Flashback Oct. 2010: "Just the Hacks, Ma'am"

Note:  Jeff D. originally posted this story about PolitiFact's treatment of Obama's campaign contribution policies back in October of 2010 on his personal blog.  With renewed focus on the Obama campaign's handling of credit card donations, we feel a review of PolitiFact's past treatment of the issue has renewed value.  The post was edited for style in this incarnation.



Few media outlets are as disingenuous and misleading as the supposed "fact checking" outfit PolitiFact. Despite making the claim that they "help you find the truth in American politics", the project is simply an extension of the unabashedly left-wing St. Petersburg Times editorial page, and their consistently flawed "Truth-O-Meter" shtick betrays this bias.

This week produced a fine example of the bizarre contortions this "unbiased" outfit will go through to defend Obama. On Tuesday they offered up RNC chairman Michael Steele and his comments regarding disclosure of campaign donors. Specifically, PolitiFact chose to rate Steele's charge of Obama's hypocrisy-

When President, then candidate, Obama was asked to disclose some of his donors because there was suspicion of their being the foreign source of money into his campaign, they refused to do it. So don't give me this high-and-mighty, holier-than-thou attitude about special interests flooding the political marketplace.

With Obama's false narrative about the Chamber of Commerce, and Pelosi's hysterical warnings about plutocracies, Steele's comments were timely and spot on (for a change).

Was Obama asked to disclose donors, and did he refuse? It seems simple enough to verify.

It is a well documented fact that during the 2008 presidential campaign Obama refused to disclose the names of over 2 million donors. These particular donors contributed less than $200 each, and therefore fell below the reporting requirements. While Obama had no legal obligation to disclose them, he was under pressure to do just that. The reason was Obama had reduced the security safeguards on his campaign website that prevent fraudulent or illegal contributions. Obama claimed this was necessary due to the high volume of donations and the fact that the security measures slowed the process down. Fair enough.

Then erratic and abnormal donation patterns began to appear, including odd and un-rounded amounts (e.g. $133.29-suggesting foreign currency conversion), and curiously named donors like John Galt and Nodda Realperson, and of course Adolf Hitler and "Hbkjb,jkbkj".

In allowing donors to evade standard verification procedures, it became easier for people in Gaza, or even passionate supporters in Vermont, to circumvent donor disclosure laws. Basically, a single person using phony names could make multiple donations, with each individual donation under the $200 limit, but totaling tens of thousands of dollars in the aggregate, in order to avoid the reporting threshold.

These types of contribution shenanigans aren't unique to Obama's campaign. They happen to all politicians. What was unusual however was Obama's steadfast refusal to disclose the names of donors so independent journalists could vet the legitimacy of erroneous contributions.

Several groups started asking Obama to disclose the full list of donors in order to investigate these discrepancies. Obama refused.

The Republican National Committee went as far as filing a complaint with the FEC over the irregularities claiming Obama was accepting foreign cash. The Center For Responsive Politics asked Obama twice to disclose the names of "bundler" donors.

When the supposedly tech savvy Obama campaign finally responded with the ridiculous claim that compiling the list of names would be too technologically difficult, left-leaning Slate.com asked "So how come we were able to do it in a couple hours?"   Slate also noted:

Politically, there would be several advantages in releasing the names. Obama has campaigned on a platform of making government more transparent...

Ultimately the Obama campaign refused to disclose the names of over 2 million donors representing roughly $400 million in donations. In response to Obama's recent misleading attacks against the disclosure policies of Republican PAC's, the Wall Street Journal pointed out the hypocrisy in an editorial:

Mr. Axelrod told CNN the White House "believes deeply in disclosure"...But it wasn't always the case. During 2008, the Obama campaign didn't show any interest in going beyond the letter of the law in disclosing its donors to the general public. Despite public pleas from campaign-finance reform groups such as Common Cause and Democracy 21, Team Obama refused to...release names of donors who gave less than $200, even though such donors supplied about half of the $800 million the Obama campaign raised.

The bottom line is Obama accepted donations from contributors who were likely foreign nationals and he refused to publicly disclose the names. With all of this evidence it wasn't hard for PolitiFact to rate Michael Steele's claim......False?????

 PolitiFact tries to frame the "facts":

Despite the context of the conversation, Steele was not contending that the Obama campaign was asked to disclose donors to independent groups funding attack ads. That's a somewhat new phenomenon this election cycle. Trade groups and other 501 (c) groups were always allowed to keep donors anonymous. But the Supreme Court's Citizen United case upped the stakes with a ruling that allows corporations to contribute unlimited amounts to independent efforts to support or oppose a candidate.

What the what?!

PolitiFact correctly notes that Steele didn't imply that Obama refused to disclose donors of independent PAC groups. So why bring it up except to confuse the issue? And speaking of confusing the issue, what exactly does the Citizens United case have to do with Obama's 2008 campaign? Well, nothing except to throw the controversial ruling into the mix to get the base all fired up and attempt to connect two things that are otherwise unconnected. In this case it's diversionary and misleading.

Steele's statement begins and ends with calling Obama a hypocrite because in 2008 he refused to disclose his donors, and now Obama's complaining about right wing groups failing to disclose donors. All they need to determine is whether or not Obama refused to name names of donors. But if PolitiFact did that they'd have to call Obama a hypocrite.

Surprisingly, Politifact had the balls to cite Opensecrets.org to "prove" Obama's innocence while also taking a thinly veiled swipe at John McCain-

In fact, an analysis of campaign contributions by the Center for Responsive Politics found that the Obama campaign scored slightly higher than McCain's when it came to full disclosure of donors. The center found the Obama campaign fully disclosed 90 percent of the donations to the campaign, as opposed to 87 percent for the McCain campaign..

Those numbers are accurate. But what the unbiased, non-partisan, help you sort out the truth, fact checkers at PolitiFact fail to tell you is that those numbers don't include donor's who contributed under $200, which is the exact group of donors Steele was talking about. Oh, what Politifact also fails to mention in their snub was that unlike Obama, John McCain did release the names of donors who contributed less than $200. Why was this fact left out of the article?

What other gems did PolitiFact come up with?

We think Steele's comment is misleading in the context of responding to Democrats' complaints about tens of millions of dollars anonymously making their way into this election via independent groups like Crosssroads GPS. Steele's comments aren't directly related to that issue.

Huh? The argument is about transparency. How is it not a relevant criticism? And even if it was irrelevant, that doesn't make it false.

Again, it's not that the Obama campaign was asked for names of foreign donors and refused.

Well, except for the fact that that is exactly what happened.

 And finally they offer up their conclusion:

There was no issue of the Obama campaign willfully refusing to disclose the names of foreign donors.

Yes. There was. For PolitiFact to ignore the mountain of evidence that supports Steele's claim can only be a deliberate evasion of reality. PolitiFact's disingenuous "fact checking" can only be considered ideological cheerleading, and yet another example of media bias.

This latest disservice to facts is not new for PolitiFact. Bryan White over at Sublime Bloviations has been documenting their flawed and misleading ratings for a long time. His site is an invaluable source for exposing the misleading conclusions and flexible standards PolitiFact employs in their farcical "truth seeking" project.

Politics is full of misleading statements and outright lies. A truly unbiased source providing actual facts would be a welcome addition to political discourse.

But PolitiFact is not unbiased. They are simply a liberal opinion site riddled with inaccuracies, rhetoric, and ideology.

Falsely claiming to be objective purveyors of truth is wholly offensive, and PolitiFact should be exposed for the left wing ideologues they are.


Edit 10/09/12-Removed broken embed to video of Steele/MSNBC interview. It can still be found here. -Jeff

Edit 3/9/13-Removed link from words "warnings about plutocracies" for dubious source. - Jeff

Ranting and Rating: Why PolitiFact's Numbers Don't Add Up

Crossposted from Bewz, Newz, 'n' Vewz.

"I've given you a decision to make,
Things to lose, things to take,
Just as she's about ready to cut it up, She says:
  "Wait a minute, honey, I'm gonna add it up."

-Violent Femmes

One of the more common methods of using PolitiFact's findings is to add up total ratings and form a conclusion based on the data. In its simplest form, this is when someone looks at, for example, 100 PolitiFact ratings, 50 from Republicans and 50 from Democrats, then adds up who received more trues and who had more falses, and concludes from that total who is more credible. The reality is that a collection of PolitiFact's ratings provides far more information about the ideological bias of PolitiFact's editors than it does about the people they check.

One of the reasons this flawed method is so popular is that PolitiFact frequently promotes it as part of its shtick. Whether it's the ubiquitous report cards, or the iPhone app with its absurd Truth Index (described as a "Dow Jones Industrial Average of truth"), PolitiFact implicitly tells readers they can simply click a link to find out the credibility of a particular politician. Like most diet pills and get-rich-quick schemes, it's snake oil science and complete junk.

The most obvious flaw with this method is selection bias. There's simply no way for PolitiFact, or anyone for that matter, to check every statement by every politician. This means PolitiFact needs to have some sort of random selection process in order to ensure their sample reflects the wide variety of political statements being made, as well as the politicians making them. Without a random process, editors and writers might investigate statements that pique their own ideological interests. And how does PolitiFact choose its subjects?

"We choose to check things we are curious about. If we look at something and we think that an elected official or talk show host is wrong, then we will fact-check it."

Ruh-roh.

This "things we're curious about" method may explain why Senate hopeful Christine O'Donnell (Rep-RI) garnered four PolitiFact ratings, while the no less comical Senate hopeful Alvin Greene (Dem-SC) received none. 

Officially, PolitiFact only checks claims that are the "most newsworthy and significant." (Unless it's about Obama getting his daughters a puppy. Or baseball). PolitiFact also has a penchant for accepting reader suggestions. Anyone visiting PolitiFact's Facebook page is aware that their fans overwhelmingly reside on the left side of the political spectrum. If PolitiFact asks 50,000 liberals what statements to check, guess what? Statements about Fast and Furious won't be as popular as, say, Sarah Palin.

It's also important to consider the source of the statement being rated. For example, when Barack Obama made the claim that preventative health care is an overall cost saver, and Republican David Brooks wrote a column explaining Obama is wrong; PolitiFact gave a True to Brooks. This spares Obama a demerit in his column* while granting Republicans an easy True. Another example of this source selection is evident in the rating about $16 muffins for a Department of Justice meeting. Despite the claim being made in an official Inspector General report and being repeated by several media outlets, including the New York Times and PolitiFact partners NPR and ABC news, PolitiFact hung a False rating around Bill O'Reilly's neck. PolitiFact refrained from judging the nominally liberal media outlets--and the source of the claim--all while burdening O'Reilly with a negative mark in his file.

One of the most overlooked problems with analyzing a tally of the ratings is the inconsistent application of standards PolitiFact employs in different fact checks. Even if one was to assume PolitiFact used a random selection process and assigned its ratings to the appropriate source, we still have a problem when subjects aren't checked according to the same set of standards. For example, Politifact rated Obama "Half True" when he made a claim about the rates certain taxpayers pay. His claim only earned that rating when PolitiFact considered the amount their employers contributed to the employees' tax burden. Almost simultaneously, they labeled Herman Cain Mostly False in a similar claim specifically because he used the same formula. A cursory analysis of total ratings fails to detect this disparate treatment. When considering such flexible guidelines, the "report cards" don't seem like such a credible evaluation.

Ultimately, the sum of PolitiFact's ratings tells us far more about what interests PolitiFact's editors and readers than it does about the credibility of any individual politician. With so many flaws in their process, and such a minute sample size in a vast ocean of statements, conclusions about a subject's overall honesty should be considered dubious. We recognize that this flawed process will undoubtedly affect liberal politicians as well. However, it's our contention that the personal bias of the editors and writers will harm those on the right side of the aisle more often and more dramatically than those on the left.

Adding up PolitiFact's ratings in an attempt to analyze a person's or party's credibility produces misleading results. Until PolitiFact includes a check for selection bias and establishes and adheres to transparent and objective standards, an analysis based on their cumulative work is ill-founded at best, and grossly inaccurate at worst.




*PolitiFact did eventually give Obama a False after he repeatedly made the claim, but still spared several high profile Democrats for the same statement. Unlike perennial fact check favorites like the jobs created by the stimulus or Obama's birth certificate, PolitiFact seems to think the issue isn't worth revisiting.


Update (4/8/2012)-Shortly after (because?) we published this post PolitiFact did revisit Obama's  "Preventative Care Saves Money" claim, and gave him another False. Fair enough. But there's still plenty of other claims that give Obama a pass while simultaneously earning their "We give good grades to the GOP too!" chits that the original point still stands.-Jeff



(2/1/2012): Corrected Alvin Greene's state and name.

Bewz Newz 'n' Vewz: "Total Clusterfact: Sorting out Solyndra"

PFB associate Jeff Dyberg has posted a magum opus questioning how PolitiFact Florida could reach its finding of "Mostly False" that President Obama's administration extended half a billion in loans to its friends at Solyndra.

No, really:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

A snippet of Jeff's take from his blog Bewz Newz 'n' Vewz:

PolitiFact reviews an Americans for Prosperity ad and helpfully specifies what they're going to sort out the truth of:

We decided to fact-check the ad, focusing on whether the president gave "half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy." 

They can't screw this one up, can they? Multiple media reports have shown beyond dispute that Obama donors are closely tied to Solyndra, and also that the White House was aware of Solyndra's problems prior to the loan. So just how bad did PolitiFact flub this rating?

Jeff provides plenty of evidence showing the PolitiFact bloodhounds all over the trail without picking up the scent.   Apparently, it's plenty of correlation without any hint of causation.

It's recommended reading.

Happy Birthday, PolitiFact!

Blogger Jeff Dyberg of the PFB team wishes PolitiFact a happy birthday as only he can, sending a birthday message akin to one of those television episodes made up of memorable clips from past episodes.

Give it a read.

It'll make you laugh.  It'll remind you of PolitiFact's ideological bias.  And the latter might make you cry even if the former doesn't.

Bewz Newz 'n' Vewz: "One Of These Facts Is Not Like The Others"

PolitiFact Bias collaborator Jeff Dyberg illuminates an additional dimension of PolitiFact's selection bias problem through an examination of the treatment given Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio).  Kucinich performed some notable gum-flapping over how President Obama operated outside the law with his Libyan intervention.  PolitiFact ignored the accusation and instead dug up Kucinich's month-old comment that "To my knowledge, none of these existing programs appeared on the GAO's list of government programs at high risk of waste, fraud and abuse."

Jeff's summary of the problem:

What this teachable moment has exposed is that PolitiFact's bias isn't always as obvious as simply picking more statements on the left or the right or rating one group more harshly than the other. Their bias is evident in the specific claims and specific people they choose to rate as well as the things they choose to ignore.

This type of bias is one of the toughest to quantify, but examples such as the one Jeff offers nonetheless help build a cumulative case showing PolitiFact's affinity for the political left.

You can read the whole article here.