Hot Air: "PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year of 2014 falls apart only two months later"

Noah Rothman of the conservative site Hot Air offers a reminder that PolitiFact's 2014 "Lie of the Year" was a train wreck:

Just about two months later, PolitiFact’s LOTY imploded.

“A team of prominent researchers suggested Thursday that limited airborne transmission of the Ebola virus is ‘very likely,’” The Washington Post reported on Thursday, “a hypothesis that could reignite the debate that started last fall after one of the scientists offered the same opinion.”

PolitiFact, remember, bundled all the supposed misinformation about Ebola into one giant and ambiguous "Lie of the Year." George Will's claim that some scientists believe Ebola may pass via a sneeze or a cough was the centerpiece of PolitiFact's award.

In truth, Will's statement was never worthy of a bad rating, let alone inclusion in a group "Lie of the Year" award. We noted at the time PolitiFact's rating relied on playing games with Will's choice of words.

Read the whole of Rothman's latest evaluation, including mentions of blogger Ace and the clip at the end of Will reminding everyone back in October that "settled science" is rarely settled.

Thanks!

We thank the excellent blog Legal Insurrection for making "2014: Another year, another laughable Lie of the Year" "Post of the Day" for Dec. 25, 2014.

What a nice present!

Mailbag meets windbag

PolitiFact published a "Lie of the Year" edition of its "Mailbag" feature on Dec. 22, 2014. Criticism by Hot Air's Noah Rothman drew immediate mention:

Noah C. Rothman at the conservative blog Hot Air took issue with our Lie of the Year choice.

"Some of these assertions (that collectively earned the Lie of the Year) were misleading, but PolitiFact’s central thesis – ‘when combined, the claims edged the nation toward panic’ – is unfalsifiable. In the absence of any questioning of the federal response to the Ebola epidemic, an unlikely prospect given the government’s poor performance, PolitiFact cannot prove there would have been no broader apprehension about the deadly African hemorrhagic fever. In fact, to make that claim would be laughable.

"In response to Ebola, Sierra Leone literally canceled Christmas. In Britain, returning health care workers who may have had contact with an Ebola patient will have a lonely holiday as well. They will be forced by government mandate to isolate themselves for the duration of the 21-day incubation period, despite the protestations of health care workers. If Ebola ‘panic’ exists, it is certainly not limited to America and is not the fault of exclusively conservative lawmakers. … PolitiFact embarrassed itself again today, but I guess that’s hardly news."

Rothman's main criticism was PolitiFact's ridiculous primary focus on George Will's true claim that Ebola could be transmitted through the air by a sneeze or a cough.

PolitiFact's guidelines:

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

Left out: the main part of Rothman's criticism.

PolitiFact=hypocrites.

Commentary: 'PolitiFact’s Ebola Distortions'

Seth Mandel has another deft dissection of PolitiFact's 2014 "Lie of the Year" up at Commentary:

Different statements being grouped together into one “lie”–especially when they’re not lies, even if they’re mistaken–will not do wonders for PolitiFact’s already rock-bottom credibility. But in fact it’s really worse than that. Here’s PolitiFact’s explanation for their choice of “Lie of the Year,” demonstrating beyond any semblance of a doubt that those who run PolitiFact don’t understand the concept around which they’ve supposedly built their business model:

Yet fear of the disease stretched to every corner of America this fall, stoked by exaggerated claims from politicians and pundits. They said Ebola was easy to catch, that illegal immigrants may be carrying the virus across the southern border, that it was all part of a government or corporate conspiracy.
The claims — all wrong — distorted the debate about a serious public health issue. Together, they earn our Lie of the Year for 2014.

You’ll notice right there that PolitiFact engages in its own bit of shameless dishonesty.

Mandel makes a great point about PolitiFact's careless reporting of its "Lie of the Year" selection, a point we're also poised to make by using even more blatant examples from Aaron Sharockman, the editor of PolitiFact's "PunditFact" venture.

It's bad enough to botch the fact-checking end of things. Telling people about the botched fact checks using a new layer of falsehoods and distortions intensifies the deceptive effects.

This is nothing out of the ordinary for PolitiFact.

We'll once again emphasize the point we made in our post yesterday: Naming more than one "Lie of the Year" has some utility when it comes to deflecting criticism. Even Mandel mumbled something about being fair to PolitiFact owing to the multiple winners before he eviscerated their inclusion of Will's claim about the airborne spread of Ebola.

2014: Another year, another laughable Lie of the Year

It's time for our annual criticism of PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" award!

Leading off in a bipartisan spirit, let's note that every single one of PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" award winners have contained some nugget of truth. This year, PolitiFact decisively elected to give the award to many quite different claims, each having something to do with the Ebola virus.

There's nothing like the meat tenderizer approach when wielding the scalpel of truth.

My handicapping job on the Lie of the Year award was pretty close. But PolitiFact threw us another curve this year by choosing two entries from its list of candidates and then throwing a bunch of other somewhat related claims in for good measure.

No, we're not even kidding.

Let's let PolitiFact's editor, Angie Drobnic Holan, tell the story:

[F]ear of the disease stretched to every corner of America this fall, stoked by exaggerated claims from politicians and pundits. They said Ebola was easy to catch, that illegal immigrants may be carrying the virus across the southern border, that it was all part of a government or corporate conspiracy.

The claims -- all wrong -- distorted the debate about a serious public health issue. Together, they earn our Lie of the Year for 2014.

PolitiFact's lead example, that Ebola is easy to catch, matches closely with the entry I marked as the most likely candidate. It's also the candidate that Hot Air's Noah Rothman identified as the worst candidate:

[T]he most undeserving of entries upon which PolitiFact has asked their audience to vote is a claim attributed to the syndicated columnist George Will. That claim stems from an October 18 appearance on Fox News Sunday in which Will criticized the members of the Obama administration for their hubristic early statements assuring the country that the Ebola outbreak in Africa was contained to that continent.

“The problem is the original assumption, said with great certitude if not certainty, was that you need to have direct contact, meaning with bodily fluids from someone because it’s not airborne,” Will said of the deadly African hemorrhagic fever. “There are doctors who are saying that in a sneeze or some cough, some of the airborne particles can be infectious.”

Rothman's post at Hot Air makes essentially the same points we posted to PolitiFact's Facebook page back in October:
 

PolitiFact's ruling was an exercise in pedantry, extolling the epidemiological understanding of "airborne" over the common understanding. Perhaps Will's statement implicitly exaggerated the risk of contracting Ebola via airborne droplets, but his statement was literally true.

What else went into the winning "Lie of the Year" grab-bag?

• Rand Paul's claim that Ebola is "incredibly contagious" (not a candidate)
• Internet users claiming Obama would detain persons showing Ebola symptoms (not a candidate)
• Bloggers claiming the virus was cooked up in a bioweapons lab (not a candidate)
• Rep. Paul Broun's claim he'd encountered reports of Ebola carriers crossing the U.S.-Mexico border (a candidate!)
• Sen. John McCain's claim the the Obama administration said there's be no U.S. outbreak of Ebola (not a candidate).

PolitiFact tosses in a few more claims later on, but you get the idea. PolitiFact crowned every blue-eyed girl Homecoming Queen in 2014, after naming only two statements "Lie of the Year" in 2013.

Why so many lies of the year in 2014?

PolitiFact poised to pick 2014 "Lie of the Year"

It's time for PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" nonsense again, where the supposedly nonpartisan fact checkers set aside objectivity even more blatantly than usual to offer their opinion on the year's most significant political falsehood.

We'll first note a change from years past, as PolitiFact abandons its traditional presentation of the candidates accompanied by their corresponding "Truth-O-Meter" graphic. Does that have something to do with criticisms over last year's deceitful presentation? One can only hope, but we're inclined to call it coincidence.

And now a bit of handicapping, using a 0-10 scale to rate the strength of the candidate: