PolitiMath at PolitiFact Virginia

Guided selection?

Earlier today, we reviewed the percentage error involved in pair of PolitiFact ratings.

On July 16, PolitiFact's PunditFact rated Cokie Roberts "Half True" for a numerical claim that was exaggerated by about 9,000 percent.  PunditFact justified the rating based on Roberts' underlying argument, that the risk of being murdered in Honduras is greater than the risk in New York City.

On July 31, PolitiFact Oregon rated George Will "False for a numerical claim that was off by as much as 225 percent.  Will claimed healthcare companies.make up 13 of the top 25 employers in Oregon, and occupy the top three positions on top of that.  The former claim was off by as much as 225 percent and the latter claim was off by 300 percent or so.  PolitiFact found Oregon's largest employer was a healthcare firm.

Today we take fresh note of a July 14 fact check from PolitiFact Virginia.

PolitiFact Virginia tested the claim of Democrat Mark Sickles that 70 percent of Virginia's Medicaid budget pays for care for seniors in nursing homes.

PolitiFact Virginia said the true number was 9.7 percent.

From that number, we calculate a percentage error of 622 percent (PolitiFact can't be trusted with that calculation).

PolitiFact Virginia gives Sickles no credit for his underlying argument and rates his claim "False."


What determines whether PolitiFact rates the underlying point along with the literal claim?

How big does an error need to get before a claim warrants a "Pants on Fire" rating?


Clarification 8-14-2014:
Changed "Will claimed healthcare companies.make up 13 of the top 25, and occupy the top three positions on top of that" to Will claimed healthcare companies.make up 13 of the top 25 employers in Oregon, and occupy the top three positions on top of that."

Anchor Rising: "Truth Once Again Blowin' In The Wind At PolitiFact"

Monique Chartier of Anchor Rising brings our attention to likely case of PolitiFact bias.

This looks like another classic case where PolitiFact (PolitiFact Rhode Island in this case) applies a hyper-literal interpretation to a statement that is plainly true when given normal charitable interpretation.

Specifically, Lisa Blais of the Ocean State Tea Party In Action group appeared on WHJJ 920's Helen Glover Show.  During that appearance, Blais said ""As you know, we came out against Deepwater.  And everybody is now paying for it in their electric bills." 

Blais' comment came in the context of a different case of potentially wasteful government intervention.  Taken in context, Blais is saying that the Deepwater wind turbine project receives its financing from electric bills.  Blais was not communicating the message that persons paying electric bills today are directly paying for the Deepwater project.  Find Blais' comments at about the two minute mark of the following audio.





PolitiFact ruled based on the idea that the listener would conclude that today's electric bill directly pays for the Deepwater project and gave Blais a ruling of "Barely True."  The PolitiFact story concedes that the project indirectly increases utility bills for today's energy consumer:

In 2009, the legislature and Gov. Donald Carcieri modified that law, requiring National Grid to actively encourage renewable energy projects; one of them was to be an undersea power line from Block Island to the mainland.
(...)
National Grid has racked up some legal costs dealing with that power line and those costs are being passed on to consumers as part of a 0.007 cents per kilowatt hour surcharge on their bills. For the typical residential customer -- who uses about 500 kilowatts per month -- that surcharge translates to no more than 3.5 cents per month.

Even taken hyper-literally Blais' claim was partly true, but the real crime is PolitiFact's decision not to give credit Blais' statement with a normal interpretation.

Blais appeared again today on the Helen Glover Show and gave PolitiFact an appropriate and well-delivered pushback.  Blais point out how PolitiFact went easy on a liberal in a different fact check when the literal interpretation was egregiously wrong.  She correctly observes that PolitiFact's standards abuse the term "standards."




Chartier provided the following update:

Permit me to be more specifical as to how PolitiFact is miss-serving the public and the truth in the case of Lisa's statement. The headline of today's rating is

Tea Party leader Lisa Blais says Rhode Island consumers are now paying for Deepwater wind turbine project in their electric bills.

However deplorable, not everyone delves into an article or an issue. On any given day, many people are only going to skim headlines to pick up the news - I'm guilty of that myself.

And in skimming mode, the all-important modifier "now" in the PolitiFact headline is not likely to register. What will certainly register, however, is the "False". So people are going to come away from this rating thinking, "That's that offshore windmill project, isn't it? I thought it was going to be funded by our electric bills. But PolitiFact says it isn't. That's good!"

Of course PolitiFact is acting hypocritically.  Blais' statement might mislead people.  That's bad, and it deserves a "Mostly False."  PolitiFact similarly misleads people.  That's good, because it gives people an easy way to find the truth in politics without reading every word of a fact check.

Future of Capitalism: "Two More Obama Switcheroos"

I'm a regular reader of Ira Stoll's Future of Capitalism, though it's not where I typically troll for PolitiFact rebukes. So I was surprised last week to catch a brief mention of our factastic friends in the otherwise non-PolitiFact related piece.

At issue is the announcement that the Obama administration seeks to reduce the number of armed services personnel by 490,000 troops over the next decade. Stoll happens to be keeping his own mini-ObamaMeter and points out that this reduction contradicts an Obama campaign promise that he "supports plans to increase the size of the Army by 65,000 troops and the Marines by 27,000 troops."

It takes Stoll a whopping two sentences to expose PolitiFact's sophistry:

The Politifact Web site absurdly rates this as a "promise kept," explaining, "Obama said nothing about keeping the higher levels indefinitely." How cynical can you get?

Not only is it cynical, it's also an example of PolitiFact's alternating standards. Note how PolitiFact dealt with Rand Paul's claim that the "average federal employee makes $120,000 a year. The average private employee makes $60,000 a year." Paul received a False rating because, as PolitiFact explained:

"Most people hearing that would assume he was talking about salary alone, but  he was talking about total compensation, including benefits such as retirement pay and paid holidays."

In Obama's case, PolitiFact gives him a Promise Kept because of the literal (and cynical) interpretation of his words. Paul, on the other hand, is deemed false not because of what he said, but because of what PolitiFact thinks people would assume he meant.

If that's not good enough, check out this recent rating on Mitt Romney's claim that "More Americans have lost their jobs under Barack Obama than any president in modern history..."

Romney’s claim is accurate if you count from every president’s first day in office to his final day -- by those standards, Obama is indeed the only president since World War II to have presided over a net job loss.

Don't worry. Despite finding the literal claim true, PolitiFact invented arbitrary standards to justify finding Romney's claim Mostly False. No "said nothing about" treatment for poor ol' Mitt.

One more?

You can read Bryan's in-depth take down of this rating on Sarah Palin, but I'll give you a hint on how it ends:

Although she's technically correct, the numbers are wildly skewed by tiny, non-industrialized countries. We find her claim Barely True.

The examples are, if I can avoid being taken literally, endless. PolitiFact's vacillating guidelines on when to literally interpret something can provide solid evidence of bias. And, to be fair, PolitiFact doesn't always take Obama literally:

So overall, the poll numbers support Obama’s general point, but they don’t fully justify his claim that "the American people for the most part think it’s a bad idea." Actually, in most of the polls just a plurality says that. On balance, we rate his statement Mostly True.

Doh!

In case readers infer that the above conflicting standards have been cherry picked, it's important to note that every one of the examples provided, including the Promise Kept cited by Stoll, was written by PolitiFacter Louis Jacobson. So we can rule out different approaches from different authors.

Until PolitiFact develops objective standards and adheres to them, the political bias of the writers and editors will be exposed with each contradictory rating.

Although Future of Capitalism isn't a usual destination for PolitiFact articles, I encourage readers to read the whole thing and enjoy Stoll's brilliant writing.


Bryan adds:

Bill Adair offered this in mid-2011:

"You're right that we have not always been consistent on our ratings for these types of claims. We've developed a new principle that is reflected in the Axelrod ruling and should be our policy from now on. The principle is that statistical claims that include blame or credit like this one will be treated as compound statements, so our rating will reflect 1) the relative accuracy of the numbers and 2) whether the person is truly responsible for the statistic.)"

That's probably good news for "Bush's fault" in the past and bad news for "Obama's fault" moving forward.


Jeff adds: Bryan is correct that PolitiFact has "updated" their principles. But we've shown, repeatedly,  that PolitiFact hasn't changed in practice subsequent to publication of Adair's new and improved standard. And Adair's update still fails to provide a transparent, let alone objective, method to weigh the various components of a compound statement.

Pete Sepp: "I don't know who the experts you consulted are or whatever policy agendas they may have"

Pete Sepp, vice president for communications and policy for the National Taxpayers Union, usually interacts with PolitiFact as an expert source.  This month, however, the NTU ran an ad that received the PolitiFact treatment, and Sepp ended up as NTU's spokesperson in defending it.  The ad called the federal government's proposed rebate program for drug purchases a "tax."

Sepp did not publish a public rebuttal to PolitiFact.  Rather, we find his arguments hosted by PolitiFact's Texas affiliate.   PolitiFact combined the bodies of three email messages from Sepp on a single reference page.

Sepp's initial email (bold emphasis added):

Based on our experience, calling this rebate plan anything less than a tax fails to capture all of its effects:

1) With a few exceptions that the Secretary of HHS would be able to approve (an uncertain proposition), drug manufacturers would be required to rebate 23 percent of the average manufacturer price (more if the drug price rose quicker than inflation) for a brand-name pharmaceutical that was distributed to lower-income Part D beneficiaries. Otherwise, the company could not participate in providing drugs to Medicaid, Medicare, or other government beneficiaries. Considering there are already genuine rebates (i.e., negotiated discounts) under several such programs, this latest demand from the government for being able to sell to a huge segment of the entire consumer drug market in the U.S. seems more like a mandatory extraction than a voluntary refund.

2) The money collected from these "rebates" don't wind up in the actual consumers' pockets or the various Part D plans; instead they go to a fund that will defray certain government Medicare program costs. A "rebate" as is commonly understood is something that the consumer of product receives after purchase. This "rebate" is nothing of the kind, and represents deceptive terminology.

3) The "rebate" is based on a percentage of price per unit, a lot like the way some excise taxes on products such as some tobacco items work.

4) This "rebate" will in essence squeeze the price bubble somewhere else. Either other Part D beneficiaries get stuck with higher premiums, people in private, non-Medicare plans pay higher prices for their drugs, or drug development and access gets scaled back, or even voluntary discounts start to dry up.

For a good summary of how this could happen, as well as some previous CBO work on this topic. I'd suggest the following link at American Action Forum, which former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin serves at:

http://americanactionforum.org/topic/cost-shifting-debt-reduction-american-seniors

Sepp from his first followup:

I didn't see a feature yet on your site so I thought I'd send you a couple other good links to commentaries that discuss the rebate scheme: 

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/obama-plan-force-rebates-medicare-drug-benefit-drive-costs-thousands-seniors-article-1.976435#ixzz1dhbBGZwe 

http://www.galen.org/component,8/action,show_content/id,13/blog_id,1608/category_id,7/type,33/ 

Yes, there are several groups like ours (AEI, Galen Institute, American Action Forum) who share concern that this proposal amounts to a tax.

And from Sepp's second followup, registering his apparent incredulity at PolitiFact's ruling:

1) "There's nothing in the proposal that calls this a tax and experts we visited say rebates like the one in Medicaid never have been called taxes." I don't know who the experts you consulted are or whatever policy agendas they may have, but here are people in the health policy field who agree with the ad's contention that the rebate proposal is best described as a tax.

Sepp gave four examples then moved to his second point:

2) In another email you had asked, "There's nothing in the proposal that calls this a tax." My answer: well, of course not! Supporters call this a rebate so they can raise revenues for the federal government without branding their scheme a tax and having to answer a lot of inconvenient questions about it. Just because they don't want to call it a tax doesn't mean it won't function like one (see above). That's exactly the point of our ad, and our mission for the past 42 years -- exposing attempts by the political class to cover up a proposal that walks, talks, and hurts like a tax by calling it something else.

Contrast Sepp's argument with PolitiFact's conclusion:

We see how the Obama proposal could be judged a nearly mandatory give-back in that drug companies that decline to give rebates would do so at risk to their bottom lines. It also makes sense that drug companies wouldn’t swallow the costs of the rebates; they’re not free.

Then again, contrary to the ad's statement, there’s no evidence low-income Medicare beneficiaries would pay a 23 percent "tax." And all told, Obama's urged rebate remains that--money paid in return for a purchase or action/opportunity. One would have to connect more dots to make it a tax. We rate the group’s statement False.

What dots require connecting, other than having the term "tax" appear in the text of the bill to describe the rebate?  Good luck finding it in the story.  I couldn't.  It's hard to know when one has met a secret standard, and other than the absurd standard of requiring the bill to describe the rebate as a "tax" it's hard to see what would serve.

One additional brickbat for PolitiFact:  Where is the full context of the ad?  If there's some reason for not giving readers a copy of the ad to look at then the readers deserve to know what it is.

Ace of Spades HQ: "PolitiFact: What Mitt Romney Said Yesterday Was True But We'll Call Him A Liar Anyway"

DrewM. at Ace of Spades HQ gives us an excellent skewering of PolitiFact, complete with the side-splitting humor one expects of Ace's place:

The bigger question is the business about the US economy being, "inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy".

Dear Politifact...this is called a rhetorical device. It's not a literal statement that can or can not be proven. Economies do not exist in space and time so their the distance from economic constructs can't be measured. Romney is simply summarizing his impressions of things and conveying that to his audience.

Funny but Politifact never seems to have gotten around to "fact checking" Obama's oft used idea of Republicans driving the economy into a ditch and then drinking a Slurpee while Democrats tried to pull it out.

Drew's spot on with the observation that PolitiFact makes factual judgments about opinions, and this PolitiFact rating of Romney looks like an all-time classic in the genre.

Read the whole post from Drew at Ace of Spades HQ for more quality humor and analysis.

Washington Examiner-Politifact Is Often More Politics Than Facts

Mark Hemingway of the Washington Examiner exposes flaws in Politifact's rating of Rand Paul. The Kentuckian pointed out a disparity between private and public worker compensation-

“The average federal employee makes $120,000 a year. The average private employee makes $60,000 a year.”

Politifact rated him False. They explained that Paul might confuse his audience-

Since most people usually think about how much they, their spouses and their colleagues get paid in salary alone — not salary plus benefits — we think most people hearing this statement would assume that Paul means that the average federal employee gets paid a salary of $120,000. That’s simply not true.

Politifact offered no evidence that "most people" would think Paul was talking about salary alone. And Hemingway was quick to point this out-

"So what they’re saying is not that what Paul said was literally false, but that according to how they think people will understand what he said, it’s not true. Come again?"

Hemingway concludes that despite Politifact framing the fact-check to their own ambiguous standards, they still missed the mark-

"Politifact does make one relevant point about the average private sector worker not being an apples-to-apples comparison to the average federal worker, but that has no bearing on what Paul actually said and hardly justifies the exorbitant compensation federal workers get."

You can read the entire article here.

You can also read a companion critique at Sublime Bloviations, that points out another flaw with the Politifact piece. Three months prior to the Paul rating Politifact came to a different conclusion when they rated Mike Keown.

This represents three separate fact checks on basically the same issue with two different conclusions.