The Washington Post: "Report: Republicans to hammer PolitiFact units on alleged bias"

Eric Wemple's Washington Post blog brings news via the Washington Examiner of a new GOP effort to engage in an aggressive pushback against PolitiFact in various states:

Via the Washington Examiner comes word that Republican operatives across the land will be targeting state PolitiFact operations. The move draws inspiration from the massive document that the Republican Party of Virginia compiled against PolitiFact Virginia earlier this month, a document covered extensively in this space.

Wemple goes on to give helpful hints to the GOP for the sake of its effort, and the hints double as criticisms of the Republican Party of Virginia's attack on PolitiFact Virginia.  Wemple's key points generally agree with what I published here before taking up this post.  Wemple says the claim that the timing of publication for PolitiFact's ratings harms the GOP is weak.  Wemple also tries to downplay the effect of the study's anecdotes by claiming they need to appear in the company of stories PolitiFact skipped that might have proved damaging to Democrats.  Though we think the latter is a good idea, we don't rate its importance as highly as Wemple does.

We disagree strongly with Wemple's conclusion featuring a quotation from PolitiFact's chief windbag, editor Bill Adair:

The Examiner story furnishes a Champagne-popping pretext for PolitiFact. After all, the brand name has now been attacked furiously from the left — see Rachel Maddow — and furiously from the right. Now they can lay claim to centrism. “This is testament to the fact that we have disrupted the status quo,” says PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair. “We’re holding people accountable for their words and they don’t like it.”

PolitiFact can pop all the Champagne it likes and keep right on chanting the claim that criticism from both sides allows it to lay claim to centrism, but that wouldn't make it true.  Shame on Wemple for not vigorously sticking a pin in that radically overblown idea.

The content of the criticism, as Wemple pointed out earlier, makes all the difference.  The criticism from the Left is weaker than that from the Right.  PolitiFact has always done a shoddy job of fact checking.  Rachel Maddow only started noticing when her ox was gored a few times too often.

As for Adair's claim that PolitiFact has "disrupted the status quo," he's finally right about something: Nobody was expecting PolitiFact do this bad a job of fact checking.  It has truly disrupted the status quo, and the politicians don't like it.  They were okay with reasonably competent fact checking from Annenberg, The Washington Post and the Associated Press.

And therein lies Wemple's apparently unasked follow up question for Adair:  "If you have disrupted the status quo, why do you think Annenberg Fact Check and The Washington Post fact checker did not disrupt the status quo?"

C'mon, Wemple.  Let's see you ask it.

The Washington Post: "PolitiFacters respond to ‘weekend dump’ allegations"

Erik Wemple of the Washingon Post delivers the third in his series following the current dust-up between the Republican Party of Virginia and PolitiFact Virginia.

Wemple, as he promised, visits the GOP's claim that the timing of PolitiFact Virginia stories appears to maximize the impact of negative stories while burying positive ones.

Wemple:

As detailed in Part One of this extensive series, the Republican Party of Virginia is claiming that PolitiFact Virginia, which is run from the offices of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, discriminates against Republican politicians in the most insidious of manners: It times positive fact-checks of Republicans for the weekends, when people aren’t logged on, and “saves” the negative stuff on Republicans for high-traffic mid-week slots. That’s the claim.

Wemple's off the mark.  The document doesn't claim that the stories are deliberately timed.  Rather, it claims that the timing of the stories yields a discriminatory result.  The discrepancy between Wemple's report and the reality of the GOP document is easy to see in the passage Wemple quotes:

Here’s a relevant excerpt from the 86-page slameroo report that the Republican Party of Virginia compiled on PolitiFact Virginia:

PolitiFact Issued Only Two “False” And One “Pants On Fire” Ruling On Republican Statements During The Weekend (Starting After 5 P.M. On Friday), Saving 37 “Mostly False,” “False,” “Pants On Fire,” And “Full Flop” Reports To Be Issued Between Monday And Thursday.

The GOP claim is obviously couched in objective terms and makes no judgments about PolitiFact's intent.  The claim concerns the result, not the intent.

And, of course, the PolitiFact response is a total joke.

Rick Thornton of the Richmond Times-Dispatch says “We typically print in the newspaper PolitiFact rulings on Sunday and Monday . . . . We post our rulings online pretty much as soon as they’re done . . . . A number of our rulings on both sides are on Fridays because they’re being finished up on Friday for Sunday.” 

That doesn't answer anything.

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair, who heads the national operation, says "It’s ridiculous to suggest that any of our PolitiFact sites schedule publication of some items to get smaller audiences."

Adair gravitates directly toward the same straw man that fascinated Wemple.  If the GOP document has the facts right and the good gets the small audience while the bad gets the big audience then the discrimination exists regardless of whether the PolitiFacters possess an awareness of the fact.  And one would think that PolitiFact Virginia would know about the alleged problem from its communications with the RPV.

Neither Thornton nor Adair addresses the charge from the RPV.  And it's a pity that Wemple reported it inaccurately.

Why is this so hard?  If the Sunday paper has more readers than weekday papers then PolitiFact can give an objective response to the charge from the RPV:  Those weekend stories often may have the larger audience.  If that defense isn't accurate then perhaps admit that the RPV has a point but assure everyone that it wasn't on purpose.

Is PolitiFact dissembling for the sake of a CYA strategy?   Yeah, could be.  In any case, the responses from PolitiFact scarcely count as serious.  And we let these people check facts for us?

The Washington Post: "Virginia Republican Party to PolitiFact: Don’t bother ringing!"

The Washington Post's reporter/blogger Erik Wemple updates his reporting on PolitiFact Virginia and the critique from the Republican Party of Virginia.

It turns out--no big surprise here--that the relationship broke down between the Virginia GOP and PolitiFact reporters.  The Republican Party of Virginia joins Wisconsin Democrats in giving their state's PolitiFact franchise the silent treatment.

Wemple may have tipped his ideological hand by referring to the GOP's critique as a "screed."  Sure, he can claim he just meant it was a long critique.  But if he does that then it makes his use of the term appear redundant ("enormous screed").  Careful, Mr. Wemple.

State political parties cutting off their cooperation with a fact checker?  Looks like the making of a news story.

The Washington Post: "Virginia Republican Party publishes huge attack paper on PolitiFact"

Erik Wemple and the Washington Post stand as the first mainstream media entities, not counting PolitiFact Virginia itself, to weigh in on the massive pushback PolitiFact Virginia received yesterday from the Republican Party of Virginia:

The Virginia Republican Party has compiled an attack on PolitiFact’s Virginia operation that is virtually unbloggable. An 86-page document with a cover page stating, “TO THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF POLITIFACT VIRGINIA’S QUESTIONABLE OBJECTIVITY,” it starts with a two-page memorandum and a three-page table of contents. Even Rachel Maddow has never produced a PolitiFact critique as exquisitely formatted.

Exquisite formatting makes less gratuitous use of capitalization according to our tastes, but we credit Wemple for zeroing in on one of the most intriguing aspects of the ponderous critique:

To narrow the scope of its inquiry, the Erik Wemple Blog will start out by exploring only the most fascinating of the Republican Party’s allegations — namely, that PolitiFact Virginia attempts to bury good ratings about Republicans and tout bad ones.

The Virginia GOP may qualify as the first to notice a bias in the timing of the stories, so that makes it a good angle for Wemple's initial approach.

Journalists are still missing the big story:  No mainstream fact checker receives anywhere near the criticism that PolitiFact receives.  There's a story in there.  And it's an important one.

A debunking with bunkum added

Erik Wemple has a short article over at the Washington Post extolling PolitiFacter Louis Jacobson's investigation into an oft-repeated claim (take note of the final line):

Have you ever heard that 85 percent of recent college graduates are moving back home? If so, then perhaps you’ve seen that figure in Time magazine, in CNNMoney.com, in the New York Post, or in an ad from American Crossroads, a group that used the whopping figure in an ad to hammer President Obama.

So if you’ve heard it from all those places, how could this figure on “boomerang” children possibly be anything but stone-cold accurate? Well, perhaps no one ever once lifted a phone receiver, put a question in an e-mail or deployed other research techniques to fact-check it. (PolitiFact gave it a “false.”)

Our purpose here at PFB is to highlight PolitiFact's liberal bias. In this case, Jacobson appears to do a fair job of researching the numbers, and after reading Jacobson's work the 85 percent stat seems completely bogus. This isn't an ideological issue. The statistic is legitimate or it isn't. Partisans can quibble over its significance or causes, but that's irrelevant to its accuracy. Props to Jacobson for the legwork. If the story ended there then PolitiFact rendered a valuable service, period. But like Anthony Weiner on a Twitter binge, PolitiFact never seems to quit until they expose themselves. If the problem still isn't clear, have a look at Jacobson's original piece:

The ad attributes the claim to a Time magazine story dated May 10, 2011. We found the article in question, which was headlined, "Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad."

The story begins, "The kids are coming home to roost. Surprise, surprise: Thanks to a high unemployment rate for new grads, many of those with diplomas fresh off the press are making a return to Mom and Dad’s place. In fact, according to a poll conducted by consulting firm Twentysomething Inc., some 85% of graduates will soon remember what Mom’s cooking tastes like."

Since the Time story didn’t give any details on the study or give any indication that a reporter had called the firm -- the same was true for the two other media reports that cited the statistic, the New York Post and CNNMoney.com -- we tried to contact Twentysomething Inc. for additional details on the methodology and date of the survey.
...
...The statistic has been repeated many times on websites and blogs -- twice in the Huffington Post, for instance, and once in the personal finance blog PT Money. It even was picked up by bloggers both liberal (Democratic Underground) and conservative (Free Republic), each with their own political spin. We did not hear back from the author of the Time magazine article.

 Still looking for the part that shows PolitiFact's liberal bias? Here's the missing piece:

Image from PolitiFact.com

Time, CNN, the Huffington Post, and Democratic Underground were all spared. Sure, the Free Republic and the New York Post went unscathed, but they're not nearly the shiny lure that attracts the liberal fish the way American Crossroads does. More importantly, this rating grants immunity to those most responsible for the bogus statistic: research firm TwentysomethingInc.

Wemple writes "PolitiFact gave it a False" (italics mine) referring to the claim, but that's not all PolitiFact did. PolitiFact put the American Crossroads logo right next to the official Truth-O-Meter with a big red False, implying not that American Crossroads is guilty of shoddy stat research, but is lying. Of the many outlets that used the statistic, it's only American Crossroads who end up with a demerit in their "Report Card" that PolitiFact so likes to peddle as a guide to a person or group's honesty.

If readers get the impression this is nitpicking on my part, it's worth noting that it's not the first time PolitiFact has burdened a conservative with a poor rating for a claim that was widely repeated in the mainstream media. Also keep in mind that in cases like this, the decision to lay blame on a specific source when so many are available is an editorial one. It is our contention that the bias of PolitiFact's editors will harm conservative sources more often than liberal ones.  An objective operation could (should and would) have simply uncovered the source of the bogus statistic, and then provided a list of all the media outlets that repeated it. PolitiFact's bias shows in the selection of just one entity--a conservative one--to shoulder the False rating.

Subtle slights like this, especially added to PolitiFact's many other tricks, allow PolitiFact to use otherwise solid journalism to contort verified facts into liberal propaganda. By all means Jacobson deserves credit for debunking a recurring myth. But as long as PolitiFact conducts itself like a Truth Pimp passing out chits to favored courtesans while branding less fortunate subjects with a scarlet letter F it should be acknowledged for what it is: an editorial page with a left-wing bias.



Update: 5/12/12: Yesterday PolitiFact announced on their Facebook page that NPR would air a segment discussing Jacobson's debunking of the 85% statistic. The comments on PolitiFact's Facebook page rarely disappoint when looking for comical examples of liberal angst and outrage, but there was at least one regarding this article that is worth noting here:

Image from Facebook

As can be expected, PolitiFact's presentation of this bogus statistic with the American Crossroads logo next to the False rating leaves readers with the impression that it was American Crossroads that came up with the figure. Notice too the commenter claims AC "keeps on lying" and "makes a purely false ad" as opposed to repeating statistics without due diligence.

PolitiFact has been doing this long enough to know that this is exactly how their readers will interpret the presentation of the rating. By selecting American Crossroads to bear the weight of the False rating on their own implies an intentional choice by the editors to influence their readers opinion about a conservative PAC. Congrats, PolitiFact. Mission accomplished.