PolitiFact tweets out gender pay gap blunder

So long as Democratic Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders doesn't tangle with Joe Biden, he can probably count on getting a break from the left-leaning "non-partisan fact checkers" (liberal bloggers) at PolitiFact.

Another case in point, this time from PolitiFact's Twitter account:

“Women make 79 cents on the dollar” (for equal work) Attempts to measure the gap between men and women doing equivalent work have shown a narrower difference, though it depends heavily on the specific profession in question. https://t.co/X6oFOtAmZJ

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) January 26, 2020

PolitiFact mismatched the fact check of Democrat Bobby Scott with the Sanders claim. Though PolitiFact is inconsistent, it usually rates claims like Sanders' "Mostly False."

In rating Scott's claim, PolitiFact Virginia took pains to detect nuance (bold emphasis added):

The statistics are across-the-board comparisons for all jobs lumped together and do not specifically compare men and women performing the same jobs. Many people, citing the statistic, wrongly use it as an apples-to-apples comparison of pay for equal work.

Scott’s statement, however, is nuanced. He says women get 80 percent pay for doing "similar" jobs as white men, which is different than saying the "same" job as men.

In spite of that, PolitiFact's tweet suggests Sanders' statement about women receiving 79 cents on the dollar for the same work is "Mostly True."

And after PolitiFact Virginia did all that work to argue "similar" means something different than "the same" (baloney, we say), PolitiFact's tweet tries to send PolitiFact Virginia's message using the word "equivalent."

That sure clears things up (Merriam-Webster).

Definition of equivalent

1 : equal in force, amount, or value also : equal in area or volume but not superposable a square equivalent to a triangle

2a : like in signification or import

b : having logical equivalence equivalent statements

3 : corresponding or virtually identical especially in effect or function

4 obsolete : equal in might or authority

5 : having the same chemical combining capacity equivalent quantities of two elements

6a : having the same solution set equivalent equations

b : capable of being placed in one-to-one correspondence equivalent sets

c : related by an equivalence relation

Why couldn't PolitiFact just take the straightforward route and present one of its old ratings directly parallel to the claim it attributed to Sanders?

Perhaps we'll never know. But it was probably bias.

We republished this item because we neglected to give it a title when it was first published.

Forgetting the title results in a cumbersome URL making it a good idea to republish it.

So that's what we did. Find the post here.

Fact checkers decide not to check facts in fact check of Bernie Sanders

As a near-perfect follow up to our post about progressives ragging on PolitiFact over its centrist bias, we present this Jan. 15, 2020 PolitiFact fact check of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders:

Sanders said his plan would "end" $100 billion in health care industry profits, and PolitiFact plants a "True" Truth-O-Meter graphic just to the right of that claim.

But there's no fact check here of whether Sanders' plan would end $100 billion in profits. Instead the fact check looks at whether the health care industry makes $100 billion in profits (bold emphasis added):

The Sanders campaign shared its math, and it’s comprehensive.

The $100 billion total comes from adding the 2018 net revenues -- as disclosed by the companies -- for 10 pharmaceutical companies and 10 companies that work in health insurance.

We redid the numbers. Sanders is correct: The total net revenues, or profits, these companies posted in 2018 comes to just more than $100 billion - $100.96 billion, in fact. We also spoke to three independent health economists, who all told us that the math checks out.

There are a couple of wrinkles to consider. Some of the companies included -- Johnson & Johnson, for instance -- do more than just health care. Those other services likely affect their bottom lines.

But more importantly, $100 billion is likely an underestimate, experts told us.

It looks to us like PolitiFact meticulously double-checked equations that did not adequately address the issue of health care profits.

On the one hand "We redid the numbers. Sanders is correct." But on the other hand "$100 billion is likely an underestimate."

The fact checkers are telling us Sanders was accurate but probably wrong.

But we've only covered a premise of Sanders' claim. The meat of the claim stems from Sanders saying he will "end" those profits.

Did Sanders mean he would cut $100 billion in profit or simply reduce profits by some unspecified amount? We don't see how a serious fact-check effort can proceed without somehow addressing that question.

PolitiFact proceeds to try to prove us wrong (bold emphasis added):

Sanders suggested that Medicare for All would "end" the $100 billion per year profits reaped by the health care industry.

The proposal would certainly give Washington the power to do that.

"If you had Medicare for All, you have a single payer that would be paying lower prices," Meara said.

That means lower prices and profits for pharmaceuticals, lower margins for insurers and lower prices for hospitals and health systems.

That could bring tradeoffs: for instance, fewer people choosing to practice medicine. But, Meara noted, the number supports Sanders’ larger thesis. "There’s room to pay less."

Though PolitiFact showed no inclination to pin down Sanders' meaning, the expert PolitiFact cited (professor of health economics Ellen Meara) translates Sanders' point as "There's room to pay less."

Do the fact checkers care how much less? Is PolitiFact actually fact-checking whether Sanders' plan would lower profit margins and it doesn't matter by how much?

Side note: PolitiFact's expert donates politically to Democrats. PolitiFact doesn't think you need to know that. PolitiFact is also supposedly a champion of transparency.

Where's the Fact Check?

PolitiFact does not know how much, if at all, the Sanders plan would cut profit margins.

PolitiFact does not specify how it interprets Sanders' claim of bringing an "end" to $100 billion in profits (the cited expert expects a lower profit margin but offers no estimate).

The bulk of the fact check is a journalistic hole. It fails to offer any kind of serious estimate of how much the Sanders' plan might trim profits. If the plan trims profits down to $75 billion, presumably PolitiFact would count that as ending $100 billion in profits.

Using that slippery understanding, quite a few outcomes could count as ending $100 billion in profits. But how many prospective voters think Sanders is promising to save consumers that $100 billion?

"Fact-checking."

That's no "centrist bias." That's doing Sanders a huge favor. It's liberal bias, the prevalent species at PolitiFact.

Progressives accusing PolitiFact of "centrist bias"

Left-leaning The Week has put out a couple of articles recently accusing PolitiFact of a "centrist bias."

Here's one of the accusations:

Is Joe Biden, contrary to his centrist reputation, a tax-and-spend liberal? That was the argument made by Politifact's Amy Sherman, defending him against accusations from the Bernie Sanders camp that in 2018, "Biden lauded Paul Ryan for proposing cuts to Social Security and Medicare." Not so, says Politifact: "The Sanders campaign plucked out part of what Biden said but omitted the full context of his comments. We rate this statement False."

Unfortunately, it's a tendentious argument that totally misreads Biden's politics and history. He did indeed call for cuts to Social Security and Medicare in a 2018 speech at the Brookings Institution — part of a decades-long career of hawking pointless austerity. Yet, just like they did with Medicare-for-all, fact checkers are bending the truth to advance an ideological centrist agenda.

The argument, unlike many from-the-left criticisms of PolitiFact, isn't frivolous. We noted during the 2016 election that PolitiFact seemed tougher on Sanders than on his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It makes sense that wherever PolitiFact's ideology falls on the political continuum those to either side may experience a resulting bias.

And, in fact, that's our purpose in highlighting the accusation. A charge of centrist bias proves consistent with the charge of liberal bias. The Week is saying PolitiFact is biased toward political positions to its left and right. The Week just doesn't bother to highlight any of the "centrist" bias that harms conservatives.

We do that.

Plus we highlight good examples of PolitiFact's anti-progressive bias under the "Left Jab" tag.



Note: The "bending the truth" example from The Week doesn't wash.

Busted: PolitiFact catches Nikki Haley using hyperbole without a license

Some things never change.

Among those things, apparently, is PolitiFact's tradition of taking Republican hyperbole literally.

Case in point:

The hyperbole should have been easy to spot based on the context.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley appeared on Fox News' "Hannity" show with host Sean Hannity.




Transcript ours (starting at about 2:12):

Do you agree with, uh, listen I've always liked General Petraeus. He's a great, great general, hero, patriot in this country. He said it's impossible to overstate the importance of this particular action. It's more significant than the killing of bin Laden, even the death of al Baghdadi. And he said Soleimani was the architect, operational commander of the Iranian effort to solidify control of the so-called Shia Crescent stretching from Iran to Iraq through Syria and southern Lebanon. I think that's the reason why Jordanians, Egyptians and Saudis are now working with the Israelis, which I don't think anybody saw coming.

NH
Well, and I'll tell you this: You don't see anyone standing up for Iran. You're not hearing any of the Gulf members, you're not hearing China, you're not hearing Russia. The only ones mourning the loss of Soleimani are our Democrat leadership. And our Democrat presidential candidates. No one else in the world, because they knew that this man had evil veins. They knew what he was capable of and they saw the destruction and, and the lives lost (based?) from his hand. And so--

SH
What a dumb (?). We've been hearing "Oh, he's evil, he's a murderer he killed Americans and he, this is the No. 1 state sponsor of terror and they're fighting all these proxy wars but we don't want to make 'em mad." That's what it sounds like to me.

NH
You know, and you go tell that to the 608 American families who lost a loved one. Go tell that to the military members who lost a limb. This was something that needed to be done and should be celebrated. And I'll tell you right now, partisan politics should stop when it comes to foreign policy. This is about America united. We need to be completely behind the president, what he did, because every one of those countries are watching our news media right now seeing what everyone's saying. And this is a moment of strength for the United States. It's a moment of strength from President Trump.

Haley's "mourning" comment comes after her emphasis Iran received no support ("You don't see anyone standing up for Iran") regarding the killing of Soleimani. So it makes very good sense to take "mourning" as a hyperbolic amplification of that point.

Hannity's response to Haley's comment came in the same vein, in fact mocking Democrats who acknowledged Soleimani got what he deserved while questioning the wisdom of the move.

PolitiFact could legitimately check to see if world leaders offered statements much in the same vein leading Democrats offered. Instead of doing that, PolitiFact used a wooden-literal interpretation of Haley's remarks as a basis for its fact check.

How do mistakes like this (and these) make it past PolitiFact's exalted "Star Chamber" of experienced fact check editors?

Could be bias.

PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" bias in 2019

As our research has documented, PolitiFact has consistently failed to offer any objective means of distinguishing objectively between false political claims and ridiculously false political claims.

On the contrary, PolitiFact's founding editor, Bill Adair, said decisions about the "Truth-O-Meter" ratings are "entirely subjective." And current editor Angie Drobnic Holan in 2014 explained the difference between the "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings by saying "the line between 'False' and 'Pants on Fire' is just, you know, sometimes we decide one way and sometimes decide the other."

Given the understanding that the difference between "False" and "Pants on Fire" rests on subjective grounds, we have conducted ongoing research on the chances a claim PolitiFact considers false will receive the "Pants on Fire" designation.

Our research suggests at least two things.

First, PolitiFact National is biased against Republicans.

Second, the statement selection process renders "Truth-O-Meter" ratings an entirely unreliable guide to candidate truthfulness even assuming the subjective ratings are objectively accurate(!).

Without further ado, an updated chart for both political parties showing the percentage of false ratings given the "Pants on Fire" rating:

We'll address one potential criticism right off the bat.

We should expect a higher percentage for the party that lies more!

We would agree with that criticism if the PolitiFact data stemmed from objective considerations in the fact checks. We have no evidence to support that and considerable evidence to counter it (see above). All the evidence suggests the "Pants on Fire" rating is a purely subjective judgment.

Subjective judgment is incompatible with neutrality.

A Review of the Findings

False statements from Democrats were rated "Pants on Fire" just 9.09 percent of the time in 2019, tying the record low set in 2009. The Republican percentage stayed very close to its historic baseline, which cumulatively stands at 27.21 percent. The long-term average for Democrats dropped slightly to 17.41 percent. Over PolitiFact National's entire history, Republicans are about 60 percent more likely to receive the subjective "Pants on Fire" rating.

That's bias.

PolitiFact's wildly unscientific selection process

The Trump presidency ought to end permanently any supposition that PolitiFact's story selection process approximates random (scientific) representative selection in any way.

Of the 14 "Pants on Fire" ratings given to Republicans in our 2019 data, 13 went to President Trump. The other one went to Mr. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

Of the 39 "False" ratings given to Republicans in our 2019 data, 29 went to Mr. Trump.

Combined, then, 42 of 53 of Republicans' false "Truth-O-Meter" ratings went to Mr. Trump.

For comparison, in 2011 PolitiFact rated 88 Republican claims false with none of them coming from Mr. Trump. From 88 down to 10? Is the Republican Party, aside from Trump, that much more honest with the passage of time? Nonsense. That hypothesis is completely implausible on its face.

The explanation is painfully simple: As PolitiFact admits, its editors choose the claims PolitiFact rates. They use editorial judgment to select stories, not scientific selection. The editors are, in the words of the editors, "not social scientists."

If anything counts as a proof that the supposedly unbiased fact checkers at PolitiFact are deliberately pulling the wool over the eyes of their readers, it is PolitiFact's unrepentant use of its aggregated ratings as voter guides.

They have to know better.

They do it anyway. And the practice was part of PolitiFact's aim from the start, which helps explain why it won't go away.

PolitiFact and Bernie Sanders explain the gender pay gap

Everybody knows about the gender pay gap, right?

It's the statistic Democrats habitually misuse to amplify their focus on "equal pay for equal work." Fact checkers like PolitiFact punish that traditional deception by rating it "Mostly True" most of the time, or sometimes just "True."

Let's take a look at PolitiFact latest PolitiSplainer on the gender wage gap, this time featuring Democratic Party presidential candidate and "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders.

Such articles might more appropriately wear the label "unexplainer."

PolitiFact starts out with exactly the kind of ambiguity Democratic Party leaders love, obscuring the difference between the raw gender wage gap and the part of the gap (if any) caused by gender discrimination:

The disparity in how much women make compared with men comes up often in the political discourse, tagged with a call to action to help women’s paychecks catch up.

Running just above that sentence the featured image directs readers toward the gender discrimination explanation for the gender pay gap. Plausibly deniable? Of course. PolitiFact didn't mean it that way or something, right?

PolitiFact goes on to tell its readers that a number of Democrats have raised the gender pay gap issue while on the campaign trail. The paragraph contains four hotlinks:

Several leading Democratic presidential candidates recently highlighted one of the biggest imbalances — saying that a Latina woman must work 23 months to make the amount a white man makes in one year, or that they make 54 cents on the dollar.

Each of the statements from Democrats highlighted the gender pay gap in an ambiguous and misleading way. None of the statements bothered to distinguish between the raw pay gap, caused by a variety of things including women working fewer hours, and the hard-to-measure pay gap caused by employers' sexual discrimination.

The claim from Mayor Pete Buttigieg was pretty much incoherent and would have made great fodder for a fact check (54 cents on the dollar isn't enough to live on? Doesn't that depend on the size of the dollar in the comparison?).

PolitiFact highlighted the version of the claim coming from Sen. Sanders:

Latina women in America must work for 23 months, on average, to make what white men earn in a year.

Equal pay is not radical. It is not extreme. It's an issue of basic justice.

We are ready to fight for decent, fair wages for women everywhere. #LatinaEqualPayDay

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) November 20, 2019

Sanders' use of the gender pay gap fits the standard pattern of deception. He leads with a figure from the raw wage gap, then assures the audience that "Equal pay is not radical ... It's an issue of basic justice."

But Sanders is misleading his audience. "Equal pay for equal work" isn't radical and may count as an issue of basic justice. But equal pay regardless of the work done is very radical in the United States. And that's what Democratic Candidates imply when they base their calls for equal pay on the disparities in the raw gender wage gap.

If only there were fact checkers who could explain that deception to the public!

But, no, PolitiFact does not explain Sanders' deception.

In fact, it appears PolitiFact has never rated Sanders on a claim related to the gender wage gap.

PolitiFact did not rate the misleading tweet featured in its PolitiSplainer. Nor did it rate any of these:

• "Women workers today earn 78 percent of what their male counterparts make.We need pay equity in our country--equal pay for equal work."
• "We must have equal pay for equal work: women want that whole damn dollar, not 79 cents on the dollar."
• "At a time when women make an average of 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, I am disappointed that every Republican in the Senate voted to filibuster the paycheck fairness act to insure equal pay for equal work."

PolitiFact ratings of the gender wage gap tend to graciously overlook the fact that Democrats almost invariably invoke the raw gender wage gap when stumping for equal pay for equal work, as Sanders did above. Does the raw gender wage gap have much of anything to do with the wage gap just from discrimination? No. There's hardly any relationship.

Should Democrats admit they want equal pay for unequal work, it's likely the American people will let them know that the idea is not mainstream and not an issue of basic fairness.

PolitiFact ought to know that by now. But you won't find it in their fact checks or PolitiSplainers dealing with the gender wage gap.

How Big is the Pay Gap from Discrimination?

Remarkably, PolitiFact's PolitiSplainer on the pay gap almost takes a pass on pinning down the role discrimination might play. One past PolitiSplainer from 2015 actually included the line from the CONSAD report's Foreword (by the Department of Labor) suggesting there may be no significant gender discrimination at all found in the raw wage gap.

In the 2019 PolitiSplainer we got this:

We often hear that discriminatory practices are a reason why on average women are paid less than men. Expert say it’s hard to measure how much of a role that discrimination plays in the disparity.

"Research shows that more than half of the gap is due to job and industry segregation — essentially, women tend to work in jobs done primarily by other women, and men tend to work in jobs done primarily by other men and the ‘men’s jobs’ are paid more," said Jennifer Clark, a spokeswoman for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Clark cited education and race as other factors, too.

Such a weak attempt to explain the role of discrimination in the gender pay gap perhaps indicates that PolitiFact's aim was to explain the raw gender wage gap. Unfortunately for the truth, that explanation largely stayed within the lines of the traditional Democratic Party deceit: Mention the raw gender wage gap and then advocate legislation supposedly helping women receive equal work for equal pay.

That juxtaposition sends the clear message the raw gender wage gap relates to discrimination.

Supposedly neutral and objective fact checkers approve the deception, so it must be okay.

We have no reason to suppose mainstream fact checkers like PolitiFact will stop playing along with the misdirection.