Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Not a Lot of Reader Confusion XI

We say that PolitiFact's graphs and charts, including its PunditFact collections of ratings for news networks, routinely mislead readers. But PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan says there isn't much reader confusion.
 
A comment today at PolitiFact's Facebook page reminds us yet again that PolitiFact's graphs and charts mislead its audience.


The comment referred to PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan's Dec. 11, 2015 opinion article in The New York Times. When a reader scoffed at the use of the Times as a reliable reference the person making the comment defended it with this (bold emphasis added):
ALL of the statistics both come from Politifact itself. I use it because it has a very nice graphic that clearly shows that Republicans as a whole are far more full of pony poop than Democrats are.
As we've pointed out repeatedly, PolitiFact has admitted its "Truth-O-Meter" ratings are subjective and that its sampling method makes no attempt to simulate randomness (therefore one may assume the data suffer from selection bias).

Yet another satisfied PolitiFact customer, misled in a way that Holan says doesn't happen a lot.

If it doesn't happen very often then why is it so easy to find examples of it happening, we wonder?

If PolitiFact was concerned about misleading people in this way, then it would attach disclaimers to every one of its graphs to warn against jumping to conclusions the PolitiFact data cannot rightly support.

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