Imperious PolitiFact

PolitiFact decides who built what, and it's ridiculous

Back in 2016 we reviewed the "True" claim PolitiFact awarded First Lady Michelle Obama for her claim the White House was built by slaves.

Slaves definitely helped with the labor of constructing the White House, but to an unknown degree. Regardless of that, PolitiFact awarded Obama a "True" rating on its subjective "Truth-O-Meter."

We thought PolitiFact went too easy on the claim, given that one could use the same standard to claim it "True" that European immigrants built the White House. Including a word like "helped" allows either claim to rise to credibility.

Fast forward to 2018 and the State of the Union Address response from U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.).

Kennedy said immigrants built Fall River, Massachusetts.

Breitbart, a right-leaning news outlet, judged Kennedy's statement "Mostly False," reasoning that the establishment of Fall River by native-born descendants of English settlers made it reasonable to say the city was built, at least in part, by those native-born people. Breitbart added that the native-born population has always outnumbered immigrants in the county that contains Fall River.

PolitiFact apparently doesn't care for sharing credit. If one group helped build something then that group gets credit and other groups that helped do not get credit.

PolitiFact rated Breitbart's claim "False." Yes, that implies that immigrants who helped "build" Fall River by coming to work at factories established by the native residents were the ones who exclusively built Fall River.

Call us radical right-wingers if you like, but we think if the facts show that credit for building something should be shared, then a fact checker should acknowledge shared credit in its ratings.

Breitbart's "Mostly False" rating hints at an ability to make that type of acknowledgement.

PolitiFact's "True" and "False" ratings make it look more partisan than Breitbart.

ISIS "contained"?

When President Obama called ISIS ("ISIL") "contained" in a televised interview on Nov. 12, 2015, other politicians, including at least one Democrat, gave him some grief over the statement.

Mainstream fact checker PunditFact came to the president's defense. PunditFact said Obama was just talking about territorial expansion, so what he said was correct.

Conservative media objected.

John Nolte from Breitbart.com:

PolitiFact’s transparent sleight-of-hand comes from basing its “True” rating — not on the question Obama is asked — but how the President chose to answer it.

Stephanopoulos asks, “But ISIS is gaining strength aren’t they?”

T. Becket Adams from the Washington Examiner:

PunditFact has rated the Obama administration's claim that the Islamic State has been "contained" as "true," even after a recent series of ISIS-sponsored events around the world have claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians.

For the fact-checker, the White House's doesn't believe ISIS is no longer a global threat, as fatal attacks last week in Beirut and Paris would show. The president and his team merely believe that the insurgent terrorist group controls a smaller portion of the Middle East today than it did a few months ago.

We think PunditFact has a bit of a point when it claims the president's remarks are taken out of context. But as Nolte and Adams point out, the specific context of the Obama interview was the strength of ISIS, not its territorial expansion.

If the president was saying that containing ISIL's geographic control equates with containing its strength, then PunditFact ends up taking the president out of context to justify claiming the president was taken out of context.

There's something not quite right about that.


Clarification Dec. 10, 2015: Changed "wasn't" to "was" in the next-to-last paragraph

Ben Shapiro: "Politifact Cites Three Liberal 'Apology Experts' to Condemn Romney"

Ben Shapiro, writing for Breitbart.com's Big Peace, pre-emptively steals my thunder on PolitiFact's ridiculous story on Mitt Romney and the statement from the American embassy in Libya.

Shapiro:

Just when you think Politifact can’t make any more of a mockery of itself than it already has – over and over and over and over again – they wade into the breach today on foreign policy. More specifically, they took issue with Mitt Romney’s statement today that “I think it’s a terrible course for America to stand in apology for our values.”

PolitiFact has a history of denying that things Mitt Romney says are apologies are, in fact, apologies.  Shapiro has fun with PolitiFact's method of undercutting Romney in this case:

So, what did Politifact have to say? They interviewed three “apology experts.” Seriously. First, they interviewed Professor John Murphy, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who said it wasn’t an apology because “the statement does not use the word ‘apology’ or ‘apologize’ and does not use any synonym for that word.” Second, they interviewed Lauren Bloom, “an attorney and business consultant who wrote The Art of the Apology.” What did she say? Romney’s “once again allowing his emotional allergy to apology to interfere with his judgment.” Finally, they interviewed Professor Rhoda E. Howard-Hassman, who said the statement was “not an apology.”

But is that PolitiFact's fault?  PolitiFact tried to contact a fourth expert who did not respond.  By looking at the earlier fact checks we can confirm that the expert was conservative foreign policy analyst Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation.

What did Gardiner have to say in PolitiFact's original story?  Here it is:

Nile Gardiner, a foreign policy analyst with the the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Obama is definitely apologizing, and it's not good. He co-wrote the Heritage analysis, "Barack Obama's Top 10 Apologies: How the President Has Humiliated a Superpower."

"Apologizing for your own country projects an image of weakness before both allies and enemies," Gardiner said. "It sends a very clear signal that the U.S. is to blame for some major developments on the world stage. This can be used to the advanage of those who wish to undermine American global leadership."

He noted that Obama tends to be most apologetic about how the U.S. has fought terrorism and its approach to the Iraq war. "There is a very strong partisan element to his apologies, but the biggest driving factor is Obama's personal belief that the U.S. is not an exceptional, uniquely great nation," he said.

As I noted in an earlier analysis, PolitiFact completely discounted Gardiner's statement in ruling Romney "Pants on Fire" for saying Mr. Obama went on an apology tour.  PolitiFact did not explain its reasons for discounting Gardiner's expertise.  If partisanship was a problem then we should expect PolitiFact to find an entirely new set of experts.  Choosing the expert opinion of three liberals over one conservative looks simply like an expression of partisan bias by the fact checker when unaccompanied by a solid rationale.

In the latest apology for Obama, PolitiFact's three experts make a show of distinguishing between condemnation and apology.  But that approach obscures a potential relationship between condemnation and apology.

One cannot condemn an entity and apologize for that same entity at the same time with the same statement.  Those aims work against each other.  But very clearly, one can easily work a condemnation into an apology:  "My son was bad, bad, bad, bad, bad--a thousand times bad for breaking your window, Mrs. Jones."

In the above example we have an apology and a condemnation in the same sentence.  It works because the apology is directed at one entity (Mrs. Jones) while the condemnation is directed at a third party (the son).  By throwing a natural ally under the bus for breaking the window, the condemner sends a clear implicit message of regret to the offended party, Mrs. Smith.

It's important to emphasize the role of an apology in both personal and international relations:  An apology is an attempt to smooth things over with the offended party.  Condemning the breaking of the window sends a message to Mrs. Jones that something will be done to the window breaker to help balance the scales of justice.  Absent that implication, condemning the window-breaker isn't likely to sooth Mrs. Jones' ire.
 
In the case of the Libyan embassy, embassy officials clearly released the statement with the aim of defusing anger at the United States.  One can claim that it was a condemnation rather than an apology, but that's obfuscation.

It was a classic apology, delivered by implicit means.

***

Shapiro's sharp, pithy and to the point.  Visit Big Peace and read the whole of his take.

Hot Air: "PolitiFact Goes to the Dogs"

This week PolitiFact flexed their Pulitzer-sized muscle by...copying and pasting.

Our fact-finding friends decided the hubbub surrounding our commander-in-chief's canine cuisine wasn't worthy of a fact check, but wanted to weigh in on it anyway. What better way to put the issue "In Context" than to simply reprint the passage from Obama's book? Karl over at Hot Air was quick to Spot spot the ruse:

Although the heart of PolitiFact is the Truth-O-Meter, which they use to rate factual claims. [sic] author Louis Jacobson assigned no rating to the seemingly straightforward question of whether Obama ate dog.

Karl's post is well worth the read, but I think his buddy Ace summed it up nicely on Twitter:

Image from Twitter

After receiving several criticisms on Twitter about being unable to determine what is a widely acknowledged fact, PolitiFact attempted to reframe the article as simply putting the issue "In Context":

Image from Twitter

That defense falls flat. Check out how PolitiFact (originally) headlined the article:

(Image from PolitiFact's Facebook page)

Did Obama eat dog in Indonesia? The question mark implies doubt. The only thing missing here is PolitiFact's gimmicky Truth-O-Meter graphic. The offending headline has since been scrubbed from the website and replaced with the more benign heading: "In context: Obama's comments on eating dog in Indonesia." Of course, no editor's note or mention of the change is provided. (The question in question is still up on PolitiFact's Facebook page, but links to a version of the story with the updated headline).

John Sexton over at Breitbart describes the trouble with the transmuted title:

Ace of Spades began questioning what exactly Politifact was suggesting with their headline shortly after the story appeared. Is there some doubt about the dog-eating story? If so, why not offer a ruling? And if there's actually no doubt, why write a factcheck piece at all? What does "context" actually add in this case? Either Obama ate dog or he didn't.

Friday afternoon, Politifact rewrote their headline. As you can see, it now reads "In context: Obama's comments on eating dog in Indonesia." No more question mark, which is presumably their way of saying the story is true. And yet, we still get no "true" ruling. And there is still no explanation of what the context adds to this discussion.

But headline hijinks aren't the only problems with this article. Karl goes on to point out that PolitiFact has not shied away from animal related claims in the past:

More significantly, PolitiFact’s responses ignore their much more relevant track record in this particular area. For example, PolitiFact rated the story about the Romneys transporting the family dog on the roof of their car as “Mostly True.” And PolitiFact rated the story about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee frying squirrels in a popcorn popper simply “True.”

In all fairness to PolitiFact, they have indeed rated Obama on a dog claim:

(Image from PolitiFact.com)

Awww...

The bottom line is PolitiFact failed to provide any context that wasn't already widely available. The one angle of the story they could have clarified was whether or not eating dog meat was customary (or even common practice) in Indonesia at the time of the incident. But if you thought that kind of context would be provided by the Pulitzer-winning outfit in a feature they call "In Context", you'd be wrong. Instead, we're forced to rely on the word of those biased extremists over at Breitbart to do the legwork PolitiFacter Louis Jacobson was too busy to do:

A diplomatic source close to the Indonesian delegation in the U.S. confirms that while dog is sometimes eaten in Indonesia, it is done so very rarely. “Obama had to go hunting for dog meat,” the source, who didn’t want to be identified, told me.

“I don’t know of anyone who eats it and frankly, I’m a little offended you would ask.”
Breitbart.com scoured Indonesian cook books. Not one mentions ways to prepare dog.

PolitiFact's latest "In Context" article was little more than a device for them to delicately acknowledge a popular and controversial issue without actually having to take a position on it. People who claim to be objective servants of fact should be unconcerned with perception. But PolitiFact are not those people. They didn't sort out the truth of anything or even put anything in context. They punted. Their Obama eats dog article was an evasion. Readers should expect more of the same in the coming months.