PolitiSpin: Biden says he cut the debt by $1.5 trillion? Half True!

We kiddeth not when we call PolitiFact a collection of liberal bloggers posing as non-partisan fact checkers.

U.S. debt hasn't gone down at all under Biden, as PolitiFact admits. PolitiFact cited a September 2022 estimate saying the deficit, not the debt, would decrease by about $1.7 trillion compared to FY2021, but that leaves a deficit of almost $1 trillion that will increase the debt by that same amount.

So, how does a left-leaning fact checker go about making a false statement seem like a partially true statement that leaves out important details or takes things out of context?

Watch and learn, wannabe liberal bloggers who covet the "fact checker" label:

"We’ve also reduced the debt and reduced the debt by $350 billion my first year," Biden said. "This year, it's going to be over $1.5 trillion (that we’ve) reduced the debt."

Biden has a point that his administration has presided over smaller deficits than were seen under the Trump administration, based on Congressional Budget Office estimates. But Biden’s remark leaves out important context. The debt had risen because of a temporary phase of unusual federal spending.

No Reduction of U.S. Debt

It's simple. Declare that when Biden says he reduced the debt by $1.5 trillion he's actually making a valid point about reducing the deficit and therefore reducing the growth of the debt. Then imply that the problem with Biden's claim isn't using "debt" instead of "deficit" but that he has left out the fact that most of the deficit reduction happened as old COVID programs stopped shelling out so much federal money.

We're probably not supposed to point out that PolitiFact omits all mention of Mr. Biden's student loan forgiveness program. The CBO said, on the page PolitiFact cited for its deficit figure, loan forgiveness actions in September 2022 could substantially affect deficit figures for FY2022.

That's what a liberal blogger will leave out that a nonpartisan fact checker will mention.

What About Biden's Underlying Point?

PolitiFact has reliably (?) informed us that the most important aspect of a numbers claim comes from the speaker's underlying point. If the numbers are off but the main point stands, a favorable "Truth-O-Meter" rating may result.

 Adair:

(W)e realized we were ducking the underlying point of blame or credit, which was the crucial message. So we began rating those types of claims as compound statements. We not only checked whether the numbers were accurate, we checked whether economists believed an office holder's policies were much of a factor in the increase or decrease.

It turns out in the Biden fact check PolitiFact found Mr. Biden was taking credit for the non-existent debt reduction:

During a Sept. 18 interview with CBS’ "60 Minutes," President Joe Biden touted his administration’s efforts to rein in federal debt.

We judge that if PolitiFact believed Biden was touting "his administration's efforts to rein in federal debt" then it regards his debt reduction claim was an effort to take credit for that supposed reduction.

So, was it a Biden administration effort that reduced the deficit (not the debt) by $1.5 trillion compared to FY2021?

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

Spending programs passed earlier in the pandemic began expiring this year, meaning federal outlays have declined. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit public policy group, has estimated that more than 80% of the $1.7 trillion reduction in the deficit can be explained by expiring or shrinking COVID-19 relief.

We calculate that as $1.35 trillion out of the $1.7 trillion, leaving Biden with the potential to claim credit for as much as $350 billion of the deficit reduction. Giving the president credit for the entire amount results in an estimated exaggeration (minimum) of 329 percent (($1.5 trillion-$.35 trillion)/$.35 trillion).

So Biden claimed debt reduction that was not debt reduction and exaggerated his administration's share of the deficit reduction by over three times its actual amount. Therefore, according to PolitiFact, what he said was half true.

The 'Slowing the Rate of Growth' Excuse

PolitiFact cleverly, or perhaps stupidly, excuses Biden's use of "debt" instead of "deficit" by interpreting the claim to mean slowing the growth of the debt. PolitiFact could argue precedent for that approach, for claims about "cutting Medicare" or "cutting Medicaid" tend to receive "Half True" ratings or worse (worse tends to happen if Republican).

The problem? Biden got the "Half True" while exaggerating the numbers in his favor for purposes of claiming credit. And that's with PolitiFact helping out by not mentioning the potential cost of his student loan bailout proposal. The Penn Wharton budget model (University of Pennsylvania) estimated costs of over $500 billion for 2022.

That figure would wipe out the administration's potential share of $350 billion of deficit reduction.

The "slowing the rate of growth" excuse doesn't come close to justifying a "Half True" rating.

We have here another strong entry from PolitiFact for the Worst Fact Check of 2022.

PolitiFact accidentally tells the truth about the Hunter Biden laptop

PolitiFact tried so hard to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story in a June 14, 2021 story that it ended up accidentally telling the truth about it.

Donald Trump claimed that he was "right about everything" and PolitiFact published its article to contest that claim item by item. Trump said the "Biden laptop was real," apparently trying to make the point that the Hunter Biden laptop story the mainstream media largely ignored in the runup to the 2020 election was truly based on Hunter Biden's laptop.

PolitiFact's telling:

'Hunter Biden’s laptop was real'

It was real in the sense that it exists, but it didn’t prove much. 

Trump allies obtained a laptop or copies of a laptop during the 2020 campaign that allegedly belonged to Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son. Over time, there has been less doubt that the laptop did in fact belong to Hunter Biden, though how the laptop came to be obtained by Trump allies and Trump-friendly media outlets is unclear.

Conservative media have done quite a bit of reporting on how the laptop ended up in Rudy Giuliani's hands, not to mention those of the FBI. We find it interesting that PolitiFact declined to report on or link to any of those details. Instead of providing those details, PolitiFact gave us Hunter Biden's side of things and a link to that story:

Hunter Biden has been open about his history as a recovering drug addict; he’s said it’s possible the laptop was stolen from him.

Did you know the FBI is investigating Hunter Biden's business dealing with China? No? PolitiFact apparently doesn't, either. Or at least PolitiFact figured it's not relevant to this story

PolitiFact wraps up the section on Biden's laptop by accidentally telling the truth:

Nothing from the laptop has revealed illegal or unethical behavior by Joe Biden as vice president with regard to his son’s tenure as a director for Burisma, a Ukraine-based natural gas company.

Though PolitiFact's statement isn't even necessarily true in itself, it tells a series of truths in what it doesn't say. It doesn't say whether the laptop shows illegal or unethical behavior as vice president not regarding Hunter Biden's (apparently well-paid) tenure with Burisma.

What can't we fit through the loophole PolitiFact leaves open?

PolitiFact's statement is compatible with each of the following prospective assertions about what the laptop shows:

• Illegal behavior by Joe Biden while not serving as vice president
• Unethical behavior by Joe Biden while not serving as vice president
• Illegal behavior by Vice President Biden unrelated to Hunter Biden's role as a Burisma employee
• Unethical behavior by VP Biden unrelated to Hunter Biden's role as a Burisma employee

We're not saying any of the statements on our list is necessarily true. We're saying PolitiFact's disclaimer about what the Hunter Biden laptop doesn't show is so laughably narrow that it's incriminating.

Why?

Why would any news organization, let alone a fact-checking organization, include such a preposterous caveat in a story? It looks designed to mislead readers. 

If it's just simple incompetence, it's of the kind that looks much worse than simple incompetence. It looks like an attempt to deceive readers.

That's a bad look.

Typo correction June 15, 2021: Bursima=.Burisma

Correction June 16, 2021: Fixed some flawed text formatting and changed "It doesn't say whether the laptop shows illegal or unethical behavior as vice president regarding Hunter Biden's (apparently well-paid) tenure with Burisma" to "It doesn't say whether the laptop shows illegal or unethical behavior as vice president not regarding Hunter Biden's (apparently well-paid) tenure with Burisma." Our apologies for any confusion our error caused.

Layers of Editors: How fast is PolitiFact's stupidity growing?

Uh-oh! PolitiFact's incompetence unfairly harmed a Democrat again! This time it was hapless Joe Biden who ended up with the short straw by PolitiFact's blinkered judgment.

PolitiFact explained that over the past 10 years the number of Hispanics increased by about 10 million, while the number of Asian Americans went up by 5.2 million.

Why is an increase, on average, of 520,000 per year a faster increase than about 1 million per year?

PolitiFact explains, sort of:

Biden said "the fastest-growing population in the United States is Hispanic." That’s incorrect: The fastest-growing group is Asian Americans, with Hispanics ranking second. Hispanics did record the largest numerical increase in population of any group between 2010 and 2019, but that’s a different measure than "fastest growing."

Instead of recognizing more than one measure of "fastest-growing," PolitiFact arbitrarily accepts one measure while rejecting the other.

But an increase of 1 million per year on average is a rate of growth, and arguably more useful than measuring rate of growth as a percentage of an existing population.

We pointed out on Twitter that PolitiFact's reasoning would suggest that a one foot tall tree that doubles in size is growing faster than a 50 foot tall tree that grows two feet during the same span of time.

Sure, the first tree may surpass the second tree in size if it continues to double in size year-by-year. But it will never happen unless the first tree starts to surpass the second tree in the number of inches of growth per year.

Never.

And the math works similarly for population growth. Unless Asian Americans start adding more population in absolute numbers than do Hispanics, the number of Hispanics will forever be greater than the number of Asian Americans. Forever. In fact, Asian Americans will not start closing the gap between the two populations until they start adding more people in raw numbers rather than merely in terms of percentage.

So who do these fact checkers think they are?


Update March 8, 2021: Added the link to the PolitiFact "fact check" in the second paragraph.

PolitiFact's "In Context" deception (Updated)

In (a) perfect world, fact checkers would publish "In Context" features that simply offer surrounding context with objective explanatory notes.

This ain't no perfect world.

The PolitiFact "In Context" articles tend to serve as editorials, just like its fact checks. Two "In Context" articles from the past year (actually one from 2021 and one from 2019) will serve as our illustrative examples.

The Vaccine Supply

On Feb. 18, 2021 PolitiFact published "In Context: What Joe Biden said about the vaccine supply he found when he took office."

President Biden said "It’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but a vaccinator; how do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm?"

Instead of using context to figure out what Mr. Biden meant or perhaps intended to say, PolitiFact offered that he was not saying there was no vaccine when he took office because elsewhere in the speech he said there were 50 million vaccine doses when he took office ("we came into office, there (were) only 50 million doses that were available"):

You can judge his meaning for yourself, but it’s clear to us that Biden didn’t mean there were no vaccines available before he took office.

So Mr. Biden could have meant anything except for there were no vaccines available when he took office? Oh thank you, Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checkers!

The fact checkers at CNN at least made a game attempt to make heads or tails out of Mr. Biden's words:

Biden made a series of claims about the Covid-19 vaccine situation upon his January inauguration. He said early at the town hall that when "we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available." Moments later, he said, "We got into office and found out the supply -- there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available." Soon after that, he told Cooper, "But when you and I talked last, we talked about -- it's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator -- how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?"

Facts First: Biden got at least one of these statistics wrong -- in a way that made Trump look better, not worse, so Biden's inaccuracy appeared accidental, but we're noting it anyway. A White House official said that Biden's claim about "10 million doses a day" being available when he took office was meant to be a reference to the 10 million doses a week that were being sent to states as of the second week of Biden's term, up from 8.6 million a week when they took over.

CNN's "Facts First" went on to explain that the Trump administration released all vaccine reserves to the states instead of holding back the second doses recommended by the manufacturers. CNN also pointed out that the Biden administration continued that same policy.

The CNN account makes it appear Mr. Biden uttered an incoherent mixture of statistics. PolitiFact didn't even make an attempt in its article to figure out what Biden was talking about. PolitiFact simply discounted the statement Biden made that seemed to contradict his dubious claim about the availability of 50 million vaccine doses when he took office.

PolitiFact's "In Context" article looks like pro-Biden spin next to the CNN account. And we thought of another "In Context" article where PolitiFact used an entirely different approach.

Very Fine People

PolitiFact used Mr. Biden's statement about "50 million doses" to excuse any inaccuracy Biden may have communicated by later saying the vaccine cupboard was bare when he took office.

But PolitiFact's "In Context" article about the circumstances of President Trump's reference to "very fine people," published April 26, 2019, made no similar use of Mr. Trump's same-speech clarification "and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally."

With Biden, readers got PolitiFact's assurance that he wasn't saying there were no vaccine doses when he took office, even though he used words to that effect.

With Trump, readers were left with PolitiFact's curiosity as to what the context might show (bold emphasis added):

We wanted to look at Trump’s comments in their original context. Here is a transcript of the questions Trump answered that addressed the Charlottesville controversy in the days after it happened. (His specific remarks about "very fine people, on both sides" come in the final third of the transcript.)

Not only did PolitiFact fail to use the context to defend Trump from the charge that he was calling neo-Nazis "fine people," about a year later (July 27, 2020) PolitiFact made that charge itself, citing its own "In Context" article in support:

• As president in 2017, Trump said there were "very fine people, on both sides," in reference to neo-Nazis and counterprotesters in Charlottesville, Va.

Making the situation that much more outrageous, PolitiFact declined to correct the latter article when we send a correction request. PolitiFact remained unmoved after we informed the International Fact-Checking Network about its behavior.

Is PolitiFact lucky or what that its owner, the Poynter Institute, also owns the International Fact-Checking Network?

This is how PolitiFact rolls. PolitiFact uses its "In Context" articles to editorially strengthen or weaken narratives, as it chooses.

It's not all about the facts.


Correction: We left out an "a" in the first sentence and also misstated the timing of the two articles our post talks about. Both errors are fixed using parenthetical comments (like this).

Story Focus Shenanigans

We've pointed out for years that PolitiFact's story focus often determines the "Truth-O-Meter" rating at the end. Story focus shenanigans never go out of style at PolitiFact.

PolitiFact's method allows its fact checkers any number of ways to approach the same claim. A fact checker might focus on what the claimant said was meant. Or the fact checker could focus on how an audience might perceive the claim. One approach might lead to one "Truth-O-Meter" rating and another approach to a different "Truth-O-Meter" rating. There's no good evidence of any objective criteria guiding the process.

That brings us to two timely examples that help illustrate the phenomenon.

"Mostly False" for the Republican

President Biden set policy to allow essential workers who are undocumented to receive coronavirus vaccines. Why is Scalise's statement "Mostly False"? Apparently because American citizens who are not among the first groups eligible for the vaccine are not waiting to get the vaccine:

But, we wondered, does allowing this population access to the vaccine mean they are being invited to step in front of American citizens in the queue?

PolitiFact weasel-words "in the queue" so that Americans in low priority vaccine eligibility groups are not in the queue at all and are thus not skipped over when undocumented immigrants join those in the high priority groups.

You're not waiting for the vaccine if you're not in that narrowly-defined queue. PolitiFact quoted a Scalise spokesperson who explained his meaning. To no avail. Scalise received a "Mostly False" rating even though his statement was literally true taken in context, with "in the queue" encompassing all American citizens awaiting the vaccine.

"Half True" for the Democrat

Hocus-pocus-story-focus.

Pointedly, PolitiFact does not look at all the ways Mr. Biden's claim fails the test of truth. It does mention some of them, but breezes past such technicalities to point out that IF the person making below $15 per hour is the sole breadwinner in a family of four AND/OR lives in an area with high living expenses THEN they would fall below the poverty level.

How many of those earning less than $15 per hour meet those conditions? Well, if that was important then PolitiFact would have given us a number. Obviously it's not important. What we need to know is that under some conditions Biden's statement could be true. Those missing conditions count as missing context and that matches PolitiFact's definition of "Half True"!

Marvel at PolitiFact's rationalization:

A spokesman for Biden said he was referring to a family of four with one full-time income using the federal government’s poverty guideline, an explanation Biden didn’t include in the interview. Using that measurement, that family with a paycheck of $13 an hour would live below the poverty line. At $15 an hour, the same family would clearly be above the poverty line. So Biden was off by about a dollar, using the existing standards.

But experts said wages alone don’t tell the full story about whether a household lives in poverty. Other factors include child care and housing costs, for example, which can vary by geography. Generalizing a "poverty wage" to a specific number ignores the different circumstances that families face. Other experts said the federal definition of a poverty level is out of date and needs changing.

We rate this claim Half True.

You wonder why similar reasoning couldn't justify a "Half True" for Scalise?

Why do you hate science?

PolitiFact miscounts American deaths during WW2?

When a PolitiFact fact check's subject matter involves math, we (figuratively!) smell blood in the water.

This item came from the PolitiFact article "Joe Biden's inaguration in extraordinary times, fact-checked," published Jan. 20, 2021. Notably, PolitiFact has only done one Truth-O-Meter rating on claims from President Joe Biden since mid-December. That's assuming PolitiFact's page showing Biden's fact checks is accurate.

As it turned out, PolitiFact was right that Biden was "close to accurate." But PolitiFact made a significant methodological blunder in reaching its conclusion. The mistake appears right away in PolitiFact's explanation for its judgment:

As Biden was speaking, the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker was reporting 402,269 deaths in the United States. That is just shy of the 405,399 U.S. deaths during World War II, according to the Congressional Research Service. With the seven-day moving average of coronavirus deaths reaching 3,015 on Inauguration Day, the four-year World War II total was due to be matched by the coronavirus either on Jan. 20 or 21, less than a year after the virus reached the United States.

PolitiFact reports incorrectly in the second sentence of the above paragraph. The Congressional Research Service source document does not give a total for all the American lives lost in World War II. It gives a total for the number of military personnel lost during the war (bold emphasis added):

This report provides U.S. war casualty statistics. It includes data tables containing the number of casualties among American military personnel who served in principal wars and combat operations from 1775 to the present. It also includes data on those wounded in action and information such as race and ethnicity, gender, branch of service, and cause of death. The tables are compiled from various Department of Defense (DOD) sources.

The total PolitiFact used omits more than 10,000 civilian casualties, including nearly 10,000 from the U.S. civilian merchant marine. We don't see where Biden limited his statement to military personnel.

PolitiFact went on to suggest Biden would be right by extrapolating the numbers forward for a full year since the U.S. started to log covid deaths. But doing that turns Biden's claim into a prediction. PolitiFact supposedly does not fact check predictions. Going on the facts alone, Biden was off by more than 10,000 deaths. PolitiFact made his error appear considerably smaller by using a flawed approach to its fact check.

It's what we call PolitiFact's "Rubberstamps for Democrats" program. We argue that the tendency to award lazy favorable ratings to Democrats (and not Republicans) counts as one evidence of PolitiFact's political bias.

PolitiFact's meritless fact check about merit

Is PolitiFact entering a golden age of Joe Biden rubberstamp fact checks?

Consider this Jan 8, 2021 item from PolitiFact with bylines for Amy Sherman and Miriam Valverde:

PolitiFact cited an expert who counted 63 cases that were dismissed either on the merits or for other reasons such as lack of standing. That's an okay thing for fact checkers to do:

Marc Elias, a lawyer who has filed and defended cases on behalf of Democrats, keeps a tally on the outcome of the election cases.

"It is 63 losses by Trump and his allies," Elias told PolitiFact the morning of Jan. 8. "We treat each case separately — so if there is a federal case and a state case, we treat them as two cases. We only ever count a case one time — so if there is an appeal or remand, we do not treat that as a separate loss."

But PolitiFact ended up having a hard time distinguishing between lack of merit and lack of standing. Instead of distinguishing between the two, PolitiFact appeared to assume that a case dismissed for lack of standing also lacked merit. This type of wording was typical of the fact check:

More than 60 lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies failed because they were unable to prove their allegations. Some lawsuits were dismissed due to errors in the filings and other procedural issues.

A proper fact check of Biden's claim would look specifically at the cases dismissed on the merits, putting a number on it and then looking at whether that number exceeded 60.

That never happens in PolitiFact's fact check. Instead, PolitiFact tells us that more than 60 cases were dismissed for a variety of reasons. And then concludes on that basis that Biden was correct. The "True" rating is supposed to mean that there's no missing context.

But PolitiFact itself omits critical context. The law distinguishes between the reasoning judges use to determine lack merit and the reasoning used to determine lack of standing. When a judge rules the plaintiff lacks standing to sue, the court need not examine the merits of the case.

Glenn G. Lammi sketched the essence of the doctrine for Forbes:

A plaintiff’s lack of standing to sue is about as close to a silver-bullet defense as civil-litigation defendants have at their disposal in federal court. The doctrine is based in Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which limits federal courts to hearing only "cases and controversies." The doctrine puts the onus on a plaintiff to prove, among other factors, that she suffered an actual harm, and if she can't, the court has no jurisdiction over the case.

And when a court has no jurisdiction over a case, it need not consider the case on its merits (Wikipedia):

In the United States, the current doctrine is that a person cannot bring a suit challenging the constitutionality of a law unless they can demonstrate that they are or will "imminently" be harmed by the law. Otherwise, the court will rule that the plaintiff "lacks standing" to bring the suit, and will dismiss the case without considering the merits of the claim of unconstitutionality.

It follows that a suit dismissed for lack of standing was not dismissed as meritless, for the court had no need to decide the case on the merits.

Without counting the number of cases dismissed for reasons other than lack of merit, a fact check cannot make a determination that more than 60 cases were dismissed as meritless. Yet PolitiFact's so-called fact check does just that.

PolitiFact used 63 as the total number of relevant cases. Based on that number, if just three cases were dismissed for reasons other than merit, then Biden's claim is false. But PolitiFact decided not to put that kind of effort into its fact check.

As happens so often, PolitiFact was only willing to put enough effort into its fact check of a Democrat to find the claim true. In this case, PolitiFact appeared to assume that any dismissal indicated lack of merit.

In other words, it was another PolitiFact rubberstamp.

PolitiFact spins Biden's position on forced busing

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden opposed forced busing to achieve racial integration in public schools.

That's obvious from PolitiFact's presentation of its June 29, 2020 of a Facebook meme, right?

PolitiFact Bias tips its hat to Newsbusters, which highlighted this item with a July 10, 2020 article of its own. Newsbusters correctly noted that PolitiFact applied plenty of spin to its article, producing an emphasis on Biden's progressive vision of "orderly integration"--whatever that was supposed to mean--while de-emphasizing the negative.

What is 'Orderly Integration'?

What was Biden's view of the "orderly integration" that was preferable to forced busing? PolitiFact relied on a secondary source, The New York Times, for that information:

Biden argued that housing integration was a better way to desegregate public schools though it would take much longer to implement than a busing plan, the (New York Times') story says.

That's one way to characterize what the Times' story said. Your mileage may vary (ours did):

In a television interview, Mr. Biden called busing an “asinine concept” and said he had “gotten to the point where I think our only recourse to eliminate busing may be a constitutional amendment.” As an alternative, he argued for putting “more money into the black schools” and opening up housing patterns, warning that otherwise “we are going to end up with the races at war.”

“You take people who aren’t racist, people who are good citizens, who believe in equal education and opportunity, and you stunt their children’s intellectual growth by busing them to an inferior school and you’re going to fill them with hatred,” he said in the interview.

We see nothing in the Times' article showing Biden predicted "white flight" as a result of forced busing.

Apparently "orderly integration" means "opening up housing patterns," whatever that means.

The Times mentioned a "television interview" of Biden as its source. The Times did not offer any detail regarding who produced or broadcasted the interview.

What was the Times' Source?

 

We found a Vox story mentioning a 1975 television interview featuring Biden and touching on the subject of busing. But the supporting link led to a Washington Post archive of a Congressional Record entry of TV News--The People Paper's print interview with Biden. We found no evidence that interview ever aired on television. We suspect Vox and The New York Times' concluded from the newspaper's name that the interview was aired on television. We had little luck finding information about the publication. But the text of the interview supports that it served as the Times' source:

"It ls true that the white man has suppressed the black man, and continues to suppress the black man. It is harder to be black than to be white. But you have to open up avenues for blacks without closing avenues for whites; you don't hold society back to let one segment catch up. You put more money into the black schools for remedial reading programs, you upgrade facilities, you upgrade opportunities, open up housing patterns."

The interview fails to tell us what "open up housing patterns" means. We hoped Googling the phrase would help, but discovered that searching for the specific phrase while excluding "Biden" returned zero hits. Perhaps one day a journalist will think to ask Biden what he was talking about.

Did Biden use 'coded language'?

We were struck by the fact that the fact checkers could not find an expert to denounce Biden's reference to the "racial jungle" as a racist "dog whistle" or "coded language."

To be clear, we hold that any labeling of something as "coded language" or a "dog whistle" needs solid evidence in support. But journalists tend to find it easy to dispense with such formalities when they can find experts or activists willing to make the charge.

Biden's Words Turned on Their Head

PolitiFact's skillfully twisted subheading makes it look like Biden's feared a "racial jungle" would occur without ill-defined "orderly integration." That wording suggests to readers that Biden would have used racial integration to avoid that "racial jungle."

But Biden was saying using forced busing to achieve integration was not orderly and would backfire.

PolitiFact could have avoided the definitional muddle by summarizing Biden using well-understood phrases: Biden believed racial integration using forced busing would lead to his children growing up in a "racial jungle."

PolitiFact avoided using plain speech to communicate Biden's position to its readers.

We got forced busing. Did we get a "racial jungle"?

It looks like PolitiFact was trying to do Biden a favor.

'Objective' PolitiFact Uses Biased Framing

Though PolitiFact absurdly tries to claim it is unbiased, its work shows bias in a multitude of ways.

One bias that popped out this week was in PolitiFact's PolitiSplainer about Tara Reade and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reade has accused Biden of sexual harassment to the point of rape. Her description of the alleged incident would technically meet at least one statutory definition of "rape."

But get a load of PolitiFact introductory paragraph concerning Reade and Biden:

More than two dozen women have accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault, and many of the allegations emerged not long before his election in November 2016. In October of that year, multiple women said he forced himself on them. A few months earlier, another woman who worked with Trump in the 1990s claimed he once pushed her against a wall and put his hand up her skirt.

There's not a word in there about Reade or Biden. The focus is entirely on sexual assault accusations against President Trump.

Why would an explainer on Reade and Biden start out focusing on allegations made against Trump, readers may wonder?

It's journalistic framing. That is, telling a story in a way to convey a particular message. The message in this case is "both sides do it" but Trump did it worse (so if it's between Biden and Trump vote Biden).

This is from the fact-checking organization that in 2018 published an article assuring readers it is unbiased. Because we could not see their faces as they published it we cannot say they published it with straight faces.

Blasey Ford/Kavanaugh, Hill/Thomas

How did PolitiFact treat parallel allegations against Justice Kavanaugh when Christine Blasey Ford accused him of attempted rape? Both sides do it?

Not quite:

As senators weigh the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh amid allegations of sexual misconduct, many Americans are thinking back to a previous example of accusations against a Supreme Court nominee.

Instead of "both sides do it" PolitiFact offered us a frame telling us that Republicans are doing it again. Clarence Thomas, though black, represented male power, which back in the olden days could easily dismiss accusations from women such as Thomas' accuser, Anita Hill:

The 1991 hearing "exposed critical fault lines in the lived-experience of those at the crossroads of race and gender," said Deborah Douglas, a journalist and visiting professor at DePauw University. "Thomas, a black man, could evoke the image of a ‘high-tech lynching’ to plead both innocence and male privilege, trumping the lived experience of a woman who represents a class of woman, the black woman, arguably, the last thought in the American public imagination."

Though Ford is white, gender has played out similarly in both cases, said Douglas, who is African-American.

What's missing from PolitiFact's PolitiSplainer on Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh? PolitiFact offers no assessment of the strength of the evidence. The article notes Anita Hill supposedly had corroborating witnesses, but does nothing to emphasize that point of contrast with the Blasey Ford allegations. Blasey Ford had no helpful corroboration from the time period the incident allegedly occurred. And PolitiFact somehow fails to mention it.

PolitiFact's Reade/Biden story, in contrast, puts focus on the evidence, albeit with signs of bias against Reade.

Spinning the Reade Evidence

Regarding the Larry King Live episode where Reade's mother apparently talked to King about an incident regarding her daughter, PolitiFact left out details supporting Reade's account. PolitiFact allowed excessive doubt to hang over the idea that it was Reade's mother who called:

On April 24, the Intercept reported on an August 1993 Larry King Live episode in which a woman calls into the CNN show to discuss her daughter’s "problems" with a senator. Reade says that caller was her mother, who has since died.

So all we have is Reade's word for it?

No.

Circumstantial evidence PolitiFact left out strongly supports Reade's account. The time frame (1993) matches. PolitiFact mentions the call occurred in 1993 but does not remind readers how this helps support Reade's account.

More importantly, the show identified the caller with the town San Luis Obispo. That's where Reade's mother lived (The Tribune, San Luis Obispo).

The woman who says former Vice President Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 used to live in Morro Bay and apparently returned here shortly after the alleged incident.

Video uncovered over the weekend and first reported by The Intercept shows an August 1993 segment on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in which a caller from San Luis Obispo County later confirmed by media outlets to be the mother of former Biden staffer Tara Reade appears to confirm that Reade had told her mother of an alleged sexual assault by Biden, who is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president.

Read more here: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article242343826.html#storylink=cpy

PolitiFact saw no reason for its readers to know that.

Note the story we quoted from The Tribune ran on April 28, 2020. PolitiFact's fact check published on April 30, 2020. In fact, CNN had reported the San Luis Obispo connection on April 25, 2020. And PolitiFact doesn't have it figured out by April 30?

Can an unbiased source leave out something like that?

When PolitiFact assures its readers it is unbiased it is lying to them, if not to itself.

Nothing To See Here: Stephanopoulos Interviews Joe Biden

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden appeared on "This Week" with interviewer George Stephanopoulos on Feb. 9, 2020.

Biden made a number of questionable claims during the interview, particularly where he claimed President Donald Trump has never condemned white supremacy (Washington Examiner).

Biden also said the 2009 stimulus bill passed by Democrats and the Obama administration had no waste or fraud to it.

For our money, a left-leaning operation like PoliitFact is likely to ignore Biden's claims on "This Week" in favor of getting to the bottom of whether Biden was quoting actor John Wayne when he ("jokingly") called a woman a "lying dog-faced pony soldier."

I guess we'll see!

PolitiFact unfairly harms Joe Biden

On May 6, 2019, PolitiFact fact-checked a claim from Democratic Party presidential hopeful (and frontrunner) Joe Biden.

Biden said he was "always" labeled as one of the most liberal Democrats in Congress.

PolitiFact rated Biden's claim "False." Perhaps the rating is fair. But PolitiFact's would-be paraphrase of Biden's claim, below, treats Biden unfairly.

We think there's room for one to count as a "staunch liberal" without always counting as a one of the most liberal.

PolitiFact, for purposes of its headline, changed Biden's claim from one to the other. In terms of its messaging, PolitiFact offers the opinion that Biden does not count as a staunch liberal.

We think fact checks should stick to the facts and not make headlines out of their opinions. PolitiFact's opinion, trumpeted above its fact check, unfairly harmed Biden.


Note: We have always said that PolitiFact's problems go beyond left-leaning bias. PolitiFact represents fact-checking done poorly. The bad fact-checking unfairly harms right and left, with the right getting the worst of it.