PolitiFact: Senior White House Officials Exist (Contrary to What Trump Said)

Apparently PolitiFact is beyond understanding why people regard news and fact-checking skeptically.

PolitiFact and The New York Times provided a handy 'Splainer of the problem, if they would only pay attention to themselves.

The New York Times reported that "senior White House official" said Trump's summit with North Korea, which Trump had called off, would be "impossible" to keep on its original date.

The Times used that reporting as part of a story supporting a narrative of administrative infighting within the Trump White House.

Trump went to Twitter in response:

The Failing @nytimes quotes “a senior White House official,” who doesn’t exist, as saying “even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed.” WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.

PolitiFact fact checked Trump's claim, noting that even if the Times went too far with its paraphrase that Trump did not complain about that. PolitiFact ruled Trump's claim "Pants on Fire" because the Times' source exists even if the source did not say what the Times claimed.

That's a Crazy Way to Check Facts, PolitiFact

PolitiFact reasoned (!) that if the Times had a source for its article even if the source did not say what the article claimed, then it was ridiculously false to say that the source did not exist.

Trump is wrong that the senior White House official cited by the New York Times "doesn’t exist" and is "phony." In fact, the official in question, Pottinger, gave an authorized background briefing to dozens of reporters in person and via phone.

The New York Times article that Trump criticized may have gone too far by paraphrasing Pottinger as saying that a June 12 summit would be impossible, since Pottinger didn’t use that specific word. However, Pottinger did express a significant degree of skepticism about the prospect of a June 12 summit.

If that was Trump's gripe, it isn't what he said. The White House source did exist. We rate Trump’s statement Pants on Fire.

PolitiFact admitted the Times might have "gone too far" with its paraphrase of the source and despite that rated Trump's claim "Pants on Fire."

But in the real world of political communication, Trump's point was clear: No representative of the White House said the meeting was impossible.

A real fact check of Trump could have noted that Trump said the Times "quoted" its source. The Times paraphrased its source instead of using a quotation, so Trump was wrong about that.

But Trump was right that having the summit on its original date was not deemed impossible. And, taken literally, Trump accurately claimed that the White House source of the "impossible" claim does not exist.

PolitiFact does The New York Times a solid

PolitiFact told its readers it was giving them a "transcript" of the audio journalists produced to support the Times' reporting. But PolitiFact's supposed transcript was missing a key line that helps make the story easier to understand.

We're using the transcript posted by Mollie Z. Hemingway at the Federalist, using bold emphasis for the parts PolitiFact left out. We emphasize that the audio posted at PolitiFact matches the Federalist's version:

REPORTER: Can you clarify that…the President obviously announced in the letter and at the top of the bill signing that the summit is called off. But then, later, he said it’s possible the existing summit could take place, or a summit at a later date. Is he saying that it’s possible that June 12th could still happen?

WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL: That’s…

REPORTER: Or has that ship sailed, right?

WHITE HOUSE OFFICIAL: I think that the main point, I suppose, is that the ball is in North Korea’s court right now. And there’s really not a lot of time. We’ve lost quite a bit of time that we would need in order to, I mean, there’s been an enormous amount of preparation that’s gone on over the past few months at the White House, at State, and with other agencies and so forth. But there’s a certain amount of actual dialogue that needs to take place at the working level with your counterparts to ensure that the agenda is clear in the minds of those two leaders when they sit down to actually meet and talk and negotiate, and hopefully make a deal. And June 12 is in 10 minutes, and it’s going to be, you know. But the President has said that he has — someday, that he looks forward to meeting with Kim.

With the missing part of the transcript, one can see that the unidentified reporter was asking a leading question ("that ship sailed, right?"). The "White House Official" did not affirm the leading question in so many words, but the foregone conclusion appeared in the so-called paraphrase of that official.

That's how the journalistic sausage is made.

And PolitiFact hid that from its readers for some mysterious reason.

That's what we call fact-checking, right?

That, PolitiFact, is why people distrust you and The New York Times. You don't tell the whole story and you don't tell it straight.

"Not a lot of reader confusion" in San Luis Obispo

The Tribune of San Luis Obispo, California, published a reader's letter touching on our favorite topic, PolitiFact. The letter provides yet more evidence of reader confusion about PolitiFact's candidate report cards. PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan insists that little reader confusion exists about the report cards.

A Dec. 13 New York Times column (“All politicians lie. Some lie more than others”) indicated that the percentages of claims in these categories for candidates Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are 84 percent, 76 percent and 66 percent, respectively.

The reader doesn't bother to say whether he believes those percentages reasonably extrapolate to generalizations about the candidates. But there was hardly a need for that, thanks to the headline provided by the Tribune:

GOP presidential front-runners lie the most

Do they?

Well, the editors of the Tribune read it in The New York Times via the editor of Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, so it must be true, right?

That's PolitiFact and the mainstream press running their own deceptive political messages while flying the banner of truth overhead.

Angie Drobnic Holan and the Times do some fact-chucking

Does PolitiFact accuse politicians of lying?

In a Dec. 7, 2015 review of a research paper I published over at Zebra Fact Check, I assured readers PolitiFact consistently says it avoids accusing politicians of lying, its "Pants on Fire" rating and "Lie of the Year" awards notwithstanding.

Days later, on Dec. 11, 2015, The New York Times published an op-ed by PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan that threatened to contradict my claim.

Though the Times' headline proclaimed "All Politicians Lie," the op-ed never really supports its blaring headline. Holan herself does not use the word "lie" in her op-ed and doesn't even refer to the concept of intentional deception--the most commonly understood meaning of "lie."

So, aside from the title of the op-ed, Holan stays consistent with PolitiFact's stance that it does not accuse politicians of intentionally deceiving people.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Holan's op-ed is misleading.

I’ve been fact-checking since 2007, when The Tampa Bay Times founded PolitiFact as a new way to cover elections. We don’t check absolutely everything a candidate says, but focus on what catches our eye as significant, newsworthy or potentially influential. Our ratings are also not intended to be statistically representative but to show trends over time.

Jeff, the other editor at PolitiFact Bias, highlighted Holan's literary pretzel on Twitter. What kind of trends do non-representative statistics show?

They show a non-representative trends, that's what kind. Anyone inclined to say differently should make their case by supporting with representative sampling the trend PolitiFact represents with its graphs and numbers. And after that vet PolitiFact's findings for accuracy and consistency. Without both, the graphs should not be taken seriously.

Even without knowing that journalists tend to lean ideologically left, it's irresponsible and misleading to present claims such as Holan's without real supporting evidence.

Shame on PolitiFact. Shame on Angie Drobnic Holan. Shame on The New York Times.

"Most dishonest" based merely on whether statements are true or false? Isn't that dishonest?

Clarification Dec. 13, 2015: The original caption under our image capture ended with "That's dishonest." We changed that to "Isn't that dishonest?" to change it from an apparent contradiction into an paradoxical charge against The New York Times.

Clarification Dec. 14, 2015:  Fixed some minor grammatical flaws.

Props to Micah Cohen

Micah Cohen, in a piece appearing at Nate Silver's portion of the New York Times, provides an excellent example for PolitiFact to follow in presenting its candidate report cards.

Cohen's summary of PolitiFact data on the Republican field of candidates very prominently featured the following (from a post Cohen wrote back in September of 2011):

PolitiFact only looks at statements that pique its interest. Here’s how Bill Adair, the editor of PolitiFact, described the process: “We select statements that we think readers will be curious about. If someone hears a claim and wonders, ‘Is that true?’ then it’s something that we’ll check.”

In other words, if Mitt Romney says the sky is blue, PolitiFact doesn’t bother grading the statement as true. So there is a sampling bias at play here. Accordingly, the following numbers should be interpreted with caution. They aren’t perfect indicators of the honesty of each candidate, and conclusions like “Candidate X lies the most” or “Candidate Y is the most truthful” should probably not be drawn from the data.

Perfect.

PolitiFact, take note.



(1/31/2012) Jeff adds: A commenter to this post brings up an excellent point, and it's one I happen to agree with. Cohen deserves credit for at least recognizing some of the flaws, and including a disclaimer. The fact that it happened in the NYT is also worthy of note. In my view, however, it's unfortunate that Cohen immediately disregards his own reservations about the legitimacy of the report cards and goes on, in detail, to provide an analysis of them anyway. A colored chart with percentages provides an undeserved air of scientific authenticity. I'm not impressed.

The flaws with PolitiFact's report cards go deeper than Cohen implied. We've published a new post that explains these problems in detail. You can read it here.