PolitiFact's top eleven fake fact checks of 2016

We've promised a list of PolitiFact's top contributions to fake news--but we don't want to get into a useless semantic argument about what constitutes "fake news." For that reason, we're calling this list PolitiFact's top "fake fact checks," and that term refers to fact checks that misinform, whether intentionally or not.

11 Mike Pence denied evolution!

PolitiFact California rated "True" Governor Jerry Brown's claim that Republican presidential candidate Mike Pence denied evolution. The truth? Pence made a statement consistent with theistic evolution without affirming or denying evolution. We called out the error here. So PolitiFact California later changed its rating to "Half True." Because if Pence did not deny evolution that means that it is half true that he denied evolution. It's fact checker logic. You wouldn't understand.

10 Ron Johnson denies humans contribute to climate change!

When Democratic candidate Russ Feingold charged that his Republican opponent Ron Johnson does not accept any human role in climate change, PolitiFact Wisconsin was there. It rated Feingold's claim "Mostly True." The problem? PolitiFact Wisconsin's evidence showed Feingold making a number of clear statements to the contrary, including one where Johnson specifically said he does not deny humans affect the climate. PolitiFact Wisconsin went with its ability to interpret Johnson's more ambiguous statements as a denial of what Johnson said plainly. We wrote about the mistake, but PolitiFact Wisconsin has stayed with its "Mostly True" rating.

9 Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme!

PolitiFact has an established precedent of denying the similarities between Social Security's "pay-as-you-go" financing and Ponzi financing. PolitiFact reinforced its misleading narrative by giving voters advance warning that they might hear the Ponzi lie in 2016. The problem? Voters can find that supposed lie repeated commonly in professional literature, written by the kind of experts PolitiFact might have interviewed to learn the truth.

Will PolitiFact ever repent of misleading its readers on this topic?

8 LGBT the group most often victimized by hate crimes!

Attorney General Loretta Lynch declared in 2016 Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgendered folks are the group most often victimized by hate crimes. PolitiFact gave Lynch's statement a "True" rating, meaning the statement is true without leaving out any important information. The problem? Lynch's statement is only true on a per capita basis. In other words, large minority groups experience more hate crimes victimization than LGBT. But an individual in the LGBT group would more likely experience a hate crime than a member of the other groups.

How is that not significant enough to affect the rating?

7 The gender wage gap is real(ly big)! Or something!

Mainstream fact checkers are consistently awful on the gender wage gap. The game works like this: Democrat candidate wants to leverage concern over gender discrimination, so Democratic candidate cites a statistic that has hardly any relationship to gender discrimination. Democratic party candidates can count on fact checkers to go along with the game so long as they do not specifically say the raw gender wage gap is caused by gender discrimination.

PolitiFact Missouri's 2016 gender wage gap story, exposed here and here, did that approach one better by badly misinterpreting its source material to exaggerate the size of the gap caused by discrimination.

6 Torture doesn't work!

PolitiFact Florida weighed in on torture and waterboarding when a Florida Republican running for Marco Rubio's senate seat said waterboarding works. PolitiFact Florida ruled the claim "False," after admitting that nobody has tested the proposition scientifically. In short, we (including PolitiFact) don't know for a fact whether waterboarding works. PolitiFact Florida's error was pointed out at Flopping Aces and here.

5 France and Germany did not think Iraq had WMD!

When former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said the French and Germans believed Iraq had WMD, PolitiFact ruled it "Mostly False." The creepy "1984" nature of this fact check stems from PolitiFact turning lack of certitude into near-certitude of lack. And PolitiFact has to win some sort of award for avoiding French President Jacques Chirac's 2003 statement, during the approach to the war, that Iraq "probably" possessed WMD.

4 Colorado Republican tried to redefine rape!

PolitiFact Colorado makes our list with its liberal "Mostly True" rating given to abortion rights champion Emily's List. Emily's list charged a Colorado Republican with trying to "redefine rape" in an abortion-related statute. PolitiFact Colorado apparently neglected to look up the traditional definition of rape (and its forcible/statutory distinction) to see whether it had changed thanks to the proposed wording. It had not, leaving the impression that PolitiFact Colorado essentially took the word of Emily's List at face value. Fellow PolitiFact critic Dustin Siggins led the way in flagging the problems with this PolitiFact Colorado item.

3 In California, it's easier to buy a gun than a Happy Meal!

Matthew Hoy, another one of our favorite PolitiFact critics, flagged this hilarious item. This was not a fact check, but rather a Twitter incident where PolitiFact California retweeted somebody else. California Democrat Gavin Newsom received bogus PolitiCover for claiming there are more gun dealers in California than McDonald's. Newsom tweeted out the bogus vindication under the absurd headline "FACT: It's easier to get a gun than a Happy Meal in California." Partly because a gun costs less than a Happy Meal?

2 Donald Trump is causing an increase in bullying in our schools!

PolitiFact ostensibly checked Hillary Clinton's claim that teachers noticed a "Trump Effect" that amounted to an increase in bullying behavior in the nation's schools. But anecdotal reports ought to mean close to squat in fact-checking circles, so PolitiFact accepted a motley collection of anecdotes from the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center as reason enough to give Clinton a "Mostly True" rating. We chronicled the numerous problems with the so-called "Trump Effect" here and at Zebra Fact Check here and here.

1 Mike Pence advocated diverting federal funds from AIDS patients to gay conversion therapy!

PolitiFact California heads the list with its second mostly fact-free fact check of Mike Pence. Back around the year 2000, when Pence was first running for the House of Representatives, he suggested that AIDS care dollars under the Ryan White Care Act should not go to organizations that celebrated behavior likely to spread AIDS. Pence said funds under the Act should go to people seeking to "change their sexual behavior." About 15 years later, Pence's statement was construed to mean that he wanted AIDS care funding to go toward gay conversion therapy. There's no serious argument supporting that notion, and Timothy P. Carney pointed that out even before PolitiFact checked the claim. But PolitiFact California gave Gavin Newsom a "True" rating for the accusation.

PolitiFact California's recent publication of its most popular fact checks for 2016 helps explain why this item tops our list. PolitiFact claimed its "Half True" rating of Newsom was its most popular story. But for months the story ran with a "True" rating. Which version of the story got the most clicks, eh?

More PolitiFingers on the scale: Loretta Lynch and LGBT hate crimes

Hat tip to journalist Dustin Siggins for bringing this item to our attention.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch received a "True" rating in a June 23, 2016 fact check by PolitiFact Florida. Lynch said members of the LGBT community are more often the victims of hate crimes than members of any other recognized community.

The "Truth-O-Meter" rating counts as an out-and-out gift to Lynch.

Our tipster, Dustin Siggins, pointed out that PolitiFact admittedly could only verify Lynch's claim according to a very incomplete data set:

An important caveat: There are several holes in the reporting of hate crimes to the FBI. Local law enforcement agencies voluntarily report their data to a state agency that compiles the information for the FBI. Some local agencies report no hate crimes or don’t submit a report.

A study by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 60 percent of violent hate crime victimizations were not reported to police in 2012.

A 2016 Associated Press investigation found that more than 2,700 city police and county sheriff's departments have not submitted a single hate crime report to the FBI during the past six years — about 17 percent of all city and county law enforcement agencies nationwide.

The caveat obviously wasn't important enough to drop Lynch's rating below "True."

So Siggins made a solid point about the quality of the data.

We were even more concerned about PolitiFact placing its focus on the "per capita" measurement of hate crimes.

There's simply nothing in Lynch's statement to suggest she was talking about a per capita measurement. PolitiFact reported that Lynch said she relied on a story in The New York Times for her information. And it's true that the Times' story focuses on per capita rates of hate crime.

But how does that excuse Lynch for the words she used?

We don't see how it could, and this type of imprecision frequently counts against the accuracy of a claim.

Compare a recent "False" rating PolitiFact gave to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump said Americans pay the highest taxes in the world. He may well have been talking about the U.S. corporate tax rate, which PolitiFact said in 2014 was one of the highest in the world. Trump did not explicitly say he was talking about the corporate tax rate, however. Would it, or should it, make a difference if his campaign had responded to PolitiFact saying he was talking about the corporate tax rate?

We think statements get their degree of truth from their immediate context. Later explanations may help point to a different dimension of that context, even potentially revealing a hidden angle to a fact checker. But the later explanation per se is irrelevant to the truth of the claim.

If Not Per Capita Then Not True

According to the words she used and according to the statistics PolitiFact used, the LGBT community is not the group most victimized by hate crimes. Blacks are more often victimized by hate crimes, as PolitiFact plainly admitted (bold emphasis added):

Another way to look at the data about hate crimes rather than per capita is the sheer number of crimes. By that measure, there were more hate crimes against African-Americans than LGBT residents. But that’s not surprising since African-Americans represent about 13.2 percent of the population according to the U.S. Census, while the LGBT community represents about 2.3 percent of the population, according to a survey done by the Centers for Disease Control (other surveys found a slightly higher rate.)

PolitiFact ignores its own evidence showing Lynch was wrong, implicitly modifies Lynch's comment to refer to the per capita measurement, and awards Lynch a "True" rating.

That's fact-checking?

Dustin Siggins: "Fact-checking the fact-checkers: Did an abortion defunding bill try ‘to redefine rape’?"

Dustin Siggins continues to establish himself as one of the finest critics of the disastrously inept fact-checking outfit "PolitiFact."

Siggins' latest takedown of PolitiFact's hapless liberal bloggers looks at PolitiFact's fact check of the liberal interest group Emily's List, which claimed a Republican legislator had tried to redefine rape.

Newfangled PolitiFact Colorado looked at whether Emily's List was right that another Colorado Republican,  Mike Coffman, voted to redefine rape and found the Emily's List claim "Mostly True":

Emily’s List said that Coffman "co-sponsored a bill to redefine rape." The record shows Coffman did co-sponsor the bill to redefine a ban on federal funding for abortions to exempt "forcible rape." Yet he later voted on the floor for an amended version that had removed the "forcible" modifier from the bill.

How did it come to pass that it's "Mostly True" that redefining a ban on federal funding for abortions redefines rape?

Siggins, writing for LifeSiteNews, placed some focus on that inconsistency:

[PolitiFact Colorado] wrote, "Critics said the 'forcible rape' language could rule out other forms of sexual assault that are considered rape, including statutory rape, attacks where women are drugged or threatened, and date rapes."

Likewise, he quoted Coffman's Democratic opponent, Morgan Carroll, who said, "Rape is about the lack of consent – not the degree of force – and this definition takes us backwards."

However, which "definition" of rape are we talking about? Generally speaking, there are at least two broad definitions of rape – sexual intercourse between two people when one party is unwilling and sexual intercourse between a legal adult and a legal minor (which can be consensual).

Siggins went on to express doubt that having sex with an incapacitated person fails to count as a forcible rape.

We found support for Siggins' skepticism at Justia.com:

Forcible Rape—Rape by Force

Definition: The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.

[...]

"Against her will" includes instances in which the victim is incapable of giving consent because of her temporary or permanent mental or physical incapacity (or because of her youth). The ability of the victim to give consent must be a professional determination by the law enforcement agency. The age of the victim, of course, plays a critical role in this determination. Individuals do not mature mentally at the same rate. For example, no 4-year-old is capable of consenting, whereas victims aged 10 or 12 may need to be assessed within the specific circumstances regarding the giving of their consent.

Put simply, the legal definition of "forcible rape" in effect during 2011, when Coffman's bill was debated, included lack of consent.

PolitiFact Colorado cited unnamed "critics" who argued otherwise:

Critics said the "forcible rape" language could rule out other forms of sexual assault that are considered rape, including statutory rape, attacks where women are drugged or threatened, and date rapes.

Does it matter to PolitiFact Colorado whether the "critics" were right? Is it okay to simply assume the anonymous critics raised a plausible and likely problem with the proposed law?

• PolitiFact Colorado neglects to define "forcible rape"
• PolitiFact Colorado offers no evidence it looked into the definition of "forcible rape"
• PolitiFact Colorado cited anonymous "critics" as a key part of its analysis

We think at minimum a neutral fact-checker would take a more detailed look than PolitiFact Colorado did at the definition of "forcible rape."


Afters

We contacted the author and the editor of the PolitiFact Colorado fact check about problems we noted above. We will update this article if we receive any reply.


Correction Feb. 12, 2016: Corrected one instance in which the word "abortion" was mistakenly substituted for "rape".

Hot Air: 'It’s time to ask PolitiFact: What is the meaning of “is”?'

Dustin Siggins, writing for the Hot Air blog, gives us a PolitiFact twofer, swatting down two fact-check monstrosities from the left-leaning fact checker.

Siggins:

In 1998, then-President Bill Clinton told the American people that he hadn’t lied to a grand jury about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky because, on the day he said “there’s nothing going on between us,” nothing was going on.

While that line has been a joke among the American people ever since, it looks like PolitiFact took the lesson to heart in two recent fact-checks that include some Olympic-level rhetorical gymnastics.

Siggins goes on from there, dealing with recent fact checks of senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).

Click the link and read.

Also consider reviewing our highlights of a few other stories by Siggins.

Dustin Siggins: The Most Overlooked 'Lie of the Year"

Persistent PolitiFact critic Dustin Siggins wrote up a piece over at Red Alert Politics asking why the GOP's supposed War on Women was left out of PolitiFact's Lie of the Year contenders. Siggins makes some solid points and it's well worth the read, but his big get was his interview with PolitiFact editor Bill Adair. Adair's response to Siggins was typical, and by typical, I mean comically inconsistent with reality.

Siggins quotes Adair:

"We rate the ‘Lie of the Year’ as the boldest statement or the statement with the biggest reach. Obviously, it’s subjective,” he said. “We didn’t do a fact-check on a statement that there was a War on Women. It was an opinion, and we don’t fact-check opinions. People used it as a sum-up of a variety of aspects of the 2012 campaigns, but it was an overall opinion, not a statement of policy fact.”

Siggins makes the case that the War on Women meme was a policy statement, and points out its wide reaching impact on the election. You should read Siggins argument in his own words and in their entirety. For us though, the rest of Adair's response is a howler.

"It was an opinion, and we don’t fact-check opinions."

This statement is from the same guy that gave Mitt Romney a Pants on Fire rating for saying "We're inches away from no longer having a free economy." (Note: Romney actually earned three Pants on Fire ratings for that same claim, something to keep in mind when PolitiFact pimps out their "report cards") What about Rick Perry's opinion that Barack Obama is a socialist? Bill Adair worked on that one too. Oops! PolitiFact calls both of those statements "hyperbole" (coincidentally, PolitiFact claims to have a policy against rating hyperbole as well). I guess hyperbole doesn't count as opinion.

Unfortunately, Adair doesn't fill us in on the objective metric PolitiFact used when they gave Obama a Half True for his claim that Romney's cuts to education would be "catastrophic." Of course, when Obama claimed that his tax plan only asked millionaires to "pay a little more," PolitiFact "decided that "a little more" is an opinion, not a checkable fact."

"Catastrophic"=Verifable fact. "A little more"=Opinion.

The most hilarious part of this is Adair evades the most obvious problem. The Pants on Fire label itself is entirely subjective. The rating is predicated on a claim being "ridiculous." To this day, Adair has never offered up an objective definition of what makes a claim "ridiculous." So the bottom line is PolitiFact doesn't check opinions, but they do use opinions to assign ratings of fact. (Read Bryan's study on the Pants on Fire/False issue here.)

Adair doesn't clarify the issue by adding yet another version of the Lie of the Year criteria:

"We rate the ‘Lie of the Year’ as the boldest statement or the statement with the biggest reach."

Last year, Angie Drobnic-Holan explained the Lie of the Year was a claim PolitiFact rated "that played the biggest role in the national discourse." Which is it?

Regardless, it's hard to imagine some of PolitiFact's finalists even being in the top 20 claims that fit either definition. In what world does Jack Markels (who?) claim that "Mitt Romney likes to fire people" rank as a "bold" statement that has "the biggest reach," let alone played "the biggest role in the national discourse." Of course, don't waste your time looking for any administration comments on Benghazi in the top ten. The reality is that the finalists for PolitiFact's Lie of the Year exemplifies the problems of PolitiFact's selection bias. I've previously said that I suspect the LOTY is predetermined, and a grab bag of nine ratings is thrown in for looks. The competition PolitiFact selected this year does nothing to change my mind.

Finally, I'll give Adair credit for the most honest thing I've ever heard him say about his body of work thus far:

"Obviously, it’s subjective”

Subjective indeed.

Siggins argues the "War on Women" campaign from the Democrats meets key aspects of Adair's criteria and makes a fine Lie of the Year candidate.  He makes a good argument that's worth reading. 

Dustin Siggins: "Is PolitiFact Campaigning for Obama?"

Dustin Siggins offers up another solid critique of PolitiFact in an article that was first posted at Right Wing News and then promoted at Hot Air. This time Siggins takes apart a PolitiFact Wisconsin rating on Nobel Teen Choice Award-winning actress Eva Longoria:

Image from PolitiFact.com

This seems like an easy claim to rate. Ryan's budget either cuts Pell Grant scholarships to 10 million students or it doesn't. How can PolitiFact screw this one up? Siggins fishes out the flaws:

PFW ranks this claim as “half-true.” Their primary evidence? An unsubstantiated claim by President Obama in April 2012:

Fortunately, our colleagues at PolitiFact National evaluated a similar statement made by Obama himself in April 2012, a few days after the GOP-controlled House approved Ryan’s budget resolution. (The plan didn’t pass in the Democratic-controlled Senate.)

Obama said that if spending reductions in the resolution “were to be spread out evenly,” nearly 10 million college students would see their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each. The White House told our colleagues the president was referring to the Pell Grant program.

So, Ryan’s plan does not specify cuts to Pell Grants. Obama is simply applying the total spending cuts in the plan evenly across the overall budget to derive a Pell Grant number.

This alone should make PolitiFact’s claim laughable.

Laughable is the right word. All PolitiFact has done here is accept Obama's dubious and "Half True" talking point as an actual budget number, and used it as a baseline to judge the accuracy of Longoria's claim. That's not fact-checking, that's the kind of spin the Obama campaign pays for from Robert Gibbs.

Siggins zeros in on another critical point PolitiFact uses to make Longoria's (and Obama's) talking point hold water:

[F]ollowing a link from the PFW analysis to the Department of Education’s website, one sees the Department has requested Pell Grants whose cost will total $36.629 billion – meaning that in a budget proposal that spends nearly one hundred times what the Department has requested, PolitiFact is making big assumptions.

It's hard to reconcile this type of rubber stamping of stump-speech rhetoric with the title of "non-partisan fact-checkers." There's simply nothing in Ryan's budget that identifies specific cuts to Pell grants, and it's only in the fast and loose world of political talking heads that assumptions like Obama's and Longoria's pass muster. Rather than sorting out the truth of the matter, PolitiFact runs to the kitchen to toss more ingredients into the soup.

Siggins has plenty more to say and we recommend checking out the entire piece.

On one point we don't quite agree with Siggins. He offers his own assessment of the correct rating without basing it on PolitiFact's definitions. We agree that Longoria's claim is false on its face, however, we tend to think that once one starts rolling around in the mud with PolitiFact's specific ratings, one may fall into their trap of trying to parse words to fit claims into its ready-made Truth molds. For my part however, I'm sympathetic to Siggins' point that this rating fails to meet PolitiFact's own standards for Half-True. The "important details" Longoria and Obama leave out happen to serve as the entire basis for their respective claims.


Bryan adds: 

I'm skeptical whether any of PolitiFact's logical hopscotch reasonably overcomes the hurdle of PolitiFact's "burden of proof" criterion:

Burden of proof -- People who make factual claims are accountable for their words and should be able to provide evidence to back them up. We will try to verify their statements, but we believe the burden of proof is on the person making the statement.

If we have evidential support of the Pell grant cuts then Sasquatch is "Half True" based on fur samples and footprints.

Turning up the heat on mainstream fact checkers

Crossposted from Sublime Bloviations


Dustin Siggins' post at the conservative blog "Hot Air" serves notice that I'm not alone in pointing out the failure of mainstream fact checkers in testing claims about effective tax rates.

Siggins:

The Obama campaign is running an ad claiming that Mitt Romney pays a lower tax rate than that of the average American.  Following the ad’s release, PolitiFact published an article rating it as “Half-True.”  From the article:

There are two main ways to make this calculation, and they lead to opposite conclusions. While we believe that including payroll taxes in the calculation offers a more accurate picture of what the American public pays the IRS, it’s also true that the Obama ad didn’t specify which measurement it was using, and in fact used a figure for Romney — 14 percent — that was based on income taxes alone. On balance, then, we rate the claim Half True.

Unfortunately for PolitiFact, their analysis completely misses the boat.

Siggins links to an analysis from "Just Facts," a not-for-profit independent fact checker:

Specifically, CBO found that households in the middle 20% of the U.S. income distribution paid an effective federal tax rate of 11.1% in 2009. Using CBO’s new estimate for allocating the burden of corporate income taxes, Just Facts and Ceterus calculate that Romney’s federal tax rate was 23.3% in 2010, which is twice the middle-income tax rate in 2009.

Just Facts published the above the same day I published my critique of Farley's fact check (Aug.7).  Their fact check goes much deeper than mine--I simply noted that Farley had short shrifted an entire body of evidence indicating that Romney almost certainly paid a higher effective tax rate than the average American. 

I criticized PolitiFact along the same lines on Aug. 10, but Siggins takes note of something I missed:

(T)he PolitiFact analysis ignores data cited by its own resource.  The article cites the Tax Policy Center to look at what tax levels are at for all income quintiles.  However, PolitiFact fails to note that the Center’s chart (the same one cited in the article) shows that the top 1% (which Romney definitely falls into) pay 7.7% of their income into the corporate tax structure.

So the PolitiFact researcher, Louis Jacobson, had the information staring him in the face and missed it or ignored it.  That's on top of somehow missing the CBO studies on effective tax rates.

Not good.


Correction Aug. 15, 2012:  Apologies to Dustin Siggins for consistently finding ways to put the vowel "a" in his name where it doesn't belong.