Remember Back When PolitiFact was Fair & Balanced?

PolitiFact has leaned left from the outset (2007).

It's not uncommon to see people lament PolitiFact's left-leaning bias along with the claim that once upon a time PolitiFact did an even-handed job on its fact-checking.

But we've never believed the fairy tale that PolitiFact started out well. It's always been notably biased to the left. And we just stumbled across a PolitiFact fact check from 2008 that does a marvelous job illustrating the point.

It's a well-known fact that nearly half of U.S. citizens pay no net income tax, right?

Yet note how the fact checker, in this case PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair, frames President Obama's claim:

In a speech on March 20, 2008, Obama took a different approach and emphasized the personal cost of the war.

"When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you're paying a price for this war," he said in the speech in Charleston, W.Va.

Hold on there, PolitiFact.

How can the cost of the war, divided up per family, rightly get categorized as a "personal cost" when about half of the families aren't paying any net federal income tax?

If the fact check was serious about the personal cost, then it would look at the differences in tax burdens. Families paying a high amount of federal income tax would pay far more than the the price of their cable bill. And families paying either a small amount of income tax or no net income tax would pay much less then the cost of their cable service for the Iraq War (usually $0).

PolitiFact stuffs the information it should have used to pan Obama's claim into paragraph No. 8, where it is effectively quarantined with parentheses (parentheses in the original):

(Of course, Obama's simplified analysis does not reflect the variations in income tax levels. And you don't have to write a check for the war each month. The war costs are included in government spending that is paid for by taxes.)

President Obama's statement was literally false and highly misleading as a means of expressing the personal cost of the war.

But PolitiFact couldn't or wouldn't see it and rated Mr. Obama's claim "True."

Not that much has changed, really.


Afters (for fun)

The author of that laughable fact check is the same Bill Adair later elevated to the Knight Chair for Duke University's journalism program.

We imagine Adair earned his academic throne in recognition of his years of neutral and unbiased  fact-checking even knowing President Obama was watching him from behind his desk.

Reminder: PolitiFact's standards shift

While doing a triple-decker fact check of PolitiFact and the Violence Against Women Act over at Zebra Fact Check, I stumbled over yet another great example of PolitiFact's shifting standards.

Remember how PolitiFact had to rate Mitt Romney "Pants on Fire" for his claim Jeep would build Jeeps in China because the claim supposedly implied Jeep would move all its manufacturing to China?  Of course.  We all remember that one.

But how about 2008, when then-candidate for president Barack Obama said his newly-chosen running mate, Joe Biden, wrote the VAWA and domestic violence went down dramatically.

PolitiFact found that Obama was accurate about the amount of the decrease, but the story expressed doubts about the implied cause.

Okay, so both of Obama's statements are true. Biden wrote an anti-domestic violence law, and domestic violence rates dropped dramatically.

But did one cause the other? Although Obama doesn't say it directly, that's the clear implication in his statement, and that's where things get a bit murkier. As we discussed back in 2007, when Biden was gunning for the top spot on the Democratic ticket, figuring out the reasons for changes in crime statistics can be tricky.  Multiple factors, including economic prosperity and demographic changes, contributed to an overall decline in violent crime throughout the 1990s and into this decade.

Romney, like Obama, made true statements.  PolitiFact in both cases saved its objections for the implied argument.

After finding a shred of evidence that the VAWA helped decrease domestic violence, PolitiFact offered its ruling on Obama's statement:

A study by the University of Arkansas, for instance, concluded in 2000 that the law's increased funding for civil legal assistance for victims contributed to the decline. Though that study also said economic and demographic factors mattered.

Obama never said the law caused all of the decrease, but he implied it, so we will rate this statement Mostly True.

"Pants on Fire" for Romney.  "Mostly True" for Obama.

Totally fair and unbiased.  Or something.

We do find one mitigating factor in PolitiFact's defense.  This story was from 2008, before 2011 when PolitiFact announced that it would provide greater weight for implied claims of responsibility.  Still, an impressive contrast results between the two rulings.  Romney's "Pants on Fire" ruling helped him capture PolitiFact's ultra-subjective "Lie of the Year" award for 2012, while Obama's "Mostly True" simply helped cement the beltway media impression that Democrats are much more truthful than Republicans.  And Obama gets to keep his "Mostly True" rating in his PolitiFact file to this day.

PolitiFact and fact checking.  Meh.

Kiriath-Arba: "Lipstick on a Pig"

"Stormin Mormon" of the Kiriath-Arba site brought back some nostalgic memories of PolitiFact and the 2008 election with a 2008 post titled "Lipstick on a Pig."

Many will remember how the McCain campaign whined about then-candidate Barack Obama calling Sarah Palin a pig by analogy not long after the Republican convention.  How silly of him, right?

"Stormin Mormon" puts the pieces together correctly, noting the reaction of the crowd to Obama's line while also noting the thin defense set forth by PolitiFact:

Apparently evidence of the fact that this expression has been used in the past somehow expunges Obama from any guilt. That kind of intentionally obtuse analysis is pathetic. Everyone knows "lipstick on a pig" is a common expression, much like "making a purse out of pig's ear" or the more colorful "shining a turd" variants. But just because the expression has previous meaning doesn't mean Obama's comments were innocent. It just means he had the cover he needed to make an obviously pointed reference to Palin and could rely on the sycophants at PolitiFact.org to back him up.

Bingo!  And back him up they did.

One aspect of Obama's speech that remains largely overlooked was his twin analogy dismissing the type of change represented by the McCain/Palin campaign.  He segued straight from the lipstick on a pig comment to talking about "an old fish" wrapped in paper that will still stink. It simply isn't plausible that a twin analogy featuring "old" and "lipstick" in consecutive references is not designed to refer to McCain and Palin.

And Obama seems to wear a knowing smirk throughout.
 


Ah, those were the days!  Here's how PolitiFact summarized its ruling:

We think it's very clear that Obama was saying McCain's effort to call himself the "candidate of change" is like putting lipstick on a pig, trying to dress up a bad idea to look better. Agree or disagree with Obama's point, but his remark wasn't the smear that McCain's people have tried to make it.

If anyone's doing any smearing, it's the McCain campaign and its outrageous attempt to distort the facts. Did Obama call Palin a pig? No, and saying so is Pants on Fire wrong.

It's fair to say that the McCain campaign exaggerated what Obama did.  He didn't call her pig, exactly.  He called her a pig by analogy.  Palin was the pig in lipstick of change and McCain the old fish of change.  The McCain campaign's failure to make that distinction made their complaint backfire.  PolitiFact and the rest of the mainstream media earned an assist, transforming Obama into the victim in the process.

On reading "Game Change," the account of the 2008 presidential campaign by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, I was actually surprised it contained no report of some surreptitious high-fives in celebration of putting one over on the public and the mainstream media.

"Stormin Mormon" made a good set of comments about PolitiFact and the mass media, so visit and read it all.

Introducing PFB's Anecdote-O-Meter

Just kidding with the title.  The o-meter stuff is too trite to use as more than a one-off joke.

But the subject is anecdotes and their role in helping to show bias in a body of work.

Most of us think we can perceive bias in an individual piece of journalism--an anecdotal evidence.  And we may often be right, but the appearance of bias in reporting or fact checking may simply occur at the result of writer error.

So how does one tell the difference between mere errors and ideological bias?

One method, bolstered by the methods of science, involves counting the number of errors and tracking any association with political parties or ideas.  Mere errors ought to occur roughly equally in stories regarding Republicans compared to those involving Democrats.  Where the errors harm one party more than the other beyond the line of statistical significance, evidence of a political bias has come to light.  The degree of deviation from best practices also may figure in a scientific study of journalistic errors.

In March of 2008 at my blog Sublime Bloviations, I started tagging relevant posts with "grading PolitiFact."  On occasion I have criticized PolitiFact for harsh grading of Democrats.  The vast majority of the posts, in accordance with my selection bias, is made up of criticisms of faulty grades given to Republicans or conservatives, or ridiculously gentle treatment of Democrats or progressives.

I work under no illusion that the list represents definitive evidence of a systemic bias at PolitiFact.  But the number of times PolitiFact's grades go easy on Democrats and tough on Republicans does count as an important and legitimate evidence supporting (not definitively) the charge of bias.

If the ideological bias at PolitiFact is not significant, then it should be possible to compile a list of comparable size and quality containing criticisms of PolitiFact where PolitiFact favors Republicans and deals harshly with Democrats.

I don't foresee that occurring.

The list from Sublime Bloviations, in chronological order (and do pardon the more polemical bent in the earlier entries.  I was shocked by the amateurish fact checks I was reading):