bar after Pride event," Again, "transgender" apparently equals "gay" at PolitiFact.


The (paywalled!) Washington Post story, as one may discern from the title, concerns a transgender woman. PolitiFact lumps the transgender woman in with gay people without evidence. Maybe they think all transgender women are gay. But even if the transgender woman was gay in this case, the ejection took place after the individual's ID did not support their restroom choice. To be fair, the story appears to reliably show that the District of Columbia restaurant may not legally adhere to that requirement:

Simply put, a person who identifies as, or presents as, a man should be permitted to use a men’s restroom, and a person who identifies as, or presents as a woman, should be permitted to use a women’s restroom. Refusing to allow individuals to use bathrooms or facilities that are congruent with their gender identity or expression is a form of discrimination under the District of Columbia Human Rights Act.

Are you a man who wants to visit the women's restaurant. Present as a woman and apparently you're in. Otherwise you're the victim of discrimination.


That's PolitiFact's third citation of a story about the Bronx couple.



If you change "Dallas Morning News" to "Dallas News," that justifies repeating an otherwise identical citation found up above. Same title, same date, same story at the same URL.



"Allegedly" is right in the headline this time. Again, the story contains no objective reporting to support that the couple was "kicked out." Likewise, no reporting sheds light that would settle the reported dispute as to whether the Burger King was open or closed.



PolitiFact's use of this citation conflates gay marriage as a ceremony with homosexual orientation. It kinda-sorta qualifies as refusing restaurant service because the couple was lesbian. But if it wasn't a wedding rehearsal dinner would their relationship have mattered?

Summary


PolitiFact lists 16 citations in support of President Biden's claim, after claiming it has "several" examples from 2014 to 2021.

Take out the duplicate items (different citations concerning the same case) and we're left with 11.

Take out the citation of an event in England (or treating UBER as a restaurant) and we're left with 10.

Take out five cases that were transgender (orientation undocumented) and we're left with five.

Discount the case where it was apparently an individual customer asking the gay couple to leave and we're left with four.

Here's what's left:

  1. The Bronx couple who were told to leave by one employee, with no enforcement of that request.
  2. The Dallas case from 2014 where the restaurant claimed the gay couple broke its rules of decorum (best example, by our reading)
  3. The California Burger King case. Was the restaurant open or closed? He said, she said.
  4. The lesbian rehearsal dinner canceled (second-best example, by our reading).
Of the four, we have one relatively clear example (No. 2), at least based on the reporting, and three that only dubiously match Biden's claim.

PolitiFact claimed it had several examples.

Have we mentioned that PolitiFact is biased?