PolitiMath at PolitiFact Oregon

Leaning.

PolitiFact Oregon provides us with a great item to compare to our July 30 examination of mathematics at PolitiFact's PunditFact project.

In the PunditFact item, we noted that Cokie Roberts used a probability comparison that was off by almost 9000 percent and received a "Half True" rating from PolitiFact, thanks to her underlying point that getting murdered in Honduras was more likely than in New York City.

On July 31, PolitiFact Oregon published a fact check of George Will.  Will wrote a few things about how prominently health care providers figure in Oregon's list of top job providers.  Will was making the case for a medical doctor in the senate, Republican candidate Monica Wehby.

PolitiFact Oregon rated Will's claim "False":

Will, in a column supporting the candidacy of Republican Senate candidate Monica Wehby, included a link purporting to show Oregon’s 25 largest employers. The chart, he wrote, indicated that the dominance of large health care providers in Oregon -- the three largest employers and 13 of the top 25 in the state fit that niche, according to the chart -- make Dr. Wehby the best choice for the job.

Calls and emails to many of the companies listed, however, indicate that the chart’s numbers are way off, often wildly so. The top three employers on the list Will used are, in fact, a single entity. And by our count, the highest number of health care providers that can rank among Oregon’s top 25 employers is nine, not the 13 Will cited.

We rate the claim False.

Will was off by as much as 225 percent (using four as the number of health care providers in the top 25), apparently totally overwhelming any underlying point he had about about health care providers employing quite a few Oregonians.

After all, it's way too much to ask for consistency from mainstream media fact checkers.

Incidentally, we found healthcare/social assistance combined make up about 12.6 percent of all jobs in Oregon (as of June 2014, seasonally adjusted).  That's about 15.1 percent of the private workforce.

PolitiFact's layers of inaccuracy

Do mainstream media outlets ever tire of their self-serving mantra that their layers of editors give them an insurmountable edge over mere bloggers?

Puny bloggers!  Mainstream Media will SMASH!

The problem?  The mainstream media have trouble with serious self-criticism.  We'll get our example, of course, from PolitiFact's PunditFact.

On May 28, 2014, PunditFact fact-checked tea party icon Sarah Palin's claim that the federal government spent money on a plan to deal with a zombie apocalypse.  PunditFact found only a Centers for Disease Control public relations campaign that used mention of zombies to help communicate the need for disaster preparedness.  That wasn't a plan, PunditFact ruled, so Palin received a "False" rating.

However, PunditFact soon heard from people pointing out the Department of Homeland Security used a campaign similar to the CDC's.  And, more importantly, the Pentagon kept a zombie apocalypse response plan in its computer database for use in training operations.  Not for real zombies, necessarily, but just to make preparedness drills more interesting and (hopefully) facilitate effective training.  So there was a plan after all, and the government apparently spent money on it.  So PolitiFact immediately revised its rating to "Half True."  And PolitiFact stuck with its rating of "False" since the "plan" wasn't really a plan.

The fact check was an epic fail, in other words.  But PolitiFact's layers of editors and fact checkers will make sure that its misinformation spreads as much as possible.   PolitiFact Oregon writer Dana Tims does his part for Oregon Live the day after PolitiFact's update to its story:

PunditFact's check, not surprisingly, found that the government has no contingency plan to cope with an invasion of the Undead. While the Centers for Disease Control did play off the zombie apocalypse craze in 2011 "as a way to pass along real information about preparing for emergencies that don't involve zombies. They wrote up a tongue-in-cheek blog post, which successfully generated plenty of attention." Palin, for her post touching on Undeath Panels, walked away with a False rating.

 Not surprisingly, eh?  Almost sounds like a bias against Palin's claim.

Either Tims wasn't aware of the fact check's afternoon update admitting the existence of a plan to cope with a zombie apocalypse, or else he just isn't good at reporting the facts.  Either way, Tims shows us the way faux checkers of facts manufacture false legends and refuse to let facts get in the way of attacking a favorite target.

More gender wage gap shenanigans from PolitiFact Oregon

Back in February, we pointed out PolitiFact Oregon's blunder in ruling it "Mostly True" that women in Oregon earn 79 cents on the dollar compared to men for doing the same job.

PolitiFact Oregon is back today with another misleading take on the gender wage gap.

The National Partnership For Women & Families, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, released a new analysis April 8, 2014, to coincide with Equal Pay Day. It cited U.S. Census data showing that women who work full time in Oregon are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men -- a claim PolitiFact Oregon has investigated previously and found solid.

But it went further. If the wage gap were eliminated, it said, "a working woman in Oregon would have enough money per year for 2,877 gallons of gas, 72 more weeks of food for her family or nearly 12 more months of rent.["]

PolitiFact Oregon apparently doesn't remember that its earlier fact check examined a version of the gender wage gap claim that had men and women doing the same work.

So we've got a fact check that focuses on a wage gap that exists primarily because men and women work at different jobs and men tend to put in longer hours.

This is a little like hearing "If you step on a crack, you'll break your mother's back" and then focusing intently on whether somebody stepped on a crack.

The National Partnership for Women & Families drew PolitiFact's attention with an April press release expressly designed to encourage support for paycheck fairness measures--measures that would do next to nothing to reduce the 21-cent gap that creates all the would-be disparities PolitiFact carefully verifies.

OMG!  We stepped on a crack!  Our poor mothers!

PolitiFact Oregon rules it "True" that we stepped on a crack the average woman in Oregon could afford to pay for more stuff if the wage gap was eliminated.  PolitiFact Oregon ignores the fact that the paycheck fairness measures the NPFWF supports would narrow the gender wage gap fractionally if at all.

Looks like PolitiFact Oregon is too busy fact checking to worry about little details like that.


Afters

We liked The Oregonian's added touch of promoting its gender wage gap story with teaser headlined with "That 79-cent gender pay gap and what it will buy."

A 79-cent gap!  What happened to the 21-cent gap?

The accompanying video has PolitiFact Oregon reporter Dana Tims expressing the NPFWF's argument, saying the pay gap would narrow if women were compensated fairly.  Tims also says the claim of a 21-cent pay gap in Oregon pretty much holds up when women and men are doing the same work, which is baloney.


Correction 4/12/2014:  Replaced the "e" in "women" in the next-to-last paragraph with an "a," changing it to the grammatically correct singular form.

Planetizen: 'How Many Bicycles Can Park In The Space Required By One Car? Don’t Ask PolitiFact'

Though we think PolitiFact unfairly harms conservatives more than liberals, we recognize that PolitiFact's ineptitude can potentially harm anything it touches.  We have a handy example of that from PolitiFact Oregon, courtesy of Todd Littman and the website Planetizen.

Littman wrote a report that undergirded Democrat Earl Blumenauer's claim that 20 bicycles can park in the space required by one car.

PolitiFact pulled its patented methods of misinterpretation and assumed that the "space required by one car" is a parking space.  Littman explained that his report isn't about parking spaces alone but takes into account the total space of a parking lot on a per-car basis.  He then related how he went through the all-too-typical runaround with the PolitiFact gang trying to get them to see his point and change the ruling.

His dealings with PolitiFact culminated in yet another disappointing exchange with the editor of PolitiFact national, this time with new national editor Angie Drobnic Holan:

I then contacted PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan, who, after several queries finally replied,

I looked at the report and I didn't see anything that wasn't factually accurate. In addition, the report seemed very thorough. I appreciate that you disagree with the rating, but at the end of the day, the rating is the judgment of the editors.

These responses indicate that the PolitiFact organization has little interest in helping their readers understand complex issues. It is news as sport rather than education. They showed no interest in making the column more accurate and fair by explaining the difference between on- and off-street parking facilities, and admitting that the statement would be "True" for the majority of car parking. Most readers will simply look at the Truth-o-Meter rating, few will understand that the conclusion only applies to a subset of total car parking.

The only way we could imagine PolitiFact could justify its stand was if Blumenauer was clearly talking about an individual parking space.  So we looked up the statement from Blumenauer:

Between 6 and 20 bicycles can be parked in the space required by one car.  The average cost of one parking space for a car in a paved lot is $2,200; in parking garages, a single car space averages $12,500. An independent cost-benefit analysis of Portland Oregon’s Bicycle Master Plan concluded that the plan would lower fuel costs by as much as $218 million (depending on the level of final investments) by 2040. (Journal of Physical Activity and Health, Vol 8 Supplement, January, 2011)

The context supports Littman.  Did PolitiFact object to the difference in cost between a parking space in a paved lot and that same space in a parking garage?  There's no excuse for the disparity in price unless one considers the structures as a whole.

This sort of thing is all too normal for PolitiFact.

We recommend Littman's critique.  He's got all the support he needs for some scathing commentary about PolitiFact.