PolitiFact's "no spin" lie

 Apparently PolitiFact's hot new method for getting people to trust their work is to lie to them.

I see it at the top of every fact check these days. PolitiFact posts a summary of its fact check near the top of the story, and at the bottom of that summary lets readers know "No spin, just facts you can trust."

"No spin."

Really?

That howler accompanied a PolitiFact fact check I ran across today, published on Feb. 23, 2024.

PolitiFact's "no spin" approach added spin to the article deck, even before the assurance that PolitiFact has a "no spin" approach: "Do immigrants crossing the US southern border take union jobs? Fact-checking Donald Trump."

The deck claim doesn't match the headline quotation.

So, why the spin?

The second paragraph counts as the key to the fact check:

"The biggest threat to your unions is millions of people coming across the border, because you're not gonna have your jobs anymore," Trump said at the Feb. 17 rally, later adding "The truth is, though, when you have millions of people coming in, they're going to take your jobs."

PolitiFact cited a CSPAN video that clocks in at over an hour. PolitiFact is also the organization that claims it constructs its fact checks to make them replicable. Clue to PolitiFact: If you're trying to allow people to fact-check your work, you tell them where to find key quotations taken from a long video.

 

It's even possible at CSPAN to create a snippet of limited length to include both quotations. We did that.

Trump's making the common sense point that importing millions of low-skilled laborers makes it easy for employers to hire low-wage workers instead of high-wage union workers. PolitiFact turns that point into a straw man, visible at the top of PolitiFact's summary section "If Your Time is Short": "Economy and labor experts told PolitiFact immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border likely aren't taking Michigan's union jobs."

Did Trump say immigrants who recently crossed the U.S. border were taking Michigan's union jobs? As though an immigrant can run up to Michigan, accept a union job and thereby displace the former holder of that union job? No, that's no what Trump's talking about. He's talking about the general depression of wages that undercuts the stability of an established high-wage union job. Low wages in Kentucky, for example, can eliminate union jobs in Michigan if the employer relocates to Kentucky and hires non-union workers.

If somebody thinks PolitiFact was actually treating Trump's claim exactly the way I suggested it should be taken, the corrective is no further away than the next bullet point in PolitiFact's summary: "(N)ewly arrived migrants are likelier to work in jobs Americans don’t want to do, such as day laborer positions. These aren’t union jobs."

PolitiFact missed Trump's point, whether intentionally or otherwise. The point is immigrants taking jobs Americans don't want to do depresses the value of labor. Cheap labor works its way through the economy, affecting jobs Americans do want to do by making labor cheaper for those jobs as well.

We see a hint of that point in PolitiFact's third bullet point: "There is a correlation between an increase in immigration and a drop in unionization. However, experts said that’s not evidence that immigrants are taking union jobs."

So, what do we do with this claim that an increase in immigration correlates with a drop in unionization in conjunction with the claim that it's not evidence immigrants are taking union jobs?

As noted above, there's ambiguity here. If immigration lowers unionization, that's certainly evidence, albeit not definitive proof, that lower wages from immigration cost the economy union jobs.

It looks like the fact check hinges on an equivocal phrase, "taking union jobs."

But taking Trump's point as we suggested, the fact check affirms Trump's accuracy. PolitiFact included this in its story summary:

(E)xperts agree immigration and union membership numbers move in concert: as immigration rises, unionization drops.

"As immigration rises, unionization drops." That's what earns Trump a "Mostly False" rating instead of "Pants on Fire," I suppose. It arguably makes Trump's claim "Mostly True." 

We consider it unforgivable for a fact checker to leave ambiguity around what is meant by "taking union jobs," and the problem is magnified when the fact checker opts for the interpretation most damaging to the person it is fact-checking.

It's yet another case of uncharitable interpretation, violating the basic interpretive principle of charitable interpretation.

Example Umpteen Showing How PolitiFact Goes Easier on Democrats

We only wish we had the time and money needed to document as much as 10 percent of PolitiFact's flawed and biased work.

We've documented a number of times PolitiFact's penchant for ignoring its central principle for grading numbers claims. PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair declared that the most important part of a numbers claim is its underlying point. But PolitiFact will ignore the underlying point at the drop of a hat if it will benefit a Democrat.

Newsom vs Haley

Newsom and "per capita" interstate migration

Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, defending himself from the charge that California is losing population while Florida gains population, said  "Per capita, more Floridians move to California than Californian's moving to Florida." PolitiFact rated the claim "Mostly True."

What's the underlying point of Newsom's claim? Does it address California's population loss compared to Florida's population gain?

No. Newsom's claim instead distracts from the issue with a pretty much meaningless statistic. Experts PolitiFact cited in the fact check underscored that fact. Note this line from PolitiFact's summary:

Experts gave varying answers about whether the margin was statistically significant, but they agreed that the slim differences make this argument technical, and not necessarily meaningful.

So, PolitiFact effectively ignored Newsom's underlying point (distracting from Sean Hannity's question) and gave him nearly full credit for telling the truth about a meaningless statistic.

Haley and ship counts as a measure of military strength

Contrast PolitiFact's treatment of Newsom to its treatment of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Haley said China is building up its military, and illustrated her claim by noting China has the largest naval fleet in the world. PolitiFact said she was right with her numbers, but faulted her for her underlying point. "Half True!"

PolitiFact's summary recounts the objections of the experts it interviewed:

Numerically, she’s on target with both countries’ ship counts. But experts say that simply counting ships omits context about a country’s true military capabilities. 

Ship counts ignore overall ship size, specific warfighting capabilities, and overall geographic reach, all of which are metrics where the United States maintains an edge over China.

It's worth noting that Haley made no claim about China's navy possessing more power than the U.S. navy. So why are tonnage and military capability relevant in rating the claim she made?

They're not. But PolitiFact has its excuse for giving Haley a lowball rating compared to the favor they did Newsom. PolitiFact focuses on Haley's underlying point and gives a poor rating for a true claim. PolitiFact ignores Newsom's underlying point and gives him a favorable rating for a claim that might not even be true (check the fine print).

It's part of the baseless narrative PolitiFact weaves: Republicans lie more.

The truth? PolitiFact is biased, and proves it repeatedly with examples like these.

PolitiFact vs Your Lyin' Eyes on the immigration invasion

On Sept. 6, 2022 PolitiFact published an item titled "A surprising number of Americans believe these false claims about immigrants. Here are the facts."

We have a favorite among the supposedly false claims believed by a surprising number of Americans.

"There is no invasion at the southern border"

No invasion at the southern border? Tell us more, PolitiFact.

More than half of Americans surveyed by NPR/Ipsos believe it is completely or somewhat true that the "U.S. is experiencing an invasion at the southern border."

But many immigrants crossing the border illegally turn themselves into Border Patrol agents on purpose, to ask for asylum, Brown said. 

"That is not behavior that you would really attribute to an invader," Brown said. She said that usually, the term invasion is used to describe a concerted effort by a country to forcibly enter another country to take it over.

Such reasoning does not belong in fact-checking. On the contrary, the logic PolitiFact accepts belongs as far from fact-checking as possible.

Here's PolitiFact's supposed logic: If the expert says "invasion" usually means one country making a concerted effort to forcibly enter another to take it over, then "invasion" means one country making a concerted effort to forcibly enter another country to take it over. For PolitiFact, it then follows that Americans viewing a tide of illegal immigration at the southern border incorrectly see it as an invasion.

At least PolitiFact declined to follow the lead of its source, NPR/Ipsos, in calling the term "invasion" racist.

Hopefully the definition from Webster's New World College Dictionary, supposedly a standard for U.S. journalists (we're using the fourth edition) can help clear things up:

 

in-va-sion ... n. ... an invading or being invaded; specif., a) an entering or being entered by an attacking military force b) an intrusion or infringement

Is there any valid reason to suppose that illegal entry to the United States does not count as intrusion? Of course not. And any fact-checker unable to figure that out cannot be worthy of the name.

Regarding the invasion at the southern border, you can believe PolitiFact or your lyin' eyes.