Tuesday, January 9, 2018

PolitiFact Texas unpublished (Updated x3)

It seems like only yesterday we were praising PolitiFact Texas and W. Gardner Selby for taking an important step toward full transparency by making its interviews of experts available to readers.

Now it has come to our attention that PolitiFact Texas has followed PolitiFact National's lead in unpublishing stories when it decides they are defective.

A publisher may have legitimate reasons for unpublishing a story. But in the interest of transparency organizations should not totally remove the defective work from public view. Organizations should archive the story and keep it available before and after the organization puts the needed changes into effect.

Lately PolitiFact disappears the entire story and only posts a link to the archived version after republishing a reworked version.

If there's a good excuse for that doughnut hole in transparency we are not aware of it.


We also disapprove of PolitiFact only communicating its decision to unpublish the item on Twitter. That's transparency only for the Twitterverse. Readers deserve better than that.



Update Jan. 10, 2018

We found what is apparently the original version of the Abbott-O-Meter ruling and archived it at the Internet Archive.

Update Nov. 28, 2024

A spike in traffic to this post led us to review it, and it turns out it's overdue for an update.

On Jan. 11, 2018, after we originally posted our Jan. 10, 2018 update, PolitiFact Texas published a new version of the story with the old version appended afterward.

PolitiFact Texas' approach addressed our concern about disappearing the defective version of the story. But PolitiFact left us ample room to continue our criticism based on its failure to use a correction notice. This is what passes for PolitiFact's mea culpa:
The Abbott-O-Meter update below was posted Jan. 4, 2018. It's eclipsed by the update above:

Ordinarily a PolitiFact promise meter features a number of updates, each superseding the earlier updates. Find an "Obameter" example with two entries here. But for whatever reason many of the PolitiFact Texas' "Abbott-O-Meter" promises have no assessments whatsoever. Without investigating, we'd assume that may have something to do with the dissolution of PolitiFact's relationship with the Austin American-Statesman.

PolitiFact, then, used something akin to its normal approach for updating a promise meter story but without acknowledging that its story was mistaken. There's no admission of error and no apology, even though it's apparent that the facts justifying the "Promise Kept" rating were in effect when PolitiFact Texas published its "Promise Broken" update.

Typically the story updates progress along the lines of "In the Works" toward either "Promise Kept," "Promise Broken" or "Compromise." Going from "Promise Broken" to "Promise Kept" in the space of a week or two doesn't really make sense.

PolitiFact made a mistake and failed to follow its corrections policy.

And while all this was happening, the International Fact-Checking Network was publishing as "verified" the claim that PolitiFact "scrupulously" follows its policy on corrections. That was a lie then and it's a lie now.


IFCN assessors don't look closely enough to find mistakes, and the IFCN intentionally keeps its assessors from readily accessing the complaints it receives from the public with virtually zero transparency.

The IFCN supposedly publishes an "annual" transparency report. The first and last such report was from 2020.

We follow Poynter’s corrections policy for our articles and any corrections can be found at this link.

For 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 State of the Fact-Checkers Reports please visit the links attached to the respective years.

Starting from 2020, IFCN publishes annual transparency reports on its Code of Principles. You can download the 2020 report here.

We judge it false that the IFCN publishes an annual transparency report. 

Oh, and of course the link for the 2020 report returns a 404 error.

What an embarrassment.

IFCN transparency means you might be able to find the 2020 report at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

There's a little tidbit about this author in that 2020 transparency report:

Durin [sic] 2020, a very significant amount of complaints have been submitted one [sic] single source against one specific verified signatory, therefore, encouraging us to explore how to navigate such overwhelming attempts without allowing the system to be abused while making sure legitimate complaints are recorded.

Apparently the IFCN settled on the strategy of ignoring my complaints regardless of their legitimacy. Another embarrassment for the IFCN.

Update Nov. 28, 2024: In truth, I should have simply provided a link to the followup story we published on Jan. 11, 2020.

But it was worth tying it in with the International Fact-Checking Network's facade of accountability.

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