Lauren Carroll cannot contain herself

PolitiFact/PunditFact writer Lauren Carroll couldn't resist pushing back against criticism she received on her story looking at the containment of ISIS.

Carroll suggested on Twitter that Breitbart.com's John Nolte had not read her fact check. The evidence?

1) I am the only byline on the story 2) I fact-checked Ben Rhodes, not Obama. @NolteNC— Lauren Carroll (@LaurenFCarroll) November 16, 2015

The fact is that PunditFact gave Carroll's story more than one presentation.

In one of the presentations, a version of Carroll's story was combined with another story from a Sunday morning news show. That second version of the story has Linda Qiu listed on the byline. So Carroll's claim she's the only one on the byline rates a "Half True" on the Hack-O-Meter. Combined with her whinge about fact-checking Obama proxy (deputy national security advisor) Ben Rhodes instead of President Obama, Carroll provides an astonishingly thin defense of her work.

The critiques from Breitbart.com and the Washington Examiner both made the point that Obama was answering a question about ISIS' strength, not the range of its geographical control. Carroll completely accepted Rhodes' spin and ignored the point of the question Obama was asked.

Where's Carroll's explanation of her central error? It's certainly not in her clumsy jabs at John Nolte.

ISIS "contained"?

When President Obama called ISIS ("ISIL") "contained" in a televised interview on Nov. 12, 2015, other politicians, including at least one Democrat, gave him some grief over the statement.

Mainstream fact checker PunditFact came to the president's defense. PunditFact said Obama was just talking about territorial expansion, so what he said was correct.

Conservative media objected.

John Nolte from Breitbart.com:

PolitiFact’s transparent sleight-of-hand comes from basing its “True” rating — not on the question Obama is asked — but how the President chose to answer it.

Stephanopoulos asks, “But ISIS is gaining strength aren’t they?”

T. Becket Adams from the Washington Examiner:

PunditFact has rated the Obama administration's claim that the Islamic State has been "contained" as "true," even after a recent series of ISIS-sponsored events around the world have claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians.

For the fact-checker, the White House's doesn't believe ISIS is no longer a global threat, as fatal attacks last week in Beirut and Paris would show. The president and his team merely believe that the insurgent terrorist group controls a smaller portion of the Middle East today than it did a few months ago.

We think PunditFact has a bit of a point when it claims the president's remarks are taken out of context. But as Nolte and Adams point out, the specific context of the Obama interview was the strength of ISIS, not its territorial expansion.

If the president was saying that containing ISIL's geographic control equates with containing its strength, then PunditFact ends up taking the president out of context to justify claiming the president was taken out of context.

There's something not quite right about that.


Clarification Dec. 10, 2015: Changed "wasn't" to "was" in the next-to-last paragraph

Breitbart News and Eric Wemple on fact checkers

The April 17 installment of Breitbart News' interview with the Washington Post's Eric Wemple features a section on fact checking. John Nolte, the Breitbart News interviewer, let Wemple turn the tables on which was conducting the interview, but on the bright side Nolte brings makes points Wemple probably wouldn't touch.

No. 1 highlight :

EW: Here are my thoughts on that specifically, and I told Glenn the same thing: You are saying that the Washington Post disproportionately targeted Republicans, and that’s fine. My only point is that I don’t think anyone can expect politicians from any party to lie at an even rate.

BNN: That wasn’t my approach with the Washington Post, though. My argument wasn’t that Kessler was calling more Republicans liars, my issue was that, by 2-to-1, Republican statements were chosen for the fact check treatment.

Credit Nolte with correcting Wemple's straw man. But the problem with the Fact Checker and PolitiFact comes at the point story selection and truth ratings intersect. Neither one tells the whole story by itself.

Nolte follows up by emphasizing the subjectivity of the ratings. Wemple offers a counter of sorts: That criticism also comes from the left.

From this point in the interview, Wemple stops giving his take and the rest of the fact checking section has Wemple prompting Nolte for his take. There's no admission from Wemple that the ratings are subjective. Wemple's abandonment of the issue leaves an implicit "the fact checkers are criticized from both sides so they must be doing something right" argument.

BNN: When PolitiFact fact checks a quip from Ted Cruz about Iran celebrating “Hate America Day” — everyone knows what he means, but they still call him a liar. It just goes too far. A subjective decision is made to get literal so Cruz can be called a liar. Kessler did this one once where Romney said Obama had never gone to Israel — and that was a fact. But Romney got Pinocchios because Kessler made a subjective decision to make certain context relevant. That’s an opinion column, not a fact check.

EW: PolitiFact is big on context too. Like the time Rachel Maddow went crazy on them. In a State of the Union speech, Obama took credit for creating so many jobs and PolitiFact said that wasn’t entirely true because those jobs were not created as a result of his policies.

BNN: Exactly!

EW: You think she’s right about that.

BNN: I think she’s dead right about that. That’s a subjective decision to bring in subjective context. Put it on the opinion pages.

EW: And you think that cudgel is used more often against Republicans.

BNN: Much more often.

Do you agree that the ratings are subjective, Eric Wemple? If so, then what does that say about claims that harsher ratings of Republicans show that Republicans simply lie more?

The meat of this issue comes from the fact checkers' framing of political truth-telling: Republicans lie more. But the fact checkers' methods remove the foundation for the frame.

Big Journalism: "Politifact Yet to Report Two Glaring Falsehoods in Obama's Reelection Doc"

From earlier this year (March), Big Journalism's John Nolte took PolitiFact to task for its kindly treatment of the Obama documentary doubling as a campaign ad.

Nolte claimed PolitiFact missed at least two big whoppers in the film.  First, GM's supposed repayment of its bailout loans (PolitiFact later graded that claim "Half True"--see below).  Second, the repeated tale of Obama's mother supposedly denied health insurance coverage.

Nolte:

Politifact took a long hard look at the Obama reelection propaganda film and found it to be … mostly true!

Yep, 3 "mostly true's" to 1 "mostly untrue."

Never saw that coming. 

 Yes, PolitiFact succeeded in giving the documentary a favorable frame.

One of the claims PolitiFact found "Mostly True" was actually very misleading.  It portrayed President Bush as giving the auto companies money with no strings attached while Obama's strong leadership held the companies accountable.  The loans from the Bush administration came with plenty of strings, including the requirement that by March the recipients present the Obama administration with a plan for achieving solvency.

PolitiFact cuts Nolte's number from two to one

To PolitiFact's partial credit, it updated its story with a fact check of the claim that Chrysler and GM repaid their loans.

PolitiFact fails to receive full credit because the applicable standard doesn't pass the sniff test when paired with the standard recently applied to Mitt Romney.  In Romney's case a true statement was called misleading and was ruled "Mostly False."  The film made a partially true statement that was misleading and received a "Half True."

PolitiFact's combination of story selection bias and biased fact checking served President Obama well.

Big Journalism: "VA GOP Pushes Back Against PolitiFact, Shows Other States the Way"

Big Journalism's John Nolte didn't take long to weigh in on the Republican Party of Virginia's challenge to PolitiFact Virginia's objectivity:

PolitiFact isn't just a national cancer on all of us. This reprehensible outfit also "fact-checks" in a number of individual states, including the crucial swing states of Florida, Wisconsin, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Virginia.

Unfortunately, my lack of superpowers makes it impossible for me to monitor the left-wing propaganda PolitiFact is surely spewing in each individual state. Thankfully, though, the Republican Party of Virginia has had enough.

Nolte's spirited rant is worth a full read, but we'll register some qualified disagreements.

If PolitiFact is a cancer it's often benign.  The fact checks are in the ballpark enough so that radical surgery probably doesn't serve as the answer.  And, in fact, the response from the Republican Party of Virginia probably doesn't serve as the model response, largely because it's too late to serve as a timely corrective for any misinformation it detects and because its format discourages people from reading it (PFB will give it a closer look over time).

On the good side, this type of response from the party does a great deal to bring attention to PolitiFact's many issues, which are best highlighted by research like that of Eric Ostermeier and collected evaluations like the recent set from Ohio Watchdog.

It's pretty easy to find good criticism of PolitiFact.  The challenge comes from getting the information in front of the public to increase people's awareness that PolitiFact cannot be trusted in its current form.

Big Journalism: "Politifact: Obama Presided Over Slowest Federal Spending Growth of Any Recent President"

Big Journalism's John Nolte comes through with a story on PolitiFact's role in supporting Rex Nutting's misleading claims about President Obama's role in expanding federal spending.

Nolte makes some statements about PolitiFact's motivations that we no not necessarily agree with, but his post hits the central issue with a powerful broadside (assisted by Jim Pethokoukis):

Now to the facts, which I will turn over to the Enterprise Blog's indispensible Jim Pethokoukis. It should be noted that Pethokoukis is not taking on Politifact but rather the nonsense that Politifact laughably proclaimed as mostly true: [emphasis added]

Nutting arrives at that 1.4% number by assigning 2009—when spending surged nearly 20%—to George W. Bush: “The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress. Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.”

Let me complete the metaphor for Nutting: “Then as those runners scored, Obama kept putting more on base.”

Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it. Only by establishing 2009 as the new baseline, something Republican budget hawks like Paul Ryan feared would happen, does Obama come off looking like a tightwad. Obama has turned a one-off surge in spending due to the Great Recession into his permanent New Normal through 2016 and beyond.

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, NOWHERE is this pertinent piece of context included anywhere in Politifact's 1300 word analysis.

Nolte's identification of the central problem agrees with the one I posted at Sublime Bloviations, for what it's worth.  A significant portion of the increased spending in 2009 was one-time spending, much of it in the form of loans, to stabilize the banking system.  Using that year as a baseline for later increases is misleading, period.  And Nolte's right that PolitiFact ignores that critical piece of context.

This bit of partisan and journalistic hackery, however, is a new low. Intentionally and dishonestly, Politifact only reports on the context that backs up the pro-Obama sleight-of-hand while the only context that matters is completely ignored. What we have here is nothing short of lying through a deliberate act of omission.

I find it hard to disagree, even though I try to give PolitiFact's journalists the benefit of the doubt as to their conscious motivations.

Big Journalism: "2012 Preview: Who Will Fact-Check the Corrupt MSM’s Cherished PolitiFact?"

Big Journalism's John Nolte forecasts PolitiFact's role in the 2012 election, using a rambling account of the organization's checkered past.  Nolte's dead-on with his assessment that PolitiFact turned popular liberal opinion into "fact" with its "Lie-of-the-Year" selections and provides music to our ears with his call to hold PolitiFact to account:

We are all activists now. Get involved. Call these people out. Spread the word.

At the risk of sounding corny, this is about our country and it is everyone’s job to watch the self-appointed Watchmen.

Hear, hear.