Justin Katz: 'Friday Fun: “PolitiFact Can”'

We've shared material from Rhode Island's Justin Katz with our readers before, but today we're honored to share Katz's parody of PolitiFact through the classic song "The Candyman."

This is just a teaser, so click on the link at the bottom to appreciate every tuneful word.

Who could take a true thing
Sprinkle it with spin
Cover it with context ’till the truth is wearing thin?
 
PolitiFact.  PolitiFact can.

Friday Fun: “PolitiFact Can”

Don't forget to read Katz's short description of the fact check that moved him to post the parody. It serves as yet another piece of evidence helping to show PolitiFact's tilt to the left.

Bravo, Justin Katz. Good laughs making a good point.

Anchor Rising: "Truth Once Again Blowin' In The Wind At PolitiFact"

Monique Chartier of Anchor Rising brings our attention to likely case of PolitiFact bias.

This looks like another classic case where PolitiFact (PolitiFact Rhode Island in this case) applies a hyper-literal interpretation to a statement that is plainly true when given normal charitable interpretation.

Specifically, Lisa Blais of the Ocean State Tea Party In Action group appeared on WHJJ 920's Helen Glover Show.  During that appearance, Blais said ""As you know, we came out against Deepwater.  And everybody is now paying for it in their electric bills." 

Blais' comment came in the context of a different case of potentially wasteful government intervention.  Taken in context, Blais is saying that the Deepwater wind turbine project receives its financing from electric bills.  Blais was not communicating the message that persons paying electric bills today are directly paying for the Deepwater project.  Find Blais' comments at about the two minute mark of the following audio.





PolitiFact ruled based on the idea that the listener would conclude that today's electric bill directly pays for the Deepwater project and gave Blais a ruling of "Barely True."  The PolitiFact story concedes that the project indirectly increases utility bills for today's energy consumer:

In 2009, the legislature and Gov. Donald Carcieri modified that law, requiring National Grid to actively encourage renewable energy projects; one of them was to be an undersea power line from Block Island to the mainland.
(...)
National Grid has racked up some legal costs dealing with that power line and those costs are being passed on to consumers as part of a 0.007 cents per kilowatt hour surcharge on their bills. For the typical residential customer -- who uses about 500 kilowatts per month -- that surcharge translates to no more than 3.5 cents per month.

Even taken hyper-literally Blais' claim was partly true, but the real crime is PolitiFact's decision not to give credit Blais' statement with a normal interpretation.

Blais appeared again today on the Helen Glover Show and gave PolitiFact an appropriate and well-delivered pushback.  Blais point out how PolitiFact went easy on a liberal in a different fact check when the literal interpretation was egregiously wrong.  She correctly observes that PolitiFact's standards abuse the term "standards."




Chartier provided the following update:

Permit me to be more specifical as to how PolitiFact is miss-serving the public and the truth in the case of Lisa's statement. The headline of today's rating is

Tea Party leader Lisa Blais says Rhode Island consumers are now paying for Deepwater wind turbine project in their electric bills.

However deplorable, not everyone delves into an article or an issue. On any given day, many people are only going to skim headlines to pick up the news - I'm guilty of that myself.

And in skimming mode, the all-important modifier "now" in the PolitiFact headline is not likely to register. What will certainly register, however, is the "False". So people are going to come away from this rating thinking, "That's that offshore windmill project, isn't it? I thought it was going to be funded by our electric bills. But PolitiFact says it isn't. That's good!"

Of course PolitiFact is acting hypocritically.  Blais' statement might mislead people.  That's bad, and it deserves a "Mostly False."  PolitiFact similarly misleads people.  That's good, because it gives people an easy way to find the truth in politics without reading every word of a fact check.

Anchor Rising: "Abortion Question Shows PolitiFact RI's Bias and Ignorance"

Blogger Justin Katz of Rhode Island's "Anchor Rising" recently hit PolitiFact for its poor handling of the abortion issue in a fact check of Jon O'Brien.  O'Brien serves as president of the self-explanatory group Catholics for Choice.

Katz makes great points about the ignorance of Roman Catholic doctrine displayed in the fact check.

Katz:

(I)n order that I may exorcise today's demon, I have to point out the ignorance and bias on display in Eugene Emery's finding that it is "mostly true" that "only 14 percent of Catholics agree with the Vatican's position that abortion should be illegal."
An objective assessment must acknowledge that there are two parts to the question, with a third qualifier necessary for an understanding of the results:

1. What is the Church's position on the matter?
2. Do Catholics agree with that position?
3. In what sense are the respondents "Catholic"?

Katz goes on to show that PolitiFact's fact-finding fudges on all three points.  PolitiFact failed to look into the crucial term "direct abortion" in the portion of the catechism it quoted and made no effort to correlate the actual Catholic doctrines to the poll data.

Katz covers it all and then some, so pay a visit and read it through.

It's worth adding that many Catholics out of agreement with Vatican teaching on abortion think they agree with Vatican teaching on abortion.  Using such statistics often matches a fallacious pattern of argument.

Anchor Rising: "Cicilline Gifted Another Mostly True From Politifact -- Seriously?"

Patrick Laverty and the Anchor Rising blog give us yet another quality criticism of PolitiFact.

PolitiFact just makes it way too easy.

Ok sure, the funding level was "close". It was in the 90s and it was more than the previous administration. However, as Politifact themselves often say, that isn't what Cicilline said. He said it was at 100% all but two years. It was there for all but six years. That's a big difference.

So the issue really speaks to Politifact's credibility, if they have much left. They are, at best, inconsistent with their rulings especially when it comes to Congressman Cicilline. This is the same newspaper that int 2010 endorsed Cicilline for Congress, in part due to his fiscal management of Providence. 

 PolitiFact's justification for the ruling?

Cicilline, in his off-the-cuff statement, mixed up where the years with the lowest contribution fell. But he made it clear a few times that he was citing figures from memory, so we’ll give him some leeway and rule Mostly True.

It's good to know that one can obtain some leeway if one is citing figures from memory.  At least when PolitiFact decides to grant such leeway (I'm not finding other examples of this kind of treatment).  If you're working from memory then the same set of facts can become more true than otherwise.  Like magic.

Looks like we can add a new wrinkle to the Principles of PolitiFact.

Anchor Rising: "Do They Even Read What They Write?"

"Anchor Rising" contributor Patrick Laverty gives us yet another anecdote illustrative of PolitiFact's bias, thanks to PolitiFact Rhode Island:

This one was just too easy. First Politifact accuses Terry Gorman of RIILE of issuing a "Mostly False" statement, and then they actually explain how their own ruling is wrong!

RIILE is Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, and the issue is the decision by the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education to provide in-state tuition rates to at least some illegal immigrants.

Laverty makes a condensed but essentially accurate case in finding PolitiFact "pants on fire" for its ruling on Gorman.  The federal law, Laverty points out, allows a state legislature to provide secondary education benefits so long as the method complies with the rest of the federal statute.  But the federal law does not make that same exception for the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education.

PolitiFact makes an effort to legitimize the Rhode Island policy by playing up a key court decision in California:

In their decision, the California judges concluded that the basis upon which California granted the in-state tuition exemption -- which includes having attended a California high school for at least three years and obtaining a high school diploma or GED from California -- constituted criteria other than residency. Therefore, the judges wrote, "it does not violate section 1623."

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on appeal.

The California court did not, however, rule on whether granting in-state tuition for undocumented students amounted to a "benefit" as defined in the federal law. That remains an open question.

There are two things of note in this portion of PolitiFact's analysis.

The first is the journalist offering a piece of legal analysis without directly sourcing it to an expert.  Journalists reporting in the objective style rarely set themselves forward as a definitive source of information.

Second, does it remain an open question?

On the face of it, the question doesn't seem so open.  The court's decision was the result of an appeal, and the lower court had ruled against the California law, finding it unconstitutional.  That court, it seems safe to say, operated on the premise that granting in-state tuition for undocumented students was a benefit under the applicable federal law.

It seems counterintuitive for the higher court to leave that issue unaddressed if it objected to that facet of the lower court's ruling.

One wonders why PolitiFact presented it as an open question, though it's clear enough in the context of the story that it serves as one of the keys to the unfavorable ruling Gorman received.

Anchor Rising: "More Bias on Display"

JD and I only got started with PolitiFact Bias in early 2011.  That puts us a few years behind in highlighting excellent examples others have found that help show PolitiFact's left-leaning bias.

Thanks to the new "PolitiFarce" tag at Anchor Rising I ran across this stellar example from Justin Katz:

The statement being addressed is that "over half of the foreign-born population in Rhode Island is white," and the findings were as follows:

Brown directed us to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 2006-2008, which includes three-year estimates of foreign-born populations in the United States. Specifically, he said he was citing the figures showing that 45.2 percent of foreign-born Rhode Islanders are white. That's not more than half. ...
Drawing from data in the 2006-2008 survey, the census said that 32 percent of foreign-born people, about one third, are white alone, not Hispanic or Latino. ...
A one-year report from 2009 showed that 30 percent of Rhode Island respondents identified themselves as "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino."

So, judged by the statistic that Brown incorrectly thought he should be using, his statement was only false by a little; judged by the appropriate statistic, Brown's statement was false by a lot. On what grounds did PolitiFact give him a "half true"?

Indeed, upon examination of PolitiFact's argument it is difficult to see what portion of Steve Brown's statement, if any, was true.

It's worth noting that this story by PolitiFact did attempt to address Brown's underlying point.  PolitiFact's standards (using the term advisedly) call for giving the underlying point the greatest emphasis in a numbers claim.

But trying to understand PolitiFact's approach on that basis simply leads to more trouble.

PolitiFact:

In the end, Brown's underlying claim that the state police investigate Hispanics more often than non-Hispanics for immigration violations is supported by the department's own numbers. Of the 92 people investigated, 71 were from Latin American countries.

The most obvious problem is the small sample size.  But the bigger problem is PolitiFact's supposed identification of Brown's "underlying claim" that Hispanics were investigated more often than non-Hispanics.  If that was Brown's underlying claim then there should have been no reason to look at race percentages among Rhode Island's foreign-born population.  PolitiFact could have just used the numbers 71 and 92 and had done with it with a glowing "True" rating.  But clearly Brown's point was that Hispanics are investigated disproportionately by race, implying racism in the department's methods.  That argument is specious on its face given the aforementioned small sample size and the strong possibility that factors other than race (proximity of the nation of origin, for example) come into play in leading to an investigation.

The "true" in Brown's statement, then, appears to come from an "underlying claim" that wasn't really Brown's point.  PolitiFact used a superficial factoid to justify bumping Brown up a notch or two (or three).

Anchor Rising introduces "PolitiFarce" tag

Rhode Island bloggers Anchor Rising have produced a number of high-quality critiques of PolitiFact, and the good folks there have added a new post category to make it easier to link to their content via PolitiFact Bias.  Look for a new link in the "PolitiFact's Detractors" section in the sidebar.

Anchor Rising's Justin Katz included the following tantalizing tidbit in a post introducing the new category:

I've actually been offered a bit of inside description of the PolitiFact process: Apparently, we can't attribute all of the blame to the journalists who pen the pieces, because at least at the Providence Journal, there's a PolitiFact board that rules on the statement and tasks the writers with explaining it.

I couldn't get details on the makeup of the board, but the process sounds exactly as the skeptical public already suspected: The analyses back-fill to the conclusions.

Katz's description appears at odds with what PolitiFact claims as its process.

A PolitiFact writer researches the claim and writes the Truth-O-Meter article with a recommended ruling. After the article is edited, it is reviewed by a panel of at least three editors that determines the Truth-O-Meter ruling.

Note that the first sentence in PolitiFact's description of its process may be taken in either of two ways.  The "recommended ruling" may either precede the work of the author by coming from an editor or editors, or it may be the work of the writer.

Certainly the description suggests that the writers produce the recommended ruling based on their research.  But perhaps that isn't the case.



March 14, 2011:  Edited to achieve subject-verb agreement in final paragraph

Anchor Rising: "Rating of John Loughlin on Social Security: PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter Earns Itself a 'Pants on Fire'"

Blogger Monique Chartier of Anchor Rising noticed when PolitiFact failed to admit that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme:

Here's the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

A Ponzi scheme is an investment fraud that involves the payment of purported returns to existing investors from funds contributed by new investors.

Here's how social security works.

The Social Security system is funded primarily by federal taxation of payrolls.

Doubtless PolitiFact might defend itself by noting that "fraud" occurs in Chartier's definition of "Ponzi scheme."  The PolitiFact argument insists against the evidence that Ponzi schemes require fraud in order to fit the proper definition.

But that's only true if we cherry-pick the definition.

Chartier's criticism hits its mark, but would have more force if she pointed out that fraud is not a necessary feature of Ponzi schemes and Ponzi financing.