LIndsey Graham out of context

Here we go again. PolitiFact has had quite a run in 2021 when it comes to taking Republicans' claims out of context.

This latest one forced me to set aside other projects that have crow(d)ed out PolitiFact Bias posts.

Did Sen. Graham say the CBO says the "Build Back Better" Act would amount to $3 trillion in deficit spending. 

He did say that, but PolitiFact took it out of context.

PolitiFact explained to its readers that Graham was talking about a modified version of the "Build Back Better" Act (bold emphasis added):

Graham said the CBO predicted the Build Back Better Act would add $3 trillion to deficits over 10 years.

He’s referring to a bill that’s not the Build Back Better Act. At Graham’s request, the CBO looked at the impact of extending the temporary programs in the bill for a full 10 years. That is an assessment of a hypothetical situation, not the bill at hand. 

We rate this claim False.

What's the problem with PolitiFact's reasoning?

It was clear in context that Graham was talking about the CBO's scoring of permanent versions of the bill's temporary provisions. The Fox News interviewer, Chris Wallace, made that clear at the outset of the interview (bold for the portion PolitiFact may have relied on for its quotation of Graham):

WALLACE: You commissioned the Congressional Budget Office to project how much Build Back Better will cost over the 10 years, assuming that the programs that are in it, the spending programs that are in it, go on for 10 years and are not as in the case with child care just for one year.

GRAHAM: Right.

WALLACE: The CBO found, instead of adding $200 billion to the deficit, it will add $3 trillion to the deficit. But, Senator, the White House says that that's fake because if the programs are extended, they'll find ways to pay for them.

GRAHAM: Well, give me a plan to pay for them then. President Biden said the bill was fully -- fully paid for. Vice President Harris said it was paid for. Schumer, Pelosi, Secretary of Treasury Yellen. The CBO says it's not paid for. It's $3 trillion of deficit spending. It's not $1.75 trillion over 10 years, it's $4.9 trillion.

We doubt PolitiFact's headline version of Graham's statement qualifies as proper application of AP style for quotations. But the main point is that, in context, Graham would be understood to be talking about the added cost of making the temporary measures permanent. And PolitiFact affirms what Graham says about that CBO projection.

So how does Graham warrant a "False" rating if he wasn't trying to fool people into thinking the new CBO scoring was for the version of the bill with the temporary provisions?

PolitiFact's Twist on the Committee For a Responsible Budget

Also of note, PolitiFact's fact check takes the Committee For a Responsible Budget out of context, using a part of one of its articles to make Graham look out of line for citing the CBO's scoring of the bill with the temporary provisions made permanent:

Modified means the CBO scored a bill that’s different from the one on the table.

"These estimates do not reflect what is actually written in the Build Back Better Act nor its official cost for scorekeeping purposes," the deficit hawk group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote. "Lawmakers may choose to allow some provisions to expire, to extend some as written, and to modify some."

That's exactly what the Committee said, but it was in the context of explaining the CBO's alternative scoring and comparing that scoring to the Committee's own alternative scoring of "Build Back Better" with its temporary provisions made permanent (highlights for the portion PolitiFact cherry picked):

Importantly, these estimates do not reflect what is actually written in the Build Back Better Act nor its official cost for scorekeeping purposes. Lawmakers may choose to allow some provisions to expire, to extend some as written, and to modify some. To offset the cost of extending these provisions as President Biden has committed, they would need to more than double current offsets in the bill. Extending programs without these offsets would substantially increase in the debt. $3 trillion of new debt would increase debt to over 116 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2031, up from 107.5 percent under current law.

The Build Back Better Act relies on a substantial amount of short-term policies and arbitrary sunsets to reduce its cost, raising the possibility of deficit-financed extensions in future years. A more robust and fiscally responsible package would not rely on these gimmicks to achieve deficit neutrality.

The second paragraph in particular aligns well with Sen. Graham's criticism of "Build Back Better."

PolitiFact hid that also from its readers, along with the fact that Graham was obviously talking about the CBO's scoring of temporary provisions made permanent.

Such fact-checking is no better than lying.

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).

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.

Trump again tries using hyperbole without a license

President Donald Trump said nobody had heard of "Juneteenth," the name given to a day many use to commemorate the end of U.S. slavery, until he popularized it. So PolitiFact fact-checked whether it was true that nobody had heard of it.

The result was a "Pants on Fire" rating. PolitiFact said millions of people knew about Juneteenth before Trump scheduled a campaign rally for that day.

PolitiFact cited the Wall Street Journal for its quotation of Trump. Here's how PolitiFact presented it to readers:

President Donald Trump took credit for boosting awareness of Juneteenth, a day that marks the end of slavery in America.

"I did something good: I made Juneteenth very famous," Mr. Trump said, in a Wall Street Journal interview. "It’s actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."

PolitiFact claims in its statement of principles it recognizes the literary technique of hyperbole (bold emphasis added):

In deciding which statements to check, we consider these questions:

• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.

Hyperbole involves the use of exaggeration to make a particular point. Hyperbole works as hyperbole when the audience understands that the exaggeration was not meant literally.

It's as though PolitiFact has caught Mr. Trump red-handed, trying to use hyperbole without a license.

We think Trump's statement certainly bears the obvious signs of hyperbole. If literally nobody had heard of Juneteenth before Trump scheduled his campaign rally, then Trump did not merely make Juneteenth very famous. He helped create it by inspiring others. But Trump's words, in fact, suggest that Juneteenth existed as "an important event, an important time" before that. Those words from Trump cue the average reader that "nobody had ever heard of it" was not meant literally but instead meant that Juneteenth was not well known.

Vice President Joe Biden illustrated what Trump likely meant. A (user-created) video clip from C-SPAN shows Biden on June 11, 2020 apparently expressing the belief that "Juneteenth" was the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. The massacre happened on June 1, 1921. Trump's rally was originally scheduled on "Juneteenth,"--June 19, 2020--but was moved back one day to June 20, 2020. The rally took place in Tulsa, which of course was the location of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

If Biden did not know about it then perhaps others did not know about it as well.

Maybe the problem is that PolitiFact does not set partisanship aside when it issues hyperbole licenses.

(Note: we'll add the full complement of tags after publishing, thanks to Blogger's new interface that only remembers one assigned tag when first publishing)

PolitiFact: A peaceful protest is a peaceful protest is a peaceful protest

When President Trump said he supports peaceful protestors, the protectors of democracy at PolitiFact jumped into their batmobile and sprang into action, ready and willing to confront Trump's rhetoric with conflations of constitutional right to assembly with other forms of peaceful protest.

Trump has said before that peaceful protests are the hallmark of democracy.

...

But Trump has also pushed back against protests, especially the Black Lives Matter movement. We reviewed his record.

Did Trump push back against the right to protest or was it against the content of the protest? Do we even care?

To illustrate Trump's pushback against protests, especially Black Lives Matter protests, PolitiFact led with a lengthy subsection on former NFL player Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, while doing his job for an NFL football team, knelt during the National Anthem in support of the Black Lives Matter cause. The performance of the National Anthem precedes the start of NFL games.

It's not a freedom of assembly issue. But if Kaepernick assembled with others peacefully in public to take a knee during a performance of the anthem and Trump opposed the assembly and not the point of the protest, then PolitiFact would have Trump dead to rights.

That's a big "if."

Strike one.

Next up, PolitiFact presented the example of Rep. Maxine Waters, who called for U.S. society to shun and harass the members of Mr. Trump's cabinet. Presumably refusing service and generally harrassing Trump's cabinet on ideological grounds passes as some sort of peaceful pubic protest. PolitiFact made no particular effort to associate Waters' recommended protest with the Black Lives Matter movement, instead attaching it to border policy.

It doesn't seem certain that trying to totally exclude Trump's cabinet from conducting any type of business in public, including dining and grocery shopping, properly counts as a peaceful protest. If everyone followed Waters' prescription the Cabinet would need to grow its own food or else starve unless it met the demands of the peaceful protestors.

Needless to say, PolitiFact doesn't delve into that.

Strike two.

Apparently PolitiiFact finished with Trump's focus in opposition to Black Lives Matter, moving on to Mr. Trump's intolerance of heckling at his campaign rallies.

PolitiFact does not point out that heckling at a private rally open to the public is not a good example of the exercise of the right to free assembly.

Leading up the 2016 election, then-candidate Trump reserved harsh words for protesters who popped up at his rallies, including those whose actions were peaceful.

For PolitiFact, there is no important distinction between showing up to heckle at a campaign rally held in a private venue and the right to public assembly. Peaceful protest is peaceful protest is peaceful protest. I wonder how long I could peacefully protest in Jon Greenberg's office before seeing the issuance of a trespass order?

Greenberg opposes peaceful protest.

See how that works?

Strike three.

But PolitiFact lacks the good grace to return to the dugout after merely three strikes:

When opponents of placing Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court marched and rallied, Trump referred to them as "a mob" and tagged all Democrats in the midterm elections as "too extreme and too dangerous to govern." 

"Republicans believe in the rule of law — not the rule of the mob," Trump tweeted Oct. 11, 2018.

We're not sure how PolitiFact deduced that Trump was talking about peaceful protests in his tweet. He wasn't responding to anybody else's tweet. We suppose that PolitiFact's sole evidence was the date of the tweet plus Trump's use of the word "mob." Because fact-checking?

Here's the tweet:

You don’t hand matches to an arsonist, and you don’t give power to an angry left-wing mob. Democrats have become too EXTREME and TOO DANGEROUS to govern. Republicans believe in the rule of law - not the rule of the mob. VOTE REPUBLICAN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2018

Are we playing "Pin the Context on the Tweet" or what?

And how would opposing giving in to protestors' demands oppose their right to protest? Is it appropriate to conflate opposition to protestors' demands with opposition to their right to peacefully protest?

Isn't that exactly what PolitiFact is doing?

It appears to us that PolitiFact argues that one cannot support peaceful protest without supporting the specific demands of the peaceful protestors.

But that's insane isn't it?

A fair examination of the topic must draw the distinction between supporting the right to protest and supporting the specific cause of the protestors.

Strike four. Go sit down, PolitiFact.

PolitiFact claims, without evidence, Trump touted chloroquine as a coronavirus cure

Should fact checkers hold themselves to the standards they expect others to meet?

We say yes.

Should fact checkers meet the standards they claim to uphold?

We say yes.

What does PolitiFact say?

(President Donald) Trump has touted chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus cure in more than a half-dozen public events since March 19.

PolitiFact published the above claim in an April 8, 2020 PolitiSplainer about hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug doctors have used in the treatment of coronavirus patients.

We were familiar with instances where Mr. Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus sufferers. But we had not heard him call it a cure. Accordingly, we tried to follow up on the evidence PolitiFact offered in support of its claim.

The article did not contain any mention of a source identifying the "half-dozen public events since March 19," so we skipped to the end to look at PolitiFact's source list. That proved disappointing.

We tweeted at the article's authors expressing our dismay at the lack of supporting documentation. Our tweet garnered no reply, no attempt to supply the missing information and no change to the original article.

Of note, when co-author Funke tweeted out a link to the article on April 8 his accompanying description counted as far more responsible than the language in the article itself:

"Here's what you need to know about hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential COVID-19 treatment."

Does "cure" mean the same thing as "potential treatment" in PolitiFactLand?

We've surveyed Mr. Trump's use of the terms "cure" and "game changer" at the White House website and found nothing that would justify the language PolitiFact used of the president.

What else does PolitiFact say?

The burden of proof is on the speaker, and we rate statements based on the information known at the time the statement is made.

 What if the speaker says "Trump has touted chloroquine or hydroxycloroquine as a coronavirus cure"? Does the speaker still have the burden of proof? If the speaker is PolitiFact, that is?

It looks like the fact-checkers have yet again allowed a(n apparently false) public narrative to guide their fact-checking.

PolitiFact absurdly charges Pete Buttigieg with "bad math"

PolitiFact gave some goofy treatment to a claim from Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg.

Buttigieg compared the 10-year unpaid cost of fellow candidate Bernie Sanders' new spending proposals to the current U.S. GDP.

PolitiFact cried foul. Or, more precisely, PolitiFact cried "bad math."

Note that PolitiFact says Buttigieg did "bad math."

PolitiFact's fact check never backs that claim.

If Buttigieg is guilty of bad anything, it was a poor job of providing thorough context for the measure he used to illustrate the size of Sanders "budget hole." Buttigieg was comparing a cumulative 10-year budget hole with one year of U.S. GDP.

PolitiFact notwithstanding, there's nothing particularly wrong with doing that. Maybe Buttigieg should have provided more context, but there's a counterargument to that point: Buttigieg was on a debate stage with a sharply limited amount of time to make his point. In addition, the debate audience and contestants may be expected to have some familiarity with cost estimates and GDP. In other words, it's likely many or most in the audience knew what Buttigieg was saying.

Let's watch PolitiFact try to justify its reasoning:

But there’s an issue with Buttigieg’s basic comparison of Sanders’ proposals to the U.S. economy. He might have been using a rhetorical flourish to give a sense of scale, but his words muddled the math.

The flaw is that he used 10-year cost and revenue estimates for the Sanders plans and stacked them against one year of the nation’s GDP.

PolitiFact tried to justify the "muddled math" charge by noting Buttigieg compared a 10-year cost estimate to a one-year figure for GDP.

But it's not muddled math. The 10-year estimates are the 10-year estimates, mathematically speaking. And the GDP figure is the GDP figure. Noting that the larger figure is larger than the smaller figure is solid math.

PolitiFact goes on to say that the Buttigieg comparison does not compare apples to apples, but so what? Saying an airplane is the size of a football field is also an apples-to-oranges comparison. Airplanes, after all, are not football fields. But the math remains solid: 100 yards equals 100 yards.

Ambiguity differs from error

In fact-checking the correct response to ambiguity is charitable interpretation. After applying charitable interpretation, the fact checker may then consider ways the message could mislead the audience.

If Buttigieg had run a campaign ad using the same words, it would make more sense to grade his claim harshly. Such a message in an ad is likely to reach people without the knowledge base to understand the comparison. But many or most in a debate audience would understand Buttigieg's comparison without additional explanation.

It's an issue of ambiguous context, not "bad math."



Correction Feb. 26, 2018: Omitted the first "i" in "Buttigieg" in the final occurrence in the next-to-last paragraph. Problem corrected.

PolitiFact weirdly unable to answer criticism

Our title plays off a PolitiFact critique Dave Weigel wrote back in 2011 (Slate). PolitiFact has a chronic difficulty responding effectively to criticism.

Most often PolitiFact doesn't bother responding to criticism. But if it makes its liberal base angry enough sometimes it will trot out some excuses.

This time PolitiFact outraged supporters of Democratic (Socialist) presidential candidate Bernie Sanders with a "Mostly False" rating of Sanders' claim that fellow Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg "opposed modest proposals during Barack Obama’s presidency to raise taxes on the wealthy, while advocating for cuts to Medicare and Social Security."

Reactions from left-leaning journalists Ryan Grim and Ryan Cooper were typical of the genre.

The problem isn't that Sanders wasn't misleading people. He was. The problem stems from PolitiFact's inability to reasonably explain what Sanders did wrong. PolitiFact offered a poor explanation in its fact check, appearing to reason that what Sanders said was true but misleading and therefore "Mostly False."

That type of description typically fits a "Half True" or a "Mostly True" rating--particularly if the subject isn't a Republican.

PolitiFact went to Twitter to try to explain its decision.

First, PolitiFact made a statement making it appear that Sanders was pretty much right:

On many occasions, Bloomberg said Medicare and Social Security had to be on the table. And he rejected stand-alone tax hikes on the wealthy.

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) February 19, 2020

Then PolitiFact (rhetorically) asked how the true statements could end up with a "Mostly False" rating. In reply to its own question, we got this:

Because Sanders failed to note the key role of deficit reduction for Bloomberg.

Seriously? Missing context tends to lead to the aforementioned "Mostly True" or "Half True" ratings, not "Mostly False" (unless it's a Republican). Sanders is no Republican, so of course there's outrage on the left.

Anyway, who cuts government programs without having deficit reduction in mind? That's pretty standard, isn't it?

How can PolitiFact be this bad at explaining itself?

In its next explanatory tweet PolitiFact did much better by pointing out Bloomberg agreed the Obama deficit reduction plan should raise taxes, including taxes on wealthy Americans.

That's important not because it's on the topic of deficit reduction but because Sanders's made it sound like Bloomberg opposed tax hikes on the wealthy at the federal level. Recall Sanders' words (bold emphasis added): "modest proposals during Barack Obama’s presidency to raise taxes on the wealthy."

Mentioning the proposals occurred during the Obama presidency led the audience to think Bloomberg was talking about tax hikes at the federal level. But Sanders was talking about Bloomberg's opposition to tax hikes in New York City, not nationally.

PolitiFact mentioned that Bloomberg had opposed the tax hikes in New York, but completely failed to identify Sanders' misdirection.

PolitiFact's next tweet only created more confusion, saying "Sanders’ said Bloomberg wanted entitlement cuts and no tax hikes. That is not what Bloomberg said."

But that's not what Sanders said. 

It's what Sanders implied by juxtaposing mention of the city tax policy with Obama-era proposals for slowing the growth of Medicare and Social Security spending.

And speaking of those two programs, that's where PolitiFact really failed with this fact check. In the past PolitiFact has distinguished, albeit inconsistently, between cutting a government program and slowing its growth. It's common in Washington D.C. to call the slowing of growth a "cut," but such a cut from a higher growth projection differs from cutting a program by making its funding literally lower from one year to the next. Fact checkers should identify the baseline for the cut. PolitiFact neglected that step.

If PolitiFact had noted that Bloomberg's supposed cuts to Social Security and Medicare were cuts to future growth projections, it could have called out Sanders for the misleading imprecision.

PolitiFact could have said the Social Security/Medicare half of Sanders' claim was "Half True" and that taking the city tax policy out of context was likewise "Half True." And if PolitiFact did not want to credit Sanders with a "Half True" claim by averaging those ratings then it could have justified a "Mostly False" rating by invoking the misleading impression Sanders achieved by juxtaposing the two half truths.

 Instead, we got yet another case of PolitiFact weirdly unable to to answer criticism.

PolitiFact as Rumpelstiltskin.

“Round about, round about,
Lo and behold!
Reel away, reel away,
Straw into gold!”

PolitiFact's Nov. 19, 2019 fact check of something President Donald Trump said on the Dan Bongino Show gives us yet another example of a classic fact checker error, the mistake of interpreting ambiguous statements as clear statements.

Here's PolitiFact's presentation of a statement it found worthy of a fact check:

In an interview with conservative show host Dan Bongino, Trump said a false rendition of that call by House Intelligence chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., forced him to release the readout of that call.

"They never thought, Dan, that I was going to release that call, and I really had no choice because Adam Schiff made up a call," Trump said Nov. 15. "He said the president said this, and then he made up a call."

The problem with Trump’s statement is that Schiff spoke after the White House released the memo of the phone call, not before.

 Note that PolitiFact finds a timeline problem with Trump's claim.

But also note that Trump makes no clear statement regarding a timeline. If Trump said "I released the transcript after Schiff did his 'parody' version of the telephone call," then he would have established an order of events. Trump's words imply an order of events, but it is not a hard logical implication (A, therefore B).

PolitiFact treats the case exactly like a hard implication.

Here's why that's the wrong approach.

First, significant ambiguity should always slow a fact-checker's progress toward an interpretation.

Second, Trump gave a speech on Sept 24, 2019 that announced the impending release of the transcript (memorandum of telephone conversation). The "transcript" was released on Sept. 25. Schiff gave his "parody" account of the call the next day, on Sept. 26.  And Trump responded to Schiff's "parody" version of his call on Sept. 30 during an event honoring the late Justice Antonin Scalia:

Adam Schiff — representative, congressman — made up what I said.  He actually took words and made it up.  The reason is, when he saw my call to the President of Ukraine, it was so good that he couldn’t quote from it because it — there was nothing done wrong.  It was perfect.

PolitiFact's interpretation asks us to believe that Trump either forgot what he said on Sept. 30 or else deliberately decided to reverse the chronology.

What motive would support that decision? Is one version more politically useful than the other?

It's not uncommon for people to speak of "having no choice" based on an event subsequent to that choice. The speaker means that the choice would have had to take place eventually.

When a source makes two claims touching the same subject and differ in content, the following rule applies: Use the more clear statement to make sense of the less clear statement.

Fact checkers who manufacture certitudes out of equivocal language give fact-checking a bad name.

They are Rumpelstiltskins, trying to spin straw into gold.


Afters

We would draw attention to a parallel highlighted at (Bryan's) Zebra Fact Check last month.

During a podcast interview Hillary Clinton used equivocal language in saying "they" were grooming Democratic Party presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard as a third-party candidate to enhance Trump's chances of winning the 2020 election.

No fact checker picked out Clinton's claim for a fact check. And that's appropriate, because the identity of "they" was never perfectly clear. Clinton probably meant the Russians, but "probably" doesn't make it a fact.

In that case, the fact checkers picked on those who interpreted Clinton to mean the Russians were grooming Gabbard (implicitly finding that Clinton's ambiguity clearly meant "Republicans").

Fact checkers have no business doing such things.

Until fact checkers can settle on a consistent approach to their craft, we justifiably view it as a largely subjective enterprise.

Reporting on the Mueller Report from the Liberal Bubble

PolitiFact's treatment of things Mueller has fit well with its left-leaning reputation.

A PolitiFact fact check from July 24, 2019 serves as our example.

We would first draw the reader's attention to the way PolitiFact altered Rep. Ratcliffe's claim. Ratcliffe  said Mueller did not follow the special counsel rules. Not following rules may take place though omission or by elaborating on what the rules stipulate. But PolitiFact says Ratcliffe claimed Mueller broke the rules.

We think it's fairly clear that elaborating on the rules counts as failing to follow the rules. It's less clear that elaborating on the rules counts as breaking the rules.

So right off the bat, PolitiFact is spinning Ratcliffe's claim into a straw man that is more easily attacked.

Missing the Point?

Rep. Ratcliffe was repeating a point pretty familiar to conservatives, that the Mueller report failed to follow the special prosecutor statute because Mueller punted on deciding whether to recommend prosecution for obstruction of justice. Conservative pundit and legal expert Andrew McCarthy, for example, has written on the topic.

It's hard to see how PolitiFact's fact check addresses a position like McCarthy's.

PolitiFact contacted three legal experts for comment. But only Mark Osler (University of St. Thomas) was quoted on Ratcliffe's key issue:

Federal regulations say, "At the conclusion of the Special Counsel's work, he or she shall provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel."

"It clearly includes declinations, which is taking no action," Osler said.

We humbly submit to the expert Osler that a declination is not merely a lack of action. Declination, in context, is a decision not to prosecute. An explanation of Special Counsel's decision not to prosecute meets the requirements of the statue. But an unexplained decision not to decide whether to prosecute should not meet the requirements even though it is lack of action.

And, hypothetically, taking no action at all as by not filing the report is taking no action but does not satisfy the statute.

A July 24, 2019 article in Washington Post helps make clear that Mueller pretty much declined to spell out why he declined to recommend prosecution for obstruction of justice:

John Yoo, a former top official in the George W. Bush Justice Department, said he found Mueller’s explanation “rather vague and somewhat mysterious,” and that he may have felt he should defer to the attorney general.

“Like everyone else, I have been trying to infer why he did what he did,” Yoo said.

But Mueller offered little elaboration on his reasoning as he was pressed Wednesday by lawmakers in both parties.

Again, the declination description required in the statute concerns the decision not to prosecute, not the decision not to explain the decision not to prosecute. Lack of action is not an explanation.

PolitiFact's Big Whiff

PolitiFact showed the true quality of its fact-checking by apparently knowing nothing about widely-published reasoning like McCarthy's. It's the Bubble!

Check out this faux pas in PolitiFact's summary:

We found no legal scholar who agreed with Ratcliffe.

PolitiFact could not find articles by Andrew McCarthy?

Couldn't find the comments by David Dorsen in this Newsweek article?

Couldn't find this piece by Alan Dershowitz for The Hill?

Trust fact checkers? Why?

The underlying point saves the day for Bernie Sanders falsehood?

For some reason there are people who believe that if a fact checker checks both sides that means that the fact checker is neutral.

We've kept pointing out that checking both sides is no kind of guarantee of nonpartisanship. It's a simple matter to give harsher ratings to one side while rating both sides. Or softer ratings to one side while rating both sides.

Latest case in point: Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

Sanders claimed that the single-payer health care system in Canada offers "quality care to all people  without out of pocket expenses."

PolitiFact found that the Canadian system does not eliminate out-of-pocket expenses (contradicting Sanders' claim).

And then PolitiFact gave Sanders' claim a "Half True" rating.

Seriously. That's what PolitiFact did.

PolitiFact's summary is remarkable for not explaining how Sanders managed to eke out a "Half True" rating for a false statement. PolitiFact describes what's wrong with the statement (how it's false) and then proclaims the "Half True" ruling:

Sanders said, "In Canada, for a number of decades they have provided quality care to all people without out-of-pocket expenses. You go in for cancer therapy, you don't take out your wallet."

So long as the care comes from a doctor or at a hospital, the Canadian system covers the full cost. But the country’s public insurance doesn’t automatically pay for all services, most significantly, prescription drugs, including drugs needed to fight cancer.

Out-of-pocket spending is about 15 percent of all Canadian health care expenditures, and researchers said prescription drugs likely represented the largest share of that.

The financial burden on people is not nearly as widespread or as severe as in the United States, but Sanders made it sound as though out-of-pocket costs were a non-issue in Canada.

We rate this claim Half True.

See?

PolitiFact says Sanders made it sound like Canadians do not pay out-of-pocket at all for health care. But Canadians do pay a substantial share out of pocket, therefore making it sound like they don't is "Half True."

Republicans, don't get the idea that you can say something PolitiFact describes as false in its fact check and then skate with a "Half True" rating on the "Truth-O-Meter."

PolitiFact's Magic Math on 'Medicare For All' (Updated)

Would you believe that PolitiFact bungled an explainer article on the Democratic Party's Medicare For All proposal?

PolitiFact's Feb. 19, 2019 PolitiSplainer, "Medicare For All, What it is, what it isn't" stumbled into trouble when it delved into the price tag attached to government-run healthcare (bold emphasis added):

How much would Medicare for All cost?

This is the great unknown.

A study of Medicare for All from the libertarian-oriented Mercatus Center at George Mason University put the cost at more than $32 trillion over 10 years. Health finance expert Kenneth Thorpe at Emory University looked at Sanders' earlier version during the 2016 campaign and figured it would cost about $25 trillion over a 10-year span.

Where would the money come from?

Sanders offered some possibilities. He would redirect current government spending of about $2 trillion per year into the program. To that, he would raise taxes on income over $250,000, reaching a 52 percent marginal rate on income over $10 million. He suggested a wealth tax on the top 0.1 percent of households.

PolitiFact introduces the funding issue by mentioning two estimates of the spending M4A would add to the budget. But when explaining how Sanders proposes to pay for the new spending PolitiFact claims Sanders would "redirect current government spending" to cover about $20 trillion of the 25-to-32 trillion increase from the estimates.

Superficially, the idea sounds theoretically possible. If the defense budget was $2 trillion per year, for example, then one could redirect that money toward the M4A program and it would cover a big hunk of the expected budget increase.

But the entire U.S. defense budget is less than $1 trillion per year. So what is the supposed source of this funding?

We looked to the document PolitiFact linked, sourced from Sanders official government website.

We found no proposal from Sanders to "redirect current government spending" to cover M4A.

We found this (bold emphasis added):

Introduction

Today, the United States spends more than $3.2 trillion a year on health care. About sixty-five percent of this funding, over $2 trillion, is spent on publicly financed health care programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs. At $10,000 per person, the United States spends far more on health care per capita and as a percentage of GDP than any other country on earth in both the public and private sectors while still leaving 28 million Americans uninsured and millions more under-insured.

Nothing else in the linked document anywhere near approaches PolitiFact's claim of $2 trillion per year "redirected" into M4A.

It's a Big ($2 trillion per year) Mistake

We do not think Sanders was proposing what PolitiFact said he was proposing. The supposed $2 trillion over 10 years, or $20 trillion, cannot help pay for the $25 trillion cost Thorpe estimated. Nor can it help pay for the $32 trillion cost that Charles Blahous (Mercatus Center) estimated.

Why? The reason is simple.

Both of those estimates pertained to costs added to the budget by M4A.

In other words, current government spending on healthcare programs was already accounted for in both estimates. The estimates deal specifically with what M4A would add to the budget on top of existing costs.

Need proof? Good. The expectation of proof is reasonable.

Mercatus Center/Blahous

M4A would add approximately $32.6 trillion to federal budget commitments during the first 10 years of its implementation (2022–2031).

Clear enough? The word "add" shows that Blahous is talking about costs over and above current budget commitments to government health care programs.

Page 5 of the full report features an example illustrating the same point:

National health expenditures (NHE) are currently projected to be $4.562 trillion in 2022. Subtracting the $10 billion decrease in personal health spending, as calculated in the previous paragraph, and crediting the plan with $83 billion in administrative cost savings results in an NHE projection under M4A of $4.469 trillion. Of this, $4.244 trillion in costs would be borne by the federal government. Compared with the current projection of $1.709 trillion of federal healthcare subsidy costs, this would be a net increase of $2.535 trillion in annual costs, or roughly 10.7 percent of GDP.

Performing similar calculations for each year results in an estimate that M4A would add approximately $32.6 trillion to federal budget commitments during the period from 2022 through 2031, with the annual cost increase reaching nearly 12.7 percent of GDP by 2031 and continuing to rise afterward.

The $1.709 trillion in "federal healthcare subsidy costs" represents expected spending under Medicare, Medicaid and other federally supported health care programs. That amount is already accounted for in Blahous' estimate of the added cost of M4A.

Kenneth Thorpe

Thorpe's description of his estimate doesn't make perfectly clear that he is estimating added costs. But his mention of the Sanders' campaign's estimate of $1.377 trillion per year provides the contextual key (bold emphasis added):

The plan is underfinanced by an average of nearly $1.1 trillion per year. The Sanders campaign estimates the average annual financing of the plan at $1.377 trillion per year between 2017 and 2026. Over the same time period, we estimate the average financing requirements of $2.47 trillion per year--about $1.1 trillion more on average per year over the same time period. 

When we look at the estimate from the Sanders campaign we find that the $1.377 trillion estimate pertained to added budget costs, not the gross cost of the plan.

Friedman's Table 1 makes it plain, listing 13,773 (billions) as "added public spending":

It's magical math to take the approximately $27 trillion in "continued government spending" to pay down the $13.8 trillion in "new public spending." But PolitiFact seems to suggest Sanders would use current spending to pay for his program's new spending.

Again, we do not think that is what Sanders suggests.

The liberal bloggers at PolitiFact simply botched the reporting.

Our Eye On Corrections

We think this PolitiBlunder clearly deserves a correction and apology from PolitiFact.

Will it happen?

Great question.

As part of our effort to hold PolitiFact (and the International Fact-Checking Network) accountable, we report PolitiFact's most obvious errors through the recommended channels to see what happens.

In this case we notified the author, Jon Greenberg, via Twitter about the problem. We also used Twitter (along with Facebook) to try to draw PolitiFact's attention to the mistake. When those outreach efforts drew no acknowledgement we did as PolitiFact recommends and emailed a summary of the problem to "truthometer@politifact.com."

Should PolitiFact continue to let the error stand, we will report the error to the International Fact-Checking Network (under the auspices of the Poynter Institute, just like PolitiFact) and track whether that organization will hold PolitiFact to account for its mistakes.

We will update this section to note future developments or the lack of future developments.

Update Feb. 27, 2019

A full week after we started informing PolitiFact of the mistake in its Medicare PolitiSplainer, the bad reporting in the financing section remains unchanged.

PolitiFact: One Standard For Me and Another For Thee 2

PolitiFact executed another of its superlative demonstrations of hypocrisy this month.

After PolitiFact unpublished its botched fact check about Claire McCaskill and the affordability of private aircraft, it published a corrected (?) fact check changing the rating from "False" to "Half True." Why "Half True" instead of "True"? PolitiFact explained it gave the "Half True" rating because the (Republican) Senate Leadership Fund failed to provide adequate context (bold emphasis added).

The Senate Leadership Fund says McCaskill "even said this about private planes, ‘that normal people can afford it.’"

She said those words, but the footage in the ad leaves out both the lead-in comment that prompted McCaskill’s remark and the laughter that followed it. The full footage makes it clear that McCaskill was wrapping up a policy-heavy debate with a private-aviation manager and with a riff using the airport manager’s words. In context, he was referring to "normal" users of private planes, as opposed to "normal" Americans more generally.

We rate the statement Half True.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that PolitiFact is exactly right (we don't buy it) in the way it recounts the problems with the missing context.

Assuming the missing context in a case like this makes a statement "Half True," how in the world does PolitiFact allow itself to get away the shenanigan PolitiFact writer Jon Greenberg pulled in his article on Sen. Elizabeth Warren's DNA test?

Greenberg (bold emphasis added):

Trump once said she had as much Native American blood as he did, and he had none. At a July 5 rally in Montana, he challenged her to take a DNA test.

"I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian," Trump said.

Trump now denies saying that, but in any event, Warren did get tested and the results did find Native American ancestry.

Trump said those words, but Greenberg's version of the quote leaves out more than half of Trump's sentence, as well as comments that came before. The full quotation makes it clear that Trump's million dollar challenge was presented as a potential future event--a hypothetical, in other words. In context, Trump was referring to a potential future challenge for Warren to take a DNA test as opposed to making the $1 million challenge at that moment.

PolitiFact takes Trump just as much, if not more, out of context as the Senate Leadership Fund did with McCaskill.

How does that kind of boundless hypocrisy pass the sniff test? Are the people at PolitiFact that accustomed to their own stench?


Afters

PolitiFact's "In Context" presentation of Trump's million-dollar challenge to Sen. Warren, confirming what we're saying about PolitiFact's Jon Greenberg ignoring the surrounding context (bole emphasis in the original):

(L)et's say I'm debating Pocahontas. I promise you I'll do this: I will take, you know those little kits they sell on television for two dollars? ‘Learn your heritage!’ … And in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she is of Indian heritage because her mother said she has high cheekbones — that is her only evidence, her mother said we have high cheekbones. We will take that little kit -- but we have to do it gently. Because we're in the #MeToo generation, so I have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit, and slowly toss it, hoping it doesn't injure her arm, and we will say: ‘I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian.’

See also: Fact Checkers for Elizabeth Warren

Fact Checkers for Elizabeth Warren

Sen.Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) provided mainstream fact checkers a great opportunity to show their true colors. Fact checkers from the PolitiFact and Snopes spun themselves into the ground trying to help Warren excuse her self-identification as a "Native American."

Likely 2020 presidential candidate Warren has long been mocked from the right as "Fauxcahontas" based on her dubious claims of Native American minority status. Warren had her DNA tested and promoted the findings as some type of vindication of her claims.

The fact checkers did their best to help.

PolitiFact

PolitiFact ran Warren's report past four experts and assured us the experts thought the report was legitimate. But the quotations from the experts don't tell us much. PolitiFact uses its own summaries of the experts' opinions for the statements that best support Warren. Are the paraphrases or summaries fair? Trust PolitiFact? It's another example showing why fact checkers ought to provide transcripts of their interactions with experts.

Though the article bills itself as telling us what we can and cannot know from Warren's report, it takes a Mulligan on mentioning Warren's basic claim to minority status. Instead it emphasizes the trustworthiness of the finding of trace Native American inheritance.

At least the article admits that the DNA evidence doesn't help show Warren is of Cherokee descent. There's that much to say in favor of it.

But more to the downside, the article repeats as true the notion that Trump had promised $1 million if Warren could prove Native American ancestry (bold emphasis added):

At a July 5 rally in Montana, he challenged her to take a DNA test.

"I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian," Trump said.

Trump now denies saying that, but in any event, Warren did get tested and the results did find Native American ancestry.

Just minutes after PolitiFact published the above, it published a separate "In Context" article under this title: "In context: Donald Trump's $1 million offer to Elizabeth Warren."

While we do not recommend PolitiFact's transcript as any kind of model journalism (it leaves out quite a bit without using ellipses to show the omissions), the transcript in that article is enough to show the deception in its earlier article (green emphasis added, bold emphasis in the original):

"I shouldn't tell you because I like to not give away secrets. But let's say I'm debating Pocahontas. I promise you I'll do this: I will take, you know those little kits they sell on television for two dollars? ‘Learn your heritage!’ … And in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she is of Indian heritage because her mother said she has high cheekbones — that is her only evidence, her mother said we have high cheekbones. We will take that little kit -- but we have to do it gently. Because we're in the #MeToo generation, so I have to be very gentle. And we will very gently take that kit, and slowly toss it, hoping it doesn't injure her arm, and we will say: ‘I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian.’ And let’s see what she does. I have a feeling she will say no. But we’ll hold that for the debates.

Note that very minor expansion of the first version of the Trump quotation torpedoes claims that Trump has already pledged $1 million hinging on Warren's DNA test results: "We will say." So PolitiFact's first story dutifully leaves it out and reinforces the false impression Trump's promise was not a hypothetical.

Despite clear evidence that Trump was speaking of a hypothetical future situation, PolitiFact's second article sticks with a headline suggesting an existing pledge of $1 million--though it magnanimously allows at the end of the article that readers may draw their own conclusions.

It's such a close call, apparently, that PolitiFact does not wish to weigh in either pro or con.

Our call: The fact checkers liberal bloggers at PolitiFact contribute to the spread of misinformation.

Snopes

Though we think PolitiFact is the worst of the mainstream fact checkers, the liberal bloggers at Snopes outdid PolitiFact in terms of ineptitude this time.

Snopes used an edited video to support its claim that it was "True" Trump pledged $1 million based on Warren's DNA test.

Fact Check: Did Trump offer $1 million if Elizabeth Warren could show Native American heritage?

The president denied making the offer, but video from a July 2018 speech seemingly demonstrates otherwise.

Full Report: https://t.co/gcsUAxBcNh @elizabethforma @realDonaldTrump pic.twitter.com/mLZpz7kaJl

— snopes.com (@snopes) October 16, 2018

The fact check coverage from PolitiFact and Snopes so far makes it look like Warren will be allowed to skate on a number of apparently false claims she made in the wake of her DNA test announcement. Which mainstream fact-checker is neutral enough to look at Warren's suggestion that she can legitimately cash in on Trump's supposed $1 million challenge?

It's a good thing we have non-partisan fact checkers, right?


Afters

Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker

The Washington Post Fact Checker, to our knowledge, has not produced any content directly relating to the Warren DNA test.

That aside, Glenn Kessler has weighed in on Twitter. Some of Kessler's (re)tweets have underscored the worthlessness of the DNA test for identifying Warren as Cherokee.

On the other hand, Kessler gave at least three retweets for stories suggesting Trump had already pledged $1 million based on the outcome of a Warren DNA test.

So Kessler's not joining the other two in excusing Warren. But he's in on the movement to brand Trump as wrong even when Trump is right.

Taylor Swift's Candidates Lag in Polls--PolitiFact Hardest Hit?

We noted pop star Taylor Swift's election endorsement statement drew the selective attention of the fact checkers left-leaning bloggers at PolitiFact.

We've found it hilarious over the past several days that PolitiFact has mercilessly pimped its Swiftian fact check repeatedly on Twitter and Facebook.

Now with polls showing Swift's candidates badly trailing the Republican counterparts we can only wonder: Is PolitiFact the entity hardest hit by Swift's failure (so far) to make a critical difference in putting the Democrats over the top?

The Biggest Problem with PolitiFact's Fact Check of Taylor Swift

The Swift claim PolitiFact chose to check was the allegation that Tennessee Republican Marsha Blackburn voted against the Violence Against Women Act. We noted that PolitiFact's choice of topic, given the fact that Swift made at least four claims that might interest a fact checker, was likely the best choice from the liberal point of view.

Coincidentally(?), PolitiFact pulled the trigger on that choice. But as we pointed out in our earlier post, PolitiFact still ended up putting its finger on the scales to help its Democratic Party allies.

It's true Blackburn voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act (PolitiFact ruled it "Mostly True").

But it's also true that Blackburn voted to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.

Contradiction?

Not quite. VAWA came up for reauthorization in 2012.Blackburn co-sponsored a VAWA reauthorization bill and voted in favor. It passed the House with most Democrats voting in opposition.

And the amazing thing is that the non-partisan fact checkers liberal bloggers at PolitiFact didn't mention it. Not a peep. Instead, PolitiFact began its history of the reauthorization of the VAWA in 2013:

The 2013 controversy
The Violence Against Women Act was two decades old in 2013 when Congress wrestled with renewing the funds to support it. The law paid for programs to prevent domestic violence. It provided money to investigate and prosecute rape and other crimes against women. It supported counseling for victims.

The $630 million price tag was less the problem than some specific language on non-discrimination.

The Senate approved its bill first on Feb. 12, 2013, by a wide bipartisan margin of 78 to 22. That measure redefined underserved populations to include those who might be discriminated against based on religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

Starting the history of VAWA reauthorization in 2013 trims away the bothersome fact that Blackburn voted for VAWA reauthorization in 2012. Keeping that information out of the fact check helps sustain the misleading narrative that Republicans like Blackburn are okay with violence against women.

As likely as not that was PolitiFact's purpose.

This Is How Selection Bias Works

Here at PolitiFact Bias we have consistently harped on PolitiFact's vulnerability to selection bias.

Selection bias happens, in short, whenever a data set fails to serve as representative. Scientific studies often simulate random selection to help achieve a representative sample and avoid the pitfall of selection bias.

PolitiFact has no means of avoiding selection bias. It fact checks the issues it wishes to fact check. So PolitiFact's set of fact checks is contaminated by selection bias.

Is PolitiFact's selection bias influenced by its ideological bias?

We don't see why not. And Taylor Swift will help us illustrate the problem.

PolitiFact looked at Swift's claim that Sen. Marsha Blackburn voted against the Violence Against Women Act. That fact check comes packed with the usual PolitiFact nonsense, such as overlooking Blackburn's vote in favor of VAWA in 2012. But this time our focus falls on PolitiFact's decision to look at this Swift claim instead of others.

What other claims did PolitiFact have to choose from? Let's have a look at the relevant part of Swift's statement:

I cannot support Marsha Blackburn. Her voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me. She voted against equal pay for women. She voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act, which attempts to protect women from domestic violence, stalking, and date rape. She believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples. She also believes they should not have the right to marry. These are not MY Tennessee values.

 Now let's put the different claims in list form:

• Blackburn voted against equal pay for women.
• Blackburn voted against the Reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act
• Blackburn believes businesses have a right to refuse service to gay couples
• Blackburn also believes they should not have the right to marry

PolitiFact says it checks claims that make it wonder "Is that True?" 

The first statement regarding equal pay for women makes a great candidate for that question. Congress hasn't had to entertain a vote that would oppose equal pay for women (for equal work) for many years. It's been the law of the land since the 1960s. Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Don't make me laugh.

The second statement is a great one to check from the Democratic Party point of view, for the Democrats made changes to the VAWA with the likely intent of creating voter appeals based on conservative opposition to those changes.

The third statement concerns belief instead of the voting record, so that makes it potentially more challenging to check. On its face, Swift's claim looks like a gross oversimplification that ignores concerns about constitutional rights of conscience.

The fourth statement, like the third, involves a claim about belief. Also, the fourth statement would likely count as a gross oversimplification. Conservatives opposed to gay marriage tend to oppose same-sex couples asserting every legal advantage that opposite-sex couples enjoy.

PolitiFact chose its best candidate for finding the claim "True" instead of one more likely to garner a "False" rating. It chose the claim most likely to electorally favor Democrats.

Commonly choosing facts to check on that type of basis may damage the election prospects of those unfairly harmed by partisan story selection. People like Sen. Blackburn.

It's a rigged system when employed by neutral and nonpartisan fact checkers who lean left.

And that's how selection bias works.

Beware, lest Trump & PolitiFact turn your liberal talking point into a falsehood!

PolitiFact gave President Donald Trump a "False" rating for claiming the GOP tax bill had effectively repealed the Affordable Care Act.

We figured there was a good chance that defenders of the ACA had made the same claim.

Sure enough, we found an example from the prestigious left-leaning magazine The Atlantic. The Google preview tells the story, as does the story's URL, though the story's title tames things a little: "The GOP's High-Risk Move to Whack Obamacare in Its Tax Bill."

The key "repeal" line came from an expert The Atlantic cited in its story (bold emphasis added):

“Make no mistake, repealing the individual mandate is tantamount to repealing the Affordable Care Act,” said Brad Woodhouse, campaign director for Protect Our Care, an advocacy group supportive of the ACA.

Would Woodhouse receive a "False" rating from PolitiFact if it rated his statement?

Would The Atlantic receive a "False" rating from PolitiFact?

Would PolitiFact even notice the claim if it wasn't coming from a Republican?

Afters (other liars who escaped PolitiFact's notice)

"GOP tax bill is just another way to repeal health care." (Andy Slavitt, USA Today)

"Republican tax bill to include Obamacare repeal" (Christian Science Monitor)

"Republicans undermine their own tax reform bill to repeal Obamacare" (Salon)

"Another Obamacare repeal effort doesn't actually have to be in the tax cuts bill, says the guy heading up popular vote loser Donald Trump's Office of Management and Budget." (Daily Kos)

PolitiFact's lying "Lie of the Year" award for 2017 (Updated)

On Dec. 12, 2017, PolitiFact announced its 2017 "Lie of the Year." PolitiFact supposedly gave its award to a particular statement from President Trump.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

"This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won," said President Donald Trump in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in May.

PolitiFact Bias correctly predicted the winner. But even we hardly imagined the Olympic-grade gymnastics the editors of PolitiFact would perform in justifying their selection.

We thought PolitiFact would cross its fingers and hope the Mueller investigation would implicate Trump in some type of illegal collusion with the Russians.

Instead, PolitiFact turned Trump's statement into a complete denial that Russia interfered with the election. Instead of "Trump and Russia" like Trump said, PolitiFact trims the issue down to just "Russia."

No, seriously. PolitiFact did that. Let's start with the headline of its "Lie of the Year" announcement:

2017 Lie of the Year: Russian election interference is a 'made-up story'

Did Trump say anything in the winning statement about Russian election interference being a "made-up" story? We're not seeing it, and PolitiFact does not explain the connection. Maybe in context?

We looked to PolitiFact's original rating of Trump's claim for clues. That story suggested Trump was claiming that Democrats made up the Trump-Russia narrative. PolitiFact said James Comey's report of a "credible allegation" (or "reasonable basis to believe"!) was enough to "rebut" (refute?) Trump's charge that the narrative was made up.

How did PolitiFact know that the "credible allegation" was not made up and not by a Democrat? We do not know. PolitiFact will have to answer that one. We can only marvel at the idea that a "reasonable basis to believe" unequivocally serves as a foundation for stating something as fact.

Do we think PolitiFact's narrative that Trump completely denied Russian election interference stands up to scrutiny? We do not (Reuters, Jan 6, 2017):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President-elect Donald Trump accepts the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia engaged in cyber attacks during the U.S. presidential election and may take action in response, his incoming chief of staff said on Sunday.

In opposition to PolitiFact's reasoning, we think it much more reasonable to take Trump to mean that the narrative attempting to connect the Trump campaign to Russian meddling has no evidence to back it. If such evidence existed, it would have served to help justify the Robert Mueller investigation. Instead, Mueller was given the job of looking at a broad category of interactions ("collusion") for something that could justify criminal charges.

In fact, PolitiFact's description of what Trump said bears little resemblance to what he said.

PolitiFact (bait in red, switch in blue, highlights added):

Trump could acknowledge the interference happened while still standing by the legitimacy of his election and his presidency — but he declines to do so. Sometimes he’ll state firmly there was "no collusion" between his campaign and Russia, an implicit admission that Russia did act in some capacity. Then he reverts back to denying the interference even happened.

Declining to acknowledge the interference, supposing the Reuters story cited above counts for nothing, is not the same thing as denying the interference ever happened.

If PolitiFact had any clear statement from Trump denying Russia made any effort to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, PolitiFact would have been smart to include it (see the "Afters" section, below).

Lacking that evidence, we conclude that PolitiFact has exaggerated, one might even say "made up," the degree to which President Trump denies Russian election interference.




Afters

We say PolitiFact offered no unequivocal evidence Trump denied all Russian meddling in the U.S. election. But PolitiFact did offer evidence that it perhaps interpreted that way.

We think it fair to let PolitiFact make its case:

Facebook, Google and Twitter have investigated their own networks, and their executives have concluded — in some cases after initial foot-dragging — that Russia used the online platforms in attempts to influence the election.

After all this, one man keeps saying it didn’t even happen.

"This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should've won," said President Donald Trump in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in May.

On Twitter in September, Trump said, "The Russia hoax continues, now it's ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?"

And during an overseas trip to Asia in November, Trump spoke of meeting with Putin: "Every time he sees me, he says, ‘I didn't do that.’ And I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it." In the same interview, Trump referred to the officials who led the intelligence agencies during the election as "political hacks."

Trump continually asserts that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election is fake news, a hoax or a made-up story, even though there is widespread, bipartisan evidence to the contrary.

 We've covered PolitiFact's trading of "Trump and Russia" for just "Russia."

What "Russia hoax" was continuing? The hoax of Russian interference or the hoax of Trump and Russia collaborating to steal the election from its rightful winner?

If Trump says he thinks Putin's denials are sincere, does that likewise mean that Trump thinks nobody in Russia did anything to interfere with the U.S. election?

Who fact checks like that, not counting liberal bloggers?

Update Dec. 14, 2017: Jeff Adds:

I concur with Bryan's points above but wanted to add my gripes about PolitiFact's latest agitprop.

1) What exactly is "bipartisan evidence"? Can evidence be partisan? Can a fact have a political motive? If the nonpartisans at PolitiFact think so, it would explain a lot.

2) No decent editor should have allowed this line:

Sometimes he’ll state firmly there was "no collusion" between his campaign and Russia, an implicit admission that Russia did act in some capacity.

Huh? On what planet does denying Trump's campaign colluded with the Russians an implied admission the Russians interfered in the election? PolitiFact's argument is a non sequitur, if it even makes sense at all.

3) It seems to be an accepted truth on the left that Russian interference changed the outcome of the election, but is there any compelling evidence of that?

It seems unlikely — though not impossible — that Russia interference changed the outcome of the election. We at PolitiFact have seen no compelling evidence that it did so.

Talk about a buried lede!

The fact is currently the only evidence of Russian "interference" has been a disorganized social media campaign. There's been no evidence of vote tampering, no voting booth intimidation, no vote machine hacking. [Disclosure: I am frequent user of Twitter and Facebook but somehow overcame the onslaught of Russian brainwashing and did not vote for Trump.]

For PolitiFact to describe buying Facebook ads as "a threat to U.S. democracy" is Louise Mensch grade delusion. Further, Holan's assertion that Trump's refusal to acknowledge the "threat to democracy" is begging the question. She asserts as fact Russian interference, to whatever extent it existed, is a threat to America. Perhaps she could prove the threat is real before calling it a lie to deny it.

The premise of PolitiFact's argument rests comfortably in the swamp of liberal media where the words influence, interference, and election action all mean the same thing. Let's turn PolitiFact's trick back against it:

Trump could acknowledge the interference happened while still standing by the legitimacy of his election...

If the legitimacy of the election is a fact, then it's implied the Russians did not interfere in the election, since (using PolitiLogic throughout) if the Russians did interfere in the election, it would not be a legitimate election.

Perhaps PolitiFact chose the Russian "interference" story for their Lie of the Year because it hit so close to home. After all, misleading large swaths of impressionable users by exploiting social media to spread a political agenda with poorly written posts that don't hold up to scrutiny is PolitiFact's bread and butter.

It's hard for me to imagine PolitiFact editor Angie Holan ever persuading someone beyond her bubble that she is a convincing, coherent, and unbiased professional, but maybe that's just the vodka talking.

See you next year, comrades!