Justin Katz: "PolitiFact RI Bends Reality to Protect the Bureaucracy"

Justin Katz has a solid history of criticizing PolitiFact, particularly the Providence Journal's PolitiFact Rhode Island.

We belatedly recognize a criticism Katz wrote back in August 2015 posted at the Ocean State Current:

A Rhode Island conservative can only be grateful, I suppose, that PolitiFact RI — the long-standing shame of the Providence Journal — managed to get the word “true” somewhere in its rating of the following statement from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity:

Rhode Island will become just the second state to mandate the vaccine … and the only state to do so by regulatory fiat, without public debate, and without consideration from the elected representatives of the people.

Katz catches PolitiFact Rhode Island (the Providence Journal) rating a statement "Half True" for referring to a vaccine "mandate" just as the Providence Journal had done.

Who needs consistency when you're a fact checker?

Visit the Ocean State Current to read the whole of Katz's brief-but-thorough discrediting of PolitiFact Rhode Island's fact check.

Justin Katz: 'Friday Fun: “PolitiFact Can”'

We've shared material from Rhode Island's Justin Katz with our readers before, but today we're honored to share Katz's parody of PolitiFact through the classic song "The Candyman."

This is just a teaser, so click on the link at the bottom to appreciate every tuneful word.

Who could take a true thing
Sprinkle it with spin
Cover it with context ’till the truth is wearing thin?
 
PolitiFact.  PolitiFact can.

Friday Fun: “PolitiFact Can”

Don't forget to read Katz's short description of the fact check that moved him to post the parody. It serves as yet another piece of evidence helping to show PolitiFact's tilt to the left.

Bravo, Justin Katz. Good laughs making a good point.

Anchor Rising: "Abortion Question Shows PolitiFact RI's Bias and Ignorance"

Blogger Justin Katz of Rhode Island's "Anchor Rising" recently hit PolitiFact for its poor handling of the abortion issue in a fact check of Jon O'Brien.  O'Brien serves as president of the self-explanatory group Catholics for Choice.

Katz makes great points about the ignorance of Roman Catholic doctrine displayed in the fact check.

Katz:

(I)n order that I may exorcise today's demon, I have to point out the ignorance and bias on display in Eugene Emery's finding that it is "mostly true" that "only 14 percent of Catholics agree with the Vatican's position that abortion should be illegal."
An objective assessment must acknowledge that there are two parts to the question, with a third qualifier necessary for an understanding of the results:

1. What is the Church's position on the matter?
2. Do Catholics agree with that position?
3. In what sense are the respondents "Catholic"?

Katz goes on to show that PolitiFact's fact-finding fudges on all three points.  PolitiFact failed to look into the crucial term "direct abortion" in the portion of the catechism it quoted and made no effort to correlate the actual Catholic doctrines to the poll data.

Katz covers it all and then some, so pay a visit and read it through.

It's worth adding that many Catholics out of agreement with Vatican teaching on abortion think they agree with Vatican teaching on abortion.  Using such statistics often matches a fallacious pattern of argument.

Anchor Rising: "More Bias on Display"

JD and I only got started with PolitiFact Bias in early 2011.  That puts us a few years behind in highlighting excellent examples others have found that help show PolitiFact's left-leaning bias.

Thanks to the new "PolitiFarce" tag at Anchor Rising I ran across this stellar example from Justin Katz:

The statement being addressed is that "over half of the foreign-born population in Rhode Island is white," and the findings were as follows:

Brown directed us to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey, 2006-2008, which includes three-year estimates of foreign-born populations in the United States. Specifically, he said he was citing the figures showing that 45.2 percent of foreign-born Rhode Islanders are white. That's not more than half. ...
Drawing from data in the 2006-2008 survey, the census said that 32 percent of foreign-born people, about one third, are white alone, not Hispanic or Latino. ...
A one-year report from 2009 showed that 30 percent of Rhode Island respondents identified themselves as "white alone, not Hispanic or Latino."

So, judged by the statistic that Brown incorrectly thought he should be using, his statement was only false by a little; judged by the appropriate statistic, Brown's statement was false by a lot. On what grounds did PolitiFact give him a "half true"?

Indeed, upon examination of PolitiFact's argument it is difficult to see what portion of Steve Brown's statement, if any, was true.

It's worth noting that this story by PolitiFact did attempt to address Brown's underlying point.  PolitiFact's standards (using the term advisedly) call for giving the underlying point the greatest emphasis in a numbers claim.

But trying to understand PolitiFact's approach on that basis simply leads to more trouble.

PolitiFact:

In the end, Brown's underlying claim that the state police investigate Hispanics more often than non-Hispanics for immigration violations is supported by the department's own numbers. Of the 92 people investigated, 71 were from Latin American countries.

The most obvious problem is the small sample size.  But the bigger problem is PolitiFact's supposed identification of Brown's "underlying claim" that Hispanics were investigated more often than non-Hispanics.  If that was Brown's underlying claim then there should have been no reason to look at race percentages among Rhode Island's foreign-born population.  PolitiFact could have just used the numbers 71 and 92 and had done with it with a glowing "True" rating.  But clearly Brown's point was that Hispanics are investigated disproportionately by race, implying racism in the department's methods.  That argument is specious on its face given the aforementioned small sample size and the strong possibility that factors other than race (proximity of the nation of origin, for example) come into play in leading to an investigation.

The "true" in Brown's statement, then, appears to come from an "underlying claim" that wasn't really Brown's point.  PolitiFact used a superficial factoid to justify bumping Brown up a notch or two (or three).