Big Journalism: "Politifact Yet to Report Two Glaring Falsehoods in Obama's Reelection Doc"

From earlier this year (March), Big Journalism's John Nolte took PolitiFact to task for its kindly treatment of the Obama documentary doubling as a campaign ad.

Nolte claimed PolitiFact missed at least two big whoppers in the film.  First, GM's supposed repayment of its bailout loans (PolitiFact later graded that claim "Half True"--see below).  Second, the repeated tale of Obama's mother supposedly denied health insurance coverage.

Nolte:

Politifact took a long hard look at the Obama reelection propaganda film and found it to be … mostly true!

Yep, 3 "mostly true's" to 1 "mostly untrue."

Never saw that coming. 

 Yes, PolitiFact succeeded in giving the documentary a favorable frame.

One of the claims PolitiFact found "Mostly True" was actually very misleading.  It portrayed President Bush as giving the auto companies money with no strings attached while Obama's strong leadership held the companies accountable.  The loans from the Bush administration came with plenty of strings, including the requirement that by March the recipients present the Obama administration with a plan for achieving solvency.

PolitiFact cuts Nolte's number from two to one

To PolitiFact's partial credit, it updated its story with a fact check of the claim that Chrysler and GM repaid their loans.

PolitiFact fails to receive full credit because the applicable standard doesn't pass the sniff test when paired with the standard recently applied to Mitt Romney.  In Romney's case a true statement was called misleading and was ruled "Mostly False."  The film made a partially true statement that was misleading and received a "Half True."

PolitiFact's combination of story selection bias and biased fact checking served President Obama well.

Big Journalism: "Politispin: 'Fact-Checkers' Mislead on GOP Leaders' Favorable Unemployment Numbers"

Big Journalism's Tony Lee posted an article yesterday that sets the tone with the first line:

The purportedly unbiased Politifact will go to great lengths to help Democrats.

That's old news around here, but like the liberals who endlessly parrot PolitiFact's spin, we appreciate confirmation bias as much as the next guy. 

So what's all the hubbub about? PolitiFact Rhode Island's rating of GOP gubernatorial candidate John Robitaille's claim that "Unemployment rate dropped in every state that elected a Republican gov. in 2010." Robitaille based his claim on a report done by Robert Elliott. Lee critiques PolitiFact's dance moves:

In a remarkable twisting of facts and logic, Politifact concedes Elliott’s two points are true before somehow rendering those points to be “Half True.”

This isn't the first time in recent memory where PolitiFact found ways to determine accurate figures weren't worthy of a True rating. This rating also adds to the list of experts left with a bad taste in their mouth after dealing with PolitiFact:

“That type of spin would be expected of, say, the Democratic Governors Association, but not a supposedly ‘objective’ and ‘nonpartisan’ news organization that claims to be the official arbiter of the truth,” Elliott told Breitbart News. “It is the insidious nature of PolitiFact's bias that makes them so loathsome.”

Elliot's statements by themselves make Lee's article a must-read. But Lee sweetens the pot by highlighting PolitiFact's use of extraneous evidence to cloud the issue they were ostensibly reviewing:

Politifact then goes on to compare the unemployment rates of the states that simply elected a governor who was from a different party from the predecessor’s, which is a completely different analysis than Elliott’s, which is what Politifact was supposed to be “fact checking.”

When doing that analysis resulted in Republican governors still reducing the unemployment rate faster than Democratic governors, Politifact decided to compare the unemployment numbers of the Republican predecessors in states that elected Democrats and Democratic predecessors in states that elected Republicans. Only then -- when not even comparing the current crop of governors or the past two years, which was the basis of Elliott’s analysis -- was Politifact able to find something they could use to say Democrats (predecessors) were slightly better than Republicans (predecessors) at reducing the unemployment rate.

Lee nails the point, and this reminds me of PolitiFact's treatment of Laura Ingraham's claim about RomneyCare's unpopularity with national voters. In that case, PolitiFact based their entire rating on statistics only from Massachusetts when Ingraham was probably talking about all 50 states. It appears that when PolitiFact doesn't like the initial outcome, they find new facts to throw into the mix until they reach their desired outcome.

The most hilarious part of the rating was that PolitiFact not only conceded, but confirmed Elliot's numbers:

Considering the unemployment rate has fallen in 49 states in the last year, that’s stretching the statistic pretty thin.

We find Robitaille’s claim "is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context," our definition of Half True.

If the unemployment rate fell in 49 states, by definition Robitaille's claim is true. Using PolitiFact's logic, if Robitaille had claimed "The sun rose in every state that elected a GOP governor", he'd only be rated Half-True because he left out important details. It's nonsense. And it's not fact checking.

This is the first time we've noticed Tony Lee, but if this installment at Big Journalism is any indication, we're looking forward to highlighting his work in the future. Head over to Breitbart and read the whole thing. There's plenty more to this smackdown.


Bryan adds:

Matthew Hoy of Hoystory also takes issue with PolitiFact's rating of Robitaille.

One might cut PolitiFact a break for trying to take credit into account for the sake of its ratings if the effort was evenly applied and didn't force PolitiFact to largely ignore the definitions it established for its ratings.

What do I think of PolitiFact's execution?  I'd borrow a line from legendary football coach John McKay:  "I'm in favor of it."

Big Journalism: "VA GOP Pushes Back Against PolitiFact, Shows Other States the Way"

Big Journalism's John Nolte didn't take long to weigh in on the Republican Party of Virginia's challenge to PolitiFact Virginia's objectivity:

PolitiFact isn't just a national cancer on all of us. This reprehensible outfit also "fact-checks" in a number of individual states, including the crucial swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

Unfortunately, my lack of superpowers makes it impossible for me to monitor the left-wing propaganda PolitiFact is surely spewing in each individual state. Thankfully, though, the Republican Party of Virginia has had enough.

Nolte's spirited rant is worth a full read, but we'll register some qualified disagreements.

If PolitiFact is a cancer it's often benign.  The fact checks are in the ballpark enough so that radical surgery probably doesn't serve as the answer.  And, in fact, the response from the Republican Party of Virginia probably doesn't serve as the model response, largely because it's too late to serve as a timely corrective for any misinformation it detects and because its format discourages people from reading it (PFB will give it a closer look over time).

On the good side, this type of response from the party does a great deal to bring attention to PolitiFact's many issues, which are best highlighted by research like that of Eric Ostermeier and collected evaluations like the recent set from Ohio Watchdog.

It's pretty easy to find good criticism of PolitiFact.  The challenge comes from getting the information in front of the public to increase people's awareness that PolitiFact cannot be trusted in its current form.

Big Journalism: "PolitiFact Bases Entire Fact Check on Author's Intuition"

John Sexton of Big Journalism (and Verum Serum fame) joins Matthew Hoy in slamming PolitiFact's rating of a recent Crossroads GPS ad.

Sexton notes that the ad says one thing and PolitiFact claims the ad says something else:

The ad is clearly about the President's promise that you could keep your insurance, not some insurance. Instead of staying on that point, PolitiFact's introduces a novel new interpretation of the ad's meaning. Suddenly, it's not about the President's promise at all, rather " Its point seems to be simply that a lot of people will lose coverage." Really? Where does it say that?

Sexton draws attention to a recurrent problem at PolitiFact.  Statements that fail to accord with the views inside the left-skewed journalistic bubble often receive an uncharitable interpretation that the original speaker would scarcely recognize.  PolitiFact ends up appearing either unable or unwilling to understand the readily apparent meaning.

Sexton makes other good points as well, so visit Big Journalism and read it through start to finish.  Sexton gets Bill Adair on the record defending PolitiFact's journalistic malpractice, and that's always worth seeing even if it draws  from one of Adair's two favorite cliches:  People won't always agree with PolitiFact's ratings and PolitiFact gets criticized from conservatives and liberals (PolitiFact, therefore, is fair).

Big Journalism: "Politifact: Obama Presided Over Slowest Federal Spending Growth of Any Recent President"

Big Journalism's John Nolte comes through with a story on PolitiFact's role in supporting Rex Nutting's misleading claims about President Obama's role in expanding federal spending.

Nolte makes some statements about PolitiFact's motivations that we no not necessarily agree with, but his post hits the central issue with a powerful broadside (assisted by Jim Pethokoukis):

Now to the facts, which I will turn over to the Enterprise Blog's indispensible Jim Pethokoukis. It should be noted that Pethokoukis is not taking on Politifact but rather the nonsense that Politifact laughably proclaimed as mostly true: [emphasis added]

Nutting arrives at that 1.4% number by assigning 2009—when spending surged nearly 20%—to George W. Bush: “The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress. Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.”

Let me complete the metaphor for Nutting: “Then as those runners scored, Obama kept putting more on base.”

Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it. Only by establishing 2009 as the new baseline, something Republican budget hawks like Paul Ryan feared would happen, does Obama come off looking like a tightwad. Obama has turned a one-off surge in spending due to the Great Recession into his permanent New Normal through 2016 and beyond.

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, NOWHERE is this pertinent piece of context included anywhere in Politifact's 1300 word analysis.

Nolte's identification of the central problem agrees with the one I posted at Sublime Bloviations, for what it's worth.  A significant portion of the increased spending in 2009 was one-time spending, much of it in the form of loans, to stabilize the banking system.  Using that year as a baseline for later increases is misleading, period.  And Nolte's right that PolitiFact ignores that critical piece of context.

This bit of partisan and journalistic hackery, however, is a new low. Intentionally and dishonestly, Politifact only reports on the context that backs up the pro-Obama sleight-of-hand while the only context that matters is completely ignored. What we have here is nothing short of lying through a deliberate act of omission.

I find it hard to disagree, even though I try to give PolitiFact's journalists the benefit of the doubt as to their conscious motivations.

Big Journalism: "2012 Preview: Who Will Fact-Check the Corrupt MSM’s Cherished PolitiFact?"

Big Journalism's John Nolte forecasts PolitiFact's role in the 2012 election, using a rambling account of the organization's checkered past.  Nolte's dead-on with his assessment that PolitiFact turned popular liberal opinion into "fact" with its "Lie-of-the-Year" selections and provides music to our ears with his call to hold PolitiFact to account:

We are all activists now. Get involved. Call these people out. Spread the word.

At the risk of sounding corny, this is about our country and it is everyone’s job to watch the self-appointed Watchmen.

Hear, hear.