Remember Back When PolitiFact was Fair & Balanced?

PolitiFact has leaned left from the outset (2007).

It's not uncommon to see people lament PolitiFact's left-leaning bias along with the claim that once upon a time PolitiFact did an even-handed job on its fact-checking.

But we've never believed the fairy tale that PolitiFact started out well. It's always been notably biased to the left. And we just stumbled across a PolitiFact fact check from 2008 that does a marvelous job illustrating the point.

It's a well-known fact that nearly half of U.S. citizens pay no net income tax, right?

Yet note how the fact checker, in this case PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair, frames President Obama's claim:

In a speech on March 20, 2008, Obama took a different approach and emphasized the personal cost of the war.

"When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you're paying a price for this war," he said in the speech in Charleston, W.Va.

Hold on there, PolitiFact.

How can the cost of the war, divided up per family, rightly get categorized as a "personal cost" when about half of the families aren't paying any net federal income tax?

If the fact check was serious about the personal cost, then it would look at the differences in tax burdens. Families paying a high amount of federal income tax would pay far more than the the price of their cable bill. And families paying either a small amount of income tax or no net income tax would pay much less then the cost of their cable service for the Iraq War (usually $0).

PolitiFact stuffs the information it should have used to pan Obama's claim into paragraph No. 8, where it is effectively quarantined with parentheses (parentheses in the original):

(Of course, Obama's simplified analysis does not reflect the variations in income tax levels. And you don't have to write a check for the war each month. The war costs are included in government spending that is paid for by taxes.)

President Obama's statement was literally false and highly misleading as a means of expressing the personal cost of the war.

But PolitiFact couldn't or wouldn't see it and rated Mr. Obama's claim "True."

Not that much has changed, really.


Afters (for fun)

The author of that laughable fact check is the same Bill Adair later elevated to the Knight Chair for Duke University's journalism program.

We imagine Adair earned his academic throne in recognition of his years of neutral and unbiased  fact-checking even knowing President Obama was watching him from behind his desk.

"Mostly False" that France and Germany thought Iraq had WMD? Seriously?

PolitiFact recently weighed in on French and German intelligence about Iraq's WMD programs. Former Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said the French and Germans believed Iraq had WMD.

PolitiFact ruled Wolfowitz's claim "Mostly False."

Some may remember the media routinely reporting that French and German intelligence assessments, along with others, mirrored those of the United States (bold emphasis added):

U.S. government analysts were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years. Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February, "There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed." In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Some may remember French President Jacques Chirac, who opposed the invasion, nonetheless admitting the French believed Iraq had WMD:

There is a problem—the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right to be disturbed by this situation, and it's right in having decided Iraq should be disarmed.

Chirac's statement came from early 2003, not long before the invasion started.

But it's a trivial matter for PolitiFact to work its way around these inconvenient facts by making its own one-sided case against Wolfowitz's claim.

Why would PolitiFact take that approach? Incompetence? Bias? A little of both?

I'm working on a column for Zebra Fact Check that will expose PolitiFact's fact-checking sins in excruciating detail.