Daily Caller: "Politifact Says Trump Is Right, But Rates His Remark ‘Mostly False'"

The Daily Caller notes an item from PolitiFact where President Trump tweeted something PolitiFact found true, after which the fact checkers proceeded to rate the claim "Mostly False."

The Daily Caller's Alex Pfeiffer has the skinny:

The tweet from Trump came after Gateway Pundit reported on the change in the national debt under the two respective presidents and after former Godfather Pizza CEO Herman Cain brought up the figures on Fox News.

Politifact wrote: “The numbers check out. And in fact, the total public debt has dropped another $22 billion since the Gateway Pundit article published, according to data from the U.S. Department of Treasury.”

Despite this, Politifact still gave Trump a rating of “mostly false” and titled its article, “Why Donald Trump’s tweet about national debt decrease in his first month is highly misleading.”

We saw this item and considered writing it up. It seemed to us the type of thing that liberal (or even moderate) readers might excuse, judging that PolitiFact did enough to justify the "Mostly False" rating it gave to Trump's tweet.

The case needs additional information to show that it does not represent a fair fact check.

The definition of "Mostly False"

Did PolitiFact show that Trump's tweet met its definition of "Mostly False"? Here is the definition:

MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

Trump's tweet did not simply contain "an element of truth." It was true (and misleading). PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" definitions mean little. PolitiFact does not used objective criteria to decide the rating. If objective criteria decided the rating, then PolitiFact's creator would not declare that "Truth-O-Meter" ratings are "entirely subjective."

Sauce for the gander?

If PolitiFact applied its judgments consistently, then the Daily Caller and sites like ours would have little to complain about. But vague definitions that ultimately fail to guide the final rating make it virtually impossible even for well-meaning left-leaning journalists to keep the scales balanced.

Consider an example from the PolitiFact Oregon franchise. PolitiFact Oregon rated Democrat Brad Avakian "Mostly True" for a false statement:

Avakian, citing Census data and echoing claims by Obama and others, said women in Oregon "earn an average of 79 cents for every dollar that men earn for doing the same job." The report he relied on noted that the 79-cent figure applies to full-time, year-round work, although Avakian didn’t include those stipulations.

For starters, the commissioner loses points for cherry-picking the 79-cent figure. Other means of measuring pay gaps between men and women put it considerably less.

The same can be said of the "for doing the same job" piece. As PolitiFact has found previously, the existence of a pay gap doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the gap is caused by individual employer-level discrimination, as Avakian’s claim implies. Some of the gap is at least partially explained by the predominance of women in lower-paying fields, rather than women necessarily being paid less for the same job than men are.

Finally, Avakian used the term "average" when the report he relied on said "median." He could have avoided that by simply saying women "make 79 cents for every dollar a man earns," but since the information he cited contains only median incomes, we find the difference to be inconsequential.

Those caveats aside, he still is well inside the ballpark and the ratio he cited is a credible figure from a credible agency. We rate the claim Mostly True.

That's an inexcusably tilted playing field. If Avakian had described the raw pay gap without saying it compared men and women doing the same job, then his claim would have paralleled Trump's: a true but misleading statement. But Avakian's statement was not true and misleading. It was false and misleading at the same time.

Yet it received a "Mostly True" rating compared to Trump's "Mostly False" rating.

Doesn't fact-checking need better standards than that?



Jeff Adds (1922PST 2/27/17):
We'd love to see PolitiFact reconcile their Mostly False rating of Trump's claim with the rationale behind this gem:

Was there anything misleading about Clinton's statement?

Clinton’s figures check out, and they also mirror the broader results we came up with two years ago. Partisans are free to interpret these findings as they wish, but on the numbers, Clinton’s right. We rate his claim True.

Ha! Silly factseekers. When Trump makes an accurate claim PolitiFact conjures their magical powers of objectivity to decide what is misleading. When lovable ol' Bill makes a claim, heck, PolitiFact is just checkin' the numbers and all you partisans can figure out what it means.

Note that PolitiFact gave Bill Clinton a True rating, which they define as "The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing." Must be nice to be in the club.

We've pointed out how PolitiFact's application of standards is akin to the game of Plinko. With ratings like this it's difficult to view PolitiFact as serious journalists instead of carnival barkers.

The Daily Caller: "PolitiFact Used Doctored Clinton Foundation Memo On Its HIV/AIDS Program"

The conservative website The Daily Caller has wound up in a bit of a feud with PolitiFact. The Caller ran an article criticizing the Clinton Foundation. PolitiFact did a fact check of the Caller in response. And the Caller has responded blow for blow.

This one'll leave a mark:

High-ranking officers with the Clinton Foundation gave PolitiFact a doctored version of a 2008 memo lauding its HIV/AIDS program presumably to defend against congressional charges that the charity distributed ‘watered down’ drugs to poor patients on the African continent, according to new information acquired by The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

The altered memo went to Politifact Sept. 21, 2016, three days after TheDCNF published a story entitled, “Clinton Foundation AIDS Program Distributed ‘Watered-Down’ Drugs To Third World Countries.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Clinton Foundation AIDS Program Distributed ‘Watered-Down’ Drugs To Third World Countries)

The Caller also achieved a minor miracle by getting PolitiFact's Aaron Sharockman to respond.

Steps were reportedly taken to verify the authenticity of the Clinton Foundation document, Aaron Sharockman, executive director of PolitiFact, claimed in a statement to TheDCNF.

He told TheDCNF that the memo “was provided to us by the Clinton Foundation in response to our questions,” adding that PolitiFact “verified its authenticity through emails sent and received at that time.”

Read the whole thing here.



Correction/clarification Nov. 6, 2016: "The Daily Caller has wound up a bit of a feud"=>"The Daily Caller has wound up in a bit of a feud"

PolitiFact and the gutting of Welfare reform (Updated)

Many of us on the political right heard about the Obama administration's proposed waivers for Welfare work requirements cast in a frame suggesting Obama had rolled back a significant aspect of the Republican-led Welfare reform plan Clinton signed into law in the 1990s.

The Romney campaign didn't take long to produce ads criticizing the change.

Almost as quickly, mainstream fact checkers found fault with such ads.

PolitiFact:

The ad’s claim is not accurate, and it inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance. Pants on Fire!

 We were suspicious.  But to call the fact checkers on a mistake takes research.

Enter Mickey Kaus, piggybacking on The New York Times:

Here’s how the Times describes what Nevada wants to do:

[Nevada] asked to discuss flexibility in imposing those requirements. Perhaps, the state asked, those families hardest to employ could be exempted from the work requirements for six months while officials worked with them to stabilize their households. [E.A.]

“Exempted from the work requirements for six months.” That’s not just “weakening” work requirements–the safe, milder charge I chose to make a couple of days ago. It’s explicitly tossing them out the window for an extended period–“to allow time for their barriers to be addressed and their household circumstances stabilized”, in Nevada’s words.

Nevada, recall, was one of the states the Obama administration cited as requesting waivers from the Welfare reform work requirements.

This piece of evidence alone doesn't make the Romney ad accurate.  But it does render the "Pants on Fire" verdict very questionable.

And then there's Robert Rector, writing for the National Review:

(I)t appears the administration intends to do away with standards of the reform law that require 30 to 40 percent of the work-eligible TANF caseload to engage in clearly defined activities for 20 to 30 hours per week. It will replace those standards with a new standard urging that the work-eligible caseload engage in vaguely defined activities for as little as one hour per week. This sounds a lot like “gutting” to most reasonable people.

Read all of Rector's argument and look for additional information before making a final judgment.  Don't trust in mainstream fact checkers like PolitiFact.

We'll keep following this issue as it develops.


Update 9/11/2012:

Our apologies for neglecting information pointed out in August by Senior Attorney Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

The Obama Administration’s move to gut welfare reform puzzled Kaus, who voted for Obama in 2008. But perhaps it shouldn’t have baffled him, since it reflects Obama’s longstanding antipathy to reforms of the welfare system aimed at reducing dependency on welfare and requiring welfare recipients to work. “For example, in the years immediately after passage of the [1996 reform] law, Barack Obama himself pledged to do all he could to undo it,” noted the Washington Examiner. As the Examiner's Chief Political Correspondent, Byron York, noted, on July 12, the Obama administration ‘released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996’” to allow the “Department of Health and Human Services to waive the work requirement at the heart of welfare reform.”

Obama also gutted welfare reform in other ways, such as supporting and signing into law a stimulus package that rewarded states for promoting welfare dependency, giving state governors an incentive to try to water down any work requirements for welfare recipients to keep federal welfare money flowing.

In a subsequent essay, Bader delivers appropriate words for PolitiFact:

In arguing that waivers won’t lead to the gutting of the 1996 welfare reform law, since the Obama administration now says it won’t approve waivers unless it makes welfare reform more successful, left-leaning “independent” fact-checkers like PolitiFact and Factcheck.org chose to rely on political spin from the Obama administration in response to the furor over its action, and self-serving, unsubstantiated, and non-binding statements about its intentions, rather than on what the Obama administration actually did in claiming for itself the broad authority to waive the work requirements at the heart of the welfare-reform law (and what it actually said in its July 12 HHS memo claiming that authority, which discussed “the sort of waivers they want to grant,” which do indeed “weaken work requirements,” and did so in response to a waiver request by Nevada, which expressly sought to weaken work requirements, as Mickey Kaus has noted at The Daily Caller).

We echo Bader's question:  Why did PolitiFact remain effectively silent regarding contrary expert opinion?

This is the game we end up with so often from PolitiFact.  PolitiFact ends "he said/she said" journalism by arbitrarily picking the clear winner between two plausible opposing viewpoints.  The result gives us "PolitiFact says" journalism.


Jeff adds:

I looked through PolitiFact's source list but wasn't able to see a poll they cited that determined Romney's ad "inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance." How did PolitiFact determine the reaction millions of viewers had to the ad? Unless they offer some evidence of the audience reaction, PolitiFact is simply editorializing.

PolitiFact takes another cue from the opinion pages in its summary:

Romney’s ad says, "Under Obama’s plan (for welfare), you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check."

That's a drastic distortion of the planned changes to Temporary Assistance to Needy Families.

How is that a drastic distortion? If Romney had used Nevada's language, and said "You could be exempt from work requirements and you'll still get a welfare check" would PolitiFact have awarded Romney with a shiny True? PolitiFact's hyperbolic description is raw opinion that shouldn't be confused with verifiable evidence of a falsehood.

And check out this gem describing the same policy that allows states to provide a six month exemption from work requirements:

"The requirement was for more work, not less."

That's a portion of a Bill Clinton statement that PolitiFact rated True.

I'm also struggling to imagine the fantasy world where PolitiFact would ever write this paragraph:

That's a drastic distortion of the planned changes to the Affordable Care Act. By granting waivers to states, the Romney administration is seeking to make health insurance mandates more successful, not end them. What’s more, the waivers would apply to individually evaluated pilot programs -- HHS is not proposing a blanket, national change to ObamaCare.

In PolitiFact's world of facts, illegally granting waivers and exemptions to laws is a way to strengthen policy. Keep that in mind should the GOP control the White House and Congress next year.
 
Romney's claim is entirely accurate. Partisans can argue about whether or not it's misleading, or if it's a reasonable summation of Obama's policy. But Romney's statement that a person could still receive a welfare check without working or training is unarguably based on fact. Attempts to claim otherwise are pure editorial spin.

This is how the non-non-partisans at PolitiFact have always operated, though in the past they did better at keeping their campaign chaff out of their research wheat. They must be getting antsy, or perhaps they're getting cocky. Either way, their unabashed defense of liberal policies is less and less camouflaged as the election nears.