2016 Flashback: When PolitiFact channeled Buzzfeed (Updated)

Way back in the day, PolitiFact assured us "When possible, we go to original sources to verify the claims. We look for original government reports rather than news stories. We interview impartial experts."

We supposed the key term there is "When possible."

We were trying to find PolitiFact's most recent weigh-in on the gender pay gap and decided to take a closer look at a claim about Hillary Clinton's payroll practices.

PolitiFact's site update appears to have omitted the fact check for whatever reason, but it remains available through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

In short, the Washington Free Beacon used what's available to the public to find Clinton was typically paying female staffers less than male staffers. The GOP liked to jab Democrats with those types of comparisons precisely because Democrats made parallel claims about whole populations as though it was evidence of gender discrimination. The raw gender pay gap doesn't clearly show discrimination, however. So, the GOP liked to give the Democrats a taste of their own medicine.

Buzzfeed got access to information directly from the Clinton campaign that supposedly undermined the Free Beacon method. And maybe their work was legit. But who can say? None of it's available to the public. PolitiFact makes no assertion that it independently verified Buzzfeed's work.

The data used by Free Beacon showed that the median salary for a woman on Clinton’s payroll was about $15,700 less than the median salary for the men of the office. But this data has several caveats, including that it omits leaves of absences, which are common for staffers to work on campaigns. The data also didn’t contain Clinton’s first nine months in office or staffers who left after less than a year. 

A BuzzFeed analysis relied on more complete data and found the same median salary for men and women. But neither set of data fully answers the question about whether Clinton paid women and men the same amount for the same work.

So, PolitiFact doesn't know whether Clinton was paying women less than men, so the claim that Clinton was paying women less than men is "Mostly False."

Research courtesy of Buzzfeed, unverified by the PolitiFact team.

Fact-checking.

Same-Day Update:

I'm remiss in not pointing out that this ruling also reflects a tension with PolitiFact's "principle" stating it will grade statements on information available at the time.

Timing – Our rulings are based on when a statement was made and on the information available at that time.

Was the information shared with Buzzfeed, which PolitiFact could not/did not independently verify, available at the time?