PolitiFact botches one in Marco Rubio's favor

Though PolitiFact Bias finds PolitiFact biased to the left, we also find that PolitiFact simply stinks at fact-checking. PolitiFact stinketh so much that its mistakes sometimes run against its biased tendencies to unfairly harm Democrats or unfairly help Republicans.

We ran across a clear case of the latter this week while putting together a spreadsheet collection of PolitiFact's "True" ratings. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) received a "True" for a significantly flawed claim about Social Security:

Image capture from PolitiFact.com

Rubio was right that Social Security had to draw down the Trust Fund balance to pay benefits. But PolitiFact simply didn't bother to look at whether it was happening "for the first time."

It wasn't happening for the first time. It happened often during the 1970s. And in the 1970s Social Security was on-budget. That means that when people claim that Social Security has never contributed to the federal deficit they are quite clearly wrong as a matter of fact.

PolitiFact only looked at one government source in fact-checking Rubio. That source had nothing about whether the Trust Fund drawdown was happening for the first time.

A chart from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget makes the shortfall from the 1970s clear:

It's unlikely PolitiFact was trying to do Rubio a favor. Rather, the staff at PolitiFact probably thought they knew Social Security's financial history was solid and simply did not question when Rubio affirmed that expectation.

We'll attach the "Left Jab" tag to this item even though it did not come from a left-leaning critic of PolitiFact.

How to fact check like a partisan, featuring PolitiFact

First, find a politician who has made a conditional statement, like this one from Marco Rubio (R-Fla.):

"As long as Florida keeps the same amount of funding or gets an increase, which is what we are working on, per patient being rewarded for having done the right thing -- there is no reason for anybody to be losing any of their current benefits under Medicaid. None," he said in a Facebook Live on June 28."

Rubio starts his statement with the conditional: "As long as Florida keeps the same amount of funding or gets an increase ..." Logic demands that the latter part of Rubio's statement receive its interpretation under the assumption the condition is true.

A partisan fact checker can make a politician look bad by ignoring the condition and taking the remainder of the statement out of context. Like this:

As the partisan fact checker will want its work to pass as a fact check, at least to like-minded partisans and unsuspecting moderates, it should then proceed to check the out-of-context portion of the subject's statement.

For example, if the condition of the statement is the same or increased funding, look for ways the funding might decrease and use those findings as evidence the politician spoke falsely. For a statement like Rubio's one might cite a left-leaning think tank like the Urban Institute, with a finding that predicts lower funding for Medicaid:

The Urban Institute estimated the decline in federal dollars and enrollment for the states.

It found for Florida, that federal funding for Medicaid under ACA would be $16.8 billion in 2022. Under the Senate legislation, it would fall to about $14.6 billion, or a cut of about 13 percent (see table 6). The Urban Institute projects 353,000 fewer people on Medicaid or CHIP in Florida.

Easy-peasy, right?

Then use the rest of the fact check to show that Florida will not be likely to make up the gap predicted by the Urban Institute. That will prove, in a certain misleading and dishonest way, that Rubio's conditional statement was wrong.

The summary of such a partisan fact check might look like this:

Rubio said, "There is no reason for anybody to be losing any of their current benefits under Medicaid."

Rubio is wrong to state that benefit cuts are off the table.

There are reasons that Medicaid recipients could lose benefits if the Senate bill becomes law. The bill curbs the rate of spending by the federal government over the next decade and caps dollar amounts and ultimately reduces the inflation factor. Those changes will put pressure on states to make difficult choices including the possibility of cutting services.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

Ignoring the conditional part of the claim results in the fallacy of denying the antecedent. The partisan fact checker can usually rely on its highly partisan audience not noticing such fallacies.

Any questions?


Correction: July 2, 2017: In the next-to-last paragraph changed "to notice" to "noticing" for the sake of clarity.

A partisan coin flip for PolitiFact Florida?

A former staffer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer (the one-time PolitiFact Ohio affiliate) said the difference between one rating and another often amounted to a coin flip.

Such coin flips provide a golden opportunity for bias to swing the vote in one of PolitiFact's "star chamber" judgment sessions.

PolitiFact Florida gives us a wonderfully illustrative pair of examples:

Alan Grayson (D) vs  Patrick Murphy (D), May 16, 2016

Democrat Alan Grayson charged fellow Democrat and senate primary opponent Patrick Murphy with voting in favor of the House Benghazi committee. PolitiFact found Grayson's claim "Mostly  True." It would have been simply "True" except Grayson neglected to mention that Murphy defended his vote by saying he wanted the committee to clear Hillary Clinton's name.

Patrick Murphy (D) vs Marco Rubio (R), August 24, 2016

Democrat Patrick Murphy (same Patrick Murphy from the example above) charged Republican incumbent senatorial candidate Marco Rubio with voting against the Violence Against Women Act. PolitiFact Florida rated Murphy's claim "True," while pointing out that Rubio objected to changes made to the Act when it was submitted for reauthorization. Rubio said he favored the original wording.

But ... but ... but ...

We often encounter one knee-jerk defense when we compare two different and inconsistent ratings from PolitiFact: The circumstances were different!

Yes, the circumstances are always at least somewhat different when comparing two different fact checks. It's the difference between the two that makes them two different fact checks in the first place. The difference in circumstance only serves as a defense against the charge of inconsistency if the difference serves as a good explanation for the difference in ratings.

Grayson made a compound charge against Murphy, while Murphy made a simple charge against Rubio. That's a difference, but it only makes explaining the different ratings more difficult. PolitiFact Florida made no complaint against Grayson's charge that Murphy was in a small group of Democrats voting for the Benghazi committee. Averaging that "true" part of the rating with the less-true "voted for" part of the rating makes the latter even lower when considered by itself.

The difference in this case relies entirely on whatever criteria PolitiFact Florida used to figure out when it is okay to leave out context.

Coin flip?

 

PolitiFact has published definitions of its ratings. Two definitions are relevant to our comparison:

TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.
MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

From the two definitions above, it follows that Grayson's statement about Murphy needed clarification or additional information. Murphy's statement about Rubio, in contrast, had nothing significant missing.

It was significant that Murphy claimed his vote was intended to defend Clinton.

It was insignificant that Rubio claimed he supported the Violence Against Women Act minus the objectionable amendments.

Was this a pair of coin flips both won by Murphy?

The call for transparency

 

The Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact, supports the idea that fact checkers ought to exhibit transparency. In that spirit of transparency, we contacted the writer and editor of both fact checks to ask how they objectively determined when it was okay to leave out context.

The two of you collaborated on a parallel pair of fact checks dealing with charges that a candidate voted for a certain bill.

In one case Alan Grayson charged that Patrick Murphy voted to establish the House Benghazi committee. Your fact check found Murphy had made the vote but said he did it to clear Clinton. The fact check said Grayson should have included that context and dropped Grayson's rating down to "Mostly True."

In the second case the same Murphy said Marco Rubio voted against the Violence Against Women Act. Your fact check found Rubio had opposed the Act with his vote but he said he supported the original version of the bill (without amendments added for its re-authorization). The fact check rated Murphy's statement "True," implying that Murphy was at no fault for omitting Rubio's support for the original version of the VAWA.

In the interest of journalistic transparency (which I know PolitiFact publicly champions):

How does an objective and nonpartisan fact checker make the critical distinction between context that is properly omitted and context that should have been included?

We will transparently update this item if we receive any reply from PolitiFact Florida or its parent organizations.

Meanwhile, heads Murphy wins, tails Rubio loses. Coin flip.

Zebra Fact Check: "PolitiFact vs. Rubio on defense spending"

At my fact check site Zebra Fact Check, I took note of PolitiFact Florida's fact check of Marco Rubio from earlier this year:

Rubio said that the United States "is not building the aircraft, the long-range bombers, the additional aircraft carriers, the nuclear submarines."

The military has programs in place to build the types of equipment Rubio mentioned, including the largest aircraft procurement ever: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It will take many years and billions of dollars to complete the procurement, but Rubio’s statement could mislead voters into thinking that the United States has closed up shop in the area of military equipment and isn’t building anything, which isn’t the case.

We rate this claim False.

In PolitiFact Florida's summary Rubio's statement gets shortened--PolitiFact quotes the full sentence earlier in the story (bold emphasis added): "We are the only nation that is not building the aircraft, the long-range bombers, the additional aircraft carriers, the nuclear submarines we need for our nation's defense."

The Zebra Fact Check article points out how PolitiFact Florida carelessly overlooked an alternative understanding of Rubio's words that is consistent with his speeches:

We  find it completely obvious that Rubio was saying the pace of and planning for defense acquisitions falls below what is needed for adequate defense.

What evidence supports our position? Rubio’s own past statements, for starters.

Rubio's speech from September 2014 goes over each of the military acquisition challenges he mentions in the statement PolitiFact gave its "fact check" treatment. How did PolitiFact Florida miss that information? Probably by not knowing the issue and by not bothering to look.

In other words, by allowing bias to influence the outcome of the fact check.

That's the meaning of these accumulated examples of flawed fact checks we highlight and analyze here at PolitiFact Bias. PolitiFact makes plenty of mistakes, and the tendency of those mistakes to more often unfairly harm conservatives and Republicans makes up one of our main evidences of PolitiFact's liberal bias.

No one example is intended to prove PolitiFact's bias. The bias comes through when considering its whole body of work, including the more rare cases where PolitiFact unfairly harms a liberal with its poor fact-checking.

We're finding it harder and harder to find serious criticism of PolitiFact coming from the political left, for what that's worth.

PolitiFact defines "bailout" (Updated)

On Dec. 1, 2015, PolitiFact handed down a "Mostly False" rating on Marco Rubio's claim he prevented a $2.5 billion bailout of health insurance companies under ObamaCare.

PolitiFact's ruling hinged partly on its definition of "bailout." PolitiFact said giving the insurance companies money to help keep them in business wasn't really a bailout:

But is it really a bailout?  Several experts told us no, stressing that a bailout usually refers to a program used to save a company after the fact, not a mechanism in place to deal with a problem that everyone assumes could occur.

Are these experts engaging in a "No True Scotsman" fallacy? Or did PolitiFact do it for them by torquing the paraphrase? Perhaps PolitiFact used leading interview questions?

We were curious about PolitiFact's history of defining the term "bailout."

April 21, 2010: PolitiFact

Early on, "bailout" might have meant anything to PolitiFact:

A big challenge in analyzing Reid's statement, or any like it, is figuring out what exactly the word "bailout" means.

"It is almost impossible to pin politicians down on this one because 'bailout' has no clear meaning," said Douglas Elliott, a fellow with the Brookings Institution, a public policy think tank. "It could cover a very wide range of things, some of which involve taxpayer money and some don't, and some of which are traditional central banking or deposit insurer roles and others of which are novel."

PolitiFact decided Dodd-Frank didn't prevent bailouts in this fact check, but the definition of "bailout" was not critical to the ruling.

Oct. 27, 2010: PolitiFact Florida

Any "rescue from financial distress" qualifies as a bailout to us. And last year, the National Association of Home Builders did indeed lobby Congress for — and win — a change in tax law that it argued was a "critical stimulus measure for the U.S. economy" that would provide "an infusion of monetary resources for firms struggling to retain workers and undertake economic activity."

The issue in this fact check from PolitiFact Florida was a chain email attack on parties opposing Florida's Amendment 4. Amendment 4 would have made real estate development far more difficult. It was a measure more likely supported by progressives, so PolitiFact Florida's broad definition tended to help progressives.

Oct. 29, 2010: PolitiFact Virginia

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee said a Republican was a hypocrite because his car dealership received bailout money from the "Cash for Clunkers" program. For PolitiFact Virginia, the definition of "bailout" wasn't even at issue. Apparently it's clear that "Cash for Clunkers" was a bailout program. The DCCC gets a "Half True" since PolitiFact Virginia couldn't pin down the amount received in the bailout:

But we can’t place a dollar amount on the benefit to Rigell. The ad wrongly suggests that his dealerships’ $441,000 in rebates were straight profits and there’s reason to believe Rigell’s actual gain from Clunkers was considerably smaller. So we find the claim to be Half True.

Dec. 18, 2011: PolitiFact Texas

Our sense? Taxpayers picked up built-up costs that otherwise could not be covered. It seems reasonable to call that expenditure a bailout.

The broad sense harmed Republican Rick Perry. The narrow sense would have helped him. PolitiFact Texas opted for the broad sense.

January 13, 2014: PunditFact

Conservative Pundit Charles Krauthammer foreshadowed the Rubio ruling by calling ObamaCare's risk corridor reimbursements a "huge government bailout." When asked, Krauthammer said he was using the broad definition and provided dictionary support. PunditFact decided his statement deserved treatment according to a narrower definition.

We asked Krauthammer why he called this a bailout and he said he relied on the definition from Merriam-Webster. "The act of saving or rescuing something (such as a business) from money problems," he quoted. "A rescue from financial distress."

Rescue is clearly the operative word. We looked at other definitions. The Palgrave Dictionary of Economics spoke of a rescue from "potential or actual insolvency." Investopedia had to prevent "the consequences that arise from a business's downfall."

Using the narrow definition of "bailout" as a principal justification, PunditFact rated Krauthammer's claim "Half True."

June 30, 2014: PolitiFact

If The New York Times says the Ex-Im Bank asked for a bailout in 1987 then it must be true. There's no reason to question the definition used by the Times, right? The definition was not a major issue for the fact check.

Was TARP a "Bailout" Program?

PolitiFact appears to consistently accept that the Troubled Asset Relief Program was a bailout program. But what if we applied the definition the experts suggested for the Rubio fact check?

TARP did not stop at helping out banks that were in trouble when the measure was passed. On the contrary, the measure foresaw banks running into trouble in the near future for the same reasons other banks had run into trouble.

The TARP timeline published by ProPublica makes clear the TARP program bears some key similarities to the ObamaCare features the experts would not call "bailouts."

PolitiFact Plays Games With Definitions

We've found cases where PolitiFact manipulated the definition of "bailout" resulting in unfair harm to conservatives. We found no cases where PolitiFact similarly harmed Democrats.

If anybody can find an example of the latter we missed, we'll be delighted to edit the article to include it. Drop us a line.


Update Dec. 10, 2015
We added the Jan. 13, 2014 PunditFact item, which we intended to include in the original version. Also fixed some stubborn formatting issues.

PolitiFact making up "watch list" fact?

In a recent fact check of Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), PolitiFact gave Rubio a "Mostly False" rating. PolitiFact appears to have awarded Rubio that rating based on a fact it created out of thin air.

Rubio appeared on the CNN program "State of the Union," addressing the defeat of an amendment that would grant the U.S. Attorney General the power to prevent people suspected of terrorism from buying guns. Rubio said people could have the same name as persons on terrorism watch lists, leading to the possibility that 700,000 Americans might have been affected by the amendment.

PolitiFact mostly ignored Rubio's argument to focus on the number of Americans appearing on the lists, irrespective of name-matching:

Rubio’s count is way off. The number of Americans on the consolidated terrorist watch list is likely in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands.

PolitiFact doesn't address name-matching, abundant in the original context of Rubio's remarks, until very late in the story:

It’s more likely that a person would have the same name as someone who is on the list, and that person could run into problems at the airport if a security agent makes a misidentification, (Martin) Reardon said. This happened to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., who once wasn’t allowed to fly because he had a similar name to the alias of a suspected terrorist on the no-fly list.

But the problem of same names is less common than it used to be, and there is a reasonably efficient redress process for people to appeal to the government to get their name removed from the terrorist watch list, (Timothy) Edgar noted.

"That shows that the redress process is not a sham, but it also shows that a fairly significant number of people are put on the watchlist by mistake," he said.

Still, it’s nowhere close to 700,000 Americans.

"It's nowhere close to 700,000 Americans"

We find no evidence that PolitiFact estimated the number of Americans whose names might match those on the terrorism watch list. The story simply shows PolitiFact obtaining a professional opinion from Edgar that the name-matching problem isn't as bad as it once was.

What's the estimate of the number of Americans susceptible to the name-matching problem? Isn't that necessary to justify saying 700,000 isn't even close?

If PolitiFact obtained an estimate of the number of Americans potentially affected by the name-matching problem, that estimate belongs in the fact check. And the comparison between that number and the number Rubio used should serve as the basis for the fact check.

Fact checkers who can't figure that out are not worthy of the name "fact checkers."

Did we mention Lauren Carroll wrote this story? Katie Sanders edited the story? And it was reviewed by PolitiFact's "Star Chamber"?

Rubio wrong about welders and philosophers?

Republican presidential contender Marco Rubio made a stir with his debate-night claim that welders make more than philosophers.

A number of sources (Forbes and VOX, for example) have weighed in against Rubio on that claim.

PolitiFact joined the chorus with a fact check calling Rubio's claim "False":

Neither salary nor labor statistics back up Rubio’s claim. Statistically, philosophy majors make more money than welders -- with much more room to significantly increase pay throughout their careers.

We found Rubio's claim interesting from a fact-checking perspective before seeing PolitiFact's version of the story. We wondered if anyone who has a degree in philosophy counts as a philosopher. After all, a person could have a degree in philosophy yet work as a welder. Is that person a philosopher or a welder? The same goes for philosophy professors. Are philosophy professors paid for philosophizing or teaching?

We found a post at the conservative blog Power Line that expressed the argument nicely:

Polifact’s analysis is flawed. One doesn’t become a philosopher by majoring philosophy. John and I both so majored and we don’t claim ever to have been philosophers.

We became lawyers. Our pay reflected what lawyers, not what philosophers, make.

How would PolitiFact have evaluated the issue if Rubio's statement had come from a Democrat, we wonder?

More on PolitiFact's deceptive Rubio/climate correction

We've uncovered a bit more evidence of PolitiFact's dishonest correction of its climate-change hit piece on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

For review, here's the correction notice PolitiFact attached to its amended article:

CORRECTION: This story was updated on May 15 to clarify that 97.1 percent of the studies that took a position on global warming agreed that there's been a negative human impact on the atmosphere; more than half the studies did not take a position. Also, the story clarifies that the 2013 report looked at studies, not individual scientists.

The original article wasn't unclear about the 2013 report. It flatly said the report indicated 97.1 percent of scientists disagree with Rubio's supposed claim (PolitiFact blew and continues to blow the reporting on what Rubio said) that humans do not contribute to climate change.

Here's how PolitiFact was publicizing the Rubio fact check on its list of stories (red oval added to draw attention to the false reporting):

PolitiFact's clarification is not a clarification.  It's a gloss on a reporting error.

Here's how the Rubio blurb appears today:

PolitiFact's original article encouraged readers to conclude that 97 percent of scientists agree the Antarctic ice shelf is collapsing because of human-caused climate change.  That's a deception far worse than the Jeep ad from the Romney campaign that PolitiFact awarded its 2012 "Lie of the Year."  And the current version remains more misleading than that Romney ad.

PolitiFact continues climate change smear of Rubio

I noted over at Zebra Fact Check last year how PolitiFact has enlisted itself to aid in tarring various Republican politicians as "climate change deniers."  PolitiFact continued that effort this month:

Scientists have been issuing more new reports on the irreversible effects of climate change in recent weeks. Two groups reported on May 12, 2014, that the global sea level will rise at least 10 feet, accelerating to a dangerous pace after the next century.

Just a day before those reports were released, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., sat down with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on This Week. Talk turned to climate change, where the possible Republican presidential candidate denied a link between humans and the changing environment.

PolitiFact wasn't alone in its interpretation of Rubio's remark.  Unfortunately, PolitiFact didn't included enough context to make clear what Rubio was talking about.  Lucy McAlmont, writing at Patterico's Pontifications, took note of the cyclone of media spin and provided that context (bold emphasis carried over from McAlmont's transcript):

KARL: Miami, Tampa, are two of the cities that are most threatened by climate change. So putting aside your disagreement with what to do about it, do you agree with the science on this? I mean, how big a threat is climate change?

RUBIO: I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow, there are actions that we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate. Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to manmade activity. I do not agree with that.

KARL: You don’t buy that.

RUBIO: I don’t know of any era in history where climate has been stable. Climate is always evolving and natural disasters have always existed.

KARL: Let me get this straight. You do not think that human activity, the production of CO2 has caused warming to our planet?

RUBIO: I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That’s what I do not — And I do not believe that the laws we pass will do anything about it. Except it will destroy our economy.

Reading Rubio's responses to Karl, it should be obvious that PolitiFact reports falsely when it says Rubio denied a link between humans and the changing environment. Rubio acknowledges people contribute to climate change but questions some of the more extreme claims.
 

PolitiFact provided a great example of an extreme claim.  We assume PolitiFact did this unknowingly.

The Ice Sheet

PolitiFact led the Rubio fact check with this:

Scientists have been issuing more new reports on the irreversible effects of climate change in recent weeks. Two groups reported on May 12, 2014, that the global sea level will rise at least 10 feet, accelerating to a dangerous pace after the next century.

That rise in sea level is a result of the irreversible effects of climate change?  And relevant to Rubio's skepticism regarding the size of mankind's role in climate change?

The hotlink embedded in PolitiFact's story leads to an article in The New York Times, where we find this:

Scientists said the ice sheet was not melting because of warmer air temperatures, but rather because relatively warm water that occurs naturally in the depths of the ocean was being pulled to the surface by an intensification, over the past several decades, of the powerful winds that encircle Antarctica.

The Times' story goes on to note that (unnamed) researchers think global warming may have contributed to the wind pattern affecting the ice sheets.

For PolitiFact, somehow the tenuous scientific link between global warming and the collapsing ice sheet makes a perfect intro to its Rubio fact check.

That's irony.

A 97.1 Percent Consensus and a PolitiFact Correction

The original version of the Rubio fact check claimed 97.1 percent of scientist disagreed with Rubio.  We looked forward to dissecting that blunder.  Now we find PolitiFact buried it with the following correction:

CORRECTION: This story was updated on May 15 to clarify that 97.1 percent of the studies that took a position on global warming agreed that there's been a negative human impact on the atmosphere; more than half the studies did not take a position. Also, the story clarifies that the 2013 report looked at studies, not individual scientists.

That's how to do a dishonest correction.  PolitiFact buried its inaccurate reporting by clarifying that the 97.1 figure was a select group of science papers, not scientists.  And simply eliminates the inaccurate reporting, pretending it never happened.

See Also

James Taylor of Media Trackers Florida also brought some attention to PolitiFact's smear of Rubio. We've picked out a section that includes some of PolitiFact's pre-correction malfeasance:

PolitiFact Florida is flat-out wrong regarding its scientific assertions. PolitiFact Florida justified its “False” ruling by claiming, “A May 2013 report analyzing all scientific papers that address the causes of climate change showed 97.1 percent of scientists agree that there’s been a negative human impact on the atmosphere.”

Taylor's quotation makes clear the magnitude of some the false reporting PolitiFact covers up with its correction spin.

Also See

Zebra Fact Check has an article that helps sort out what various studies show about the consensus on climate change.

PolitiFact could have benefited by consulting it before publishing its Rubio smear.