PolitiFact Georgia, PolitiMath and the gender pay gap

On April 22, 2015, PolitiFact Georgia found it "Mostly False" that women make only 78 percent of what men make for doing the same work.

PolitiFact Georgia reported that the claim, from a Buzzfeed video, based its claim on statistics that, among other faults, did not bother to ensure that the men and women were doing the same work.

At Zebra Fact Check I've published an in-depth treatment of the way mainstream fact checkers mishandle the gender pay gap. But here we'll look narrowly at how PolitiFact Georgia applies a "Mostly False" rating to a gross exaggeration. Our "PolitiMath" stories explore the relationship between percentage error and PolitiFact's ratings, so PolitiFact Georgia's story makes a good subject.

PolitiFact's highest estimate of the wage gap after controlling for the type of job and some other factors was about 7 percent:

(T)he American Association of University Women that controlled for college major, occupation, age, geographical region, hours worked and more, and found there was still a 7 percent wage gap between male and female college grads a year after graduation.

Using that high-end estimate, the Buzzfeed video exaggerated by no less than 214 percent. There's precedent for liberals receiving ratings of "Mostly False" or better for exaggerations that large and larger. On the other hand, PolitiFact Wisconsin gave a state Democrat a "False" rating for an exaggeration of 114 percent.

At least we know Buzzfeed's exaggeration is not the largest to receive a rating of "Mostly False" or higher.

If anyone can find a statement from a Republican or conservative where a figure exaggerated by more than 100 percent received a rating of "Mostly False" or higher from PolitiFact, we'd love to hear about it. We haven't turned up anything like that yet.

Congressional pay raise update

Thanks to PolitiFact Georgia, we have another piece of evidence that PolitiFact prefers Democrats.

Partisan.

We pointed out in October 2012 that PolitiFact found it true that Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) had raised his own pay a number of times while in Congress.  In contrast, PolitiFact Ohio found it false that Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had raised his own pay a number of times while in Congress.  Their circumstances were similar.  The rulings contradict each other.

PolitiFact Georgia sees things mostly PolitiFact Ohio's way.  It's "Mostly False" that Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) raised his own pay.  Hey!  A Republican got the benefit of the doubt this time!  But it's not that simple.  Blame for the "Mostly False" claim goes to Kingston's Republican primary challenger, David Perdue.

So, on essentially the same claim, PolitiFact has put a "False" and a "Mostly False" on Republican report cards, and a "True" on the report card for the Florida Democratic Party (the latter claim was a compound claim where both halves were found true).

If Kingston wins the primary, it will be interesting to see if any Democrats pick up this line of attack.  First, will PolitiFact Georgia notice?  Second, what rating will result?

PolitiFact in Mathmagic Land

A reader pointed us to yet another marvelous example that helps show how PolitiFact applies an irregular set of standards.

PolitiFact Georgia investigated Democrat state senator Vincent Fort's charge that Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, has appointed blacks to government positions less than 3 percent of the time.  PolitiFact said the actual number was a little over 7 percent.  So the claim was only "Half True":

The senator’s overarching claim that Deal has appointed a relatively low percentage of minorities has merit. But he was wrong by a handful of percentage points. It was based on an incomplete sampling of Deal’s total appointees.

We rate the claim Half True.

The lawmaker, state senator Vincent Fort,  received a "Half True" because of the truth of his underlying point, that the percentage of black appointees was low.  And he was wrong by "only a handful of percentage points."

Compare the treatment Fort received to Grover Norquist's fate at the hands of PolitiFact Virginia back in February.  Norquist said Virginia uses less than 1 percent of its budget surplus on roads.  The actual number was about 7 percent, so Norquist was off by a handful and committed an error of about 86 percent.  Compare that to Fort's error of about 43 percent.  Norquist's rating from PolitiFact Virginia?  "False."  Norquist received no credit at all for an accurate underlying argument that Virginia doesn't spend much of its budget surplus on roads.

Perhaps Fort could claim Deal has appointed zero blacks and still get a "Half True" from PolitiFact because of the accuracy of his same underlying point.  There's no way to know based on PolitiFact's grading system.  It's all up to the subjective impressions of PolitiFact's star chambers.

It's a crazy way to fact check.  Matt Bryant scores a touchdown!  No, it was just a field goal. Half True.


Jeff Adds:

It's hard to avoid the reality that PolitiFact is an editorial site with articles like this. The final rating is based on the editors' arbitrary standard of however much a "handful" is. Not to mention that Fort named a specific figure, 3 percent, that was unarguably wrong. Whether or not Fort's underlying argument is a good one is clearly the stuff of an editorial. His figures were incorrect, and a fact check, by definition, should be limited to that.

Then again, maybe they cut Fort some slack because they assumed he was citing figures from memory?

PolitiFact Georgia publishes inaccurate stats for 2012?

These are definitely the people we want doing our fact checks.

PolitiFact Georgia published a statistical breakdown of its fact checks for 2012.

There's just one problem.  The statistics don't appear to have any solid relationship to reality.

Let's see how PolitiFact Georgia editor Jim Tharpe tells it:

Most ratings, as in 2011, fell between the extreme ratings of True and Pants On Fire.

Ratings for the GOP/conservative fact checks broke down like this: 26 True, 22 Mostly True, 32 Half True, 14 Mostly False, 16 False and eight Pants On Fire.

Ratings for the Democratic/liberal fact checks broke down like this: 10 True, 14 Mostly True, 23 Half True, 10 Mostly False, 15 False and four Pants On Fire.

For fact checks for groups and individuals we labeled as "other, " the ratings broke this way: seven True, 14 Mostly True, eight Half True, eight Mostly False, eight False and three Pants On Fire.

It's gotta be the glasses.

Going by the numbers appearing on its website, PolitiFact Georgia did less than 160 fact checks in 2012.  Tharpe gives the number 242.  Looking at all the "Truth-O-Meter" ratings, the site gives 20 per page in reverse chronological order.  On the eighth page of results we reach 2011.  Toss in 36 promises from Gov. Nathan Deal and we get to 196, not that PolitiFact Georgia has actually done that many ratings of Deal's promises.

Where do Tharpe's numbers come from?  Is there a secret list of unpublished "Truth-O-Meter" ratings from PolitiFact Georgia?  Does PolitiFact Georgia count PolitiFact National articles published in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution?  Should PolitiFact Georgia take credit for those stories if that's how Tharpe arrived at his total?

Tharpe isn't from outer space simply with respect to the total number of stories.  None of it adds up, so far as I can tell.  Add Tharpe's total stories for Democrats and Republicans and we end with a total of 194 stories--just two short of the inflated total we get by rounding up to 160 and adding in Deal's promises.  And that doesn't count an additional 48 stories from Tharpe's "other" category.

If there's one saving grace, at least the total of all those stories does agree with Tharpe's overall total of 242 stories.  It's just hard to tell from which planet those stories originated.

Here's the tale of the numbers directly from the PolitiFact Georgia website for 2012:

PolitiFact Georgia published 148 "Truth-O-Meter" fact check stories.  Of that total, 30 were "True" ratings, 33 were "Mostly True" ratings, 35 were "Half True" ratings, 20 were "Mostly False" ratings, 22 were "False" ratings and 8 "Pants on Fire" ratings.

I emailed Tharpe asking about the discrepancy.  He answered that PolitiFact Georgia keeps "a very accurate count" and confirmed that PF Georgia counted stories from PolitiFact national as well as those from the "Deal-O-Meter."  We've already touched on the problems with those methods.

If any "Deal-O-Meter" ratings count in the totals then the breakdown I show shouldn't add up.  If we don't have any "Deal-O-Meter" ratings in the total then it takes 94 stories from PF national to get to Tharpe's total of 242 stories.

On Jan. 3 I wrote again to Tharpe:

When I added together your three breakdowns of stories in the classes "Republican," "Democrat" and "other" the totals agreed with your overall total.  But all three classes are broken down into "Truth-O-Meter" ratings like "True" and "Mostly False."  There are no ratings like "Promise Kept" in those groups. Could you explain how the "Deal-O-Meter" claims fit with the total of 242 fact checks?

You affirm that your totals include some stories from PolitiFact's national operation.  At the same time, your article reports "a year of more than 200 fact checks by your local team of truth-seekers, collectively known as PolitiFact Georgia."  How does that claim jibe with using stories from PolitiFact's national operation in the totals?

When Tharpe first replied he said I could phone him if I needed more help with the numbers. Perhaps it is because I contacted him again by email instead of by phone that the message remains unanswered.

Michael F. Cannon: "I Have Been False*"

Health care policy expert Michael F. Cannon of the Cato Institute brings us yet another astonishing display of fact-check incompetence from PolitiFact.

PolitiFact Georgia is the culprit this time.
 
Cannon:

In an unconscious parody of everything that’s wrong with the “fact-checker” movement in journalism, PolitiFact Georgia (a project of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) has rated false my claim that operating an ObamaCare Exchange would violate Georgia law.

Cannon offers a devastating and conclusive rebuke of PolitiFact Georgia, and it's so elegant that putting the argument in our own words is pointless.  But to sum up, PolitiFact committed one of its traditional sins by incomprehensibly misinterpreting what the subject was saying.  PolitiFact charges Cannon with claiming that it is illegal for anyone to operate an insurance exchange in Georgia.  Cannon was talking specifically about the states setting up their own exchanges.

Here's the original context, for comparison (bold emphasis added):

State-created exchanges mean higher taxes, fewer jobs, and less protection of religious freedom. States are better off defaulting to a federal exchange. The Medicaid expansion is likewise too costly and risky a proposition. Republican Governors Association chairman Bob McDonnell (R.,Va.) agrees, and has announced that Virginia will implement neither provision.

There are many arguments against creating exchanges.

Could the context make it any clearer that Cannon refers to state-created exchanges with the arguments that follow?  The subsequent arguments augment the clarity.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

[Cannon] wrote a claim we hadn’t heard before.

"[O]perating an Obamacare exchange would be illegal in 14 states," he wrote. "Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia have enacted either statutes or constitutional amendments (or both) forbidding state employees to participate in an essential exchange function: implementing Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates."

Is that correct? PolitiFact Georgia decided to conduct an examination of the claim.

Does the federal government propose to operate a federal exchange in Georgia using Georgia government state employees?  How is that supposed to work?

Don't let our brief summary prevent you from reading Cannon's whole response.

It's just another example of amazing incompetence from PolitiFact.  Props to Cannon for standing up to this form of media tyranny.


Jeff adds:
Despite Bill Adair's assurance that PolitiFact "publishes a list of sources with every Truth-O-Meter item" in order to "to help readers judge for themselves whether they agree with the ruling," Cannon notes that the context of his original article "was lost on PolitiFact readers, because PolitiFact provided neither a citation nor a link to the opinion piece it was fact-checking."

As of the time we write this, there is in fact a link to Cannon's National Review article posted on the PF Georgia source list. This means either Cannon was wrong, or PF Georgia amended their article without informing readers of an update, correction, or even an editor's note to document the change.

Considering PolitiFact's long history of inconsistent application of their corrections policy, we're inclined to take Cannon's word for it.

Peach Pundit: "Former Senator Dan Moody Responds To PolitiFact"

Georgia's Peach Pundit, from Jan. 27:

On Tuesday, PolitiFact weighed in on a statement made by House Ethics Committee Chairman Joe Wilkinson. Politifact declared Wilkinson’s statement that Georgia’s Ethics laws are among the toughest in the nation is “false.”

Peach Pundit went on to publish an answering message from former Georgia state senator Dan Moody.  Moody makes a great point that PolitiFact's grading of Wilkinson falls into the realm of editorial judgment, deciding what criteria qualify as the proper ones to rank the strength of state ethics laws.

Wilkinson and Moody argued that disclosure laws serve as the foundation of state ethics law.  PolitiFact disagreed and pinned the "False" on Moody.

Hilariously, PolitiFact didn't even bother to quote Moody in its fact check.  It graded Moody based on a paraphrase appearing in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the PolitiFact affiliate in Georgia.

Didn't the reporter retain notes that would have allowed readers access to Moody's actual statement?

Unbelievable.

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.

About PolitiFact

Visit Peach Pundit to read Moody's riposte in full.


Edit 11/13/11: While doing some formatting work on the site after midnight I accidentally spilled some water on Gizmo and somehow this review re-posted with a new date. I "corrected" the date to 9-27-11, the day prior to when this articles "tweet" was sent, which is standard for us. Sorry for the confusion. Jeff