Friday, September 8, 2017

PolitiFact's hypocrisy

PolitiFact manifests many examples of hypocrisy. This post will focus on just one.

On August 21, 2017 Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said American has dozens of counties with zero insurers. Ryan was talking about insurers committed to serving the exchanges that serve individual market customers.

On August 24, 2017, PolitiFact published a fact check rating Ryan's claim "Pants on Fire." PolitiFact noted that Ryan had relied on outdated information to back his claim. PolitiFact said only one county was expected to risk having no insurer, and Ryan should have been aware of it:
Now technically, that report wasn’t published until two days after Ryan spoke. But the government had the information, and a day before Ryan spoke, Politico reported that just one county remained without a potential insurance carrier in 2018. The Kaiser Family Foundation published the same information the day of Ryan’s CNN town hall.

And a week earlier, the government said there were only two counties at risk of having no participating insurer. Ryan was way off no matter what.
Fast forward to Sept. 7, 2017. PolitiFact elects to republicize its fact check of Ryan, reinforcing its message that only one county remains at risk no not having any insurance provider available through the exchange. PolitiFact publicized it on Twitter:
And PolitiFact publicized it on Facebook as well.

The problem? On Sept. 6, 2017, the Kaiser Family Foundation updated its information to show 63 counties at risk of having no insurer on the exchange. The information in the story PolitiFact shared was outdated.

Paul Ryan got a "Pants on Fire" for peddling outdated information.

What does PolitiFact get for doing the same thing?

Another Pulitzer Prize?

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