PolitiFact Texas uses tongs (2016)

Our "tweezers or tongs" tag applies to cases where PolitiFact had a choice of a narrow focus on one part of a claim or a wider focus on a claim with more than one part.

The tweezers or tongs option allows a fact-check to exercise bias by using the true part of a statement to boost the rating. Or ignoring the true part of the statement to drop the rating.

In this case, from 2016, a Democrat got the benefit of PolitiFact Texas' tongs treatment:

So, it was true that Texas law requires every high school to have a voter registrar.

But it was false that the law requires the registrar to get the children to vote once they're eligible.

PolitiFact averages it out:

Saldaña said a Texas law requires every high school to have a voter registrar "and part of their responsibility is to make sure that when children become 18 and become eligible to vote, that they vote."

A 1983 law requires every high school to have a deputy voter registrar tasked with giving eligible students voter registration applications. Each registrar also must make sure submitted applications are appropriately handled.

However, the law doesn’t require registrars to make every eligible student register; it's up to each student to act or not. Also, as Saldaña acknowledged, registrars aren’t required to ensure that students vote.

We rate this statement Half True.

There are dozens of examples where PolitiFact ignored what was true in favor of emphasizing the false. It's just one more way the PolitiFact system allows bias to creep in.

Here's one for which PolitiFact Pennsylvania breaks out the tweezers:

Sen. Toomey (R-Penn.) correctly says the ACA created a new category of eligibility. That part of his claim does not figure in the "Half True" rating.

We doubt that PolitiFact has ever created an ethical, principled and objective means for deciding when to ignore parts of compound claims.

Certainly we see no evidence of such means in PolitiFact's work.

Another nugget from the Hollyfield interview

In an earlier post we pointed out how managing editor Amy Hollyfield of PolitiFact described its "Truth-O-Meter" in terms hard to reconcile with those used by PolitiFact's creator, Bill Adair.

The Hollyfield interview published at The Politic (Yale University) contains other amusing nuggets, such as this howler (bold emphasis added):

We take accuracy very seriously. Transparency is one of the key things we focus on, which is why we publish all the sources for our fact checks. We flag every correction and have a subject tag called “correction,” so you can see every fact check we’ve put a correction on.

We find Hollyfield's assertion offensive, especially as it occurs in response to a question about this website, PolitiFact Bias.

PolitiFact does a poor job of consistently adding the subject tags to corrected articles.

We pointed out an example in December 2016. PolitiFact California changed the rating of a fact check from "True" to "Half True," publishing a new version of its fact check from months earlier. Weeks later, PolitiFact California has yet to add a tag to the article that would make it appear on PolitiFact's "Corrections and Updates" page.

Maybe PolitiFact California does not regard rewriting an article as a correction or update?

How about PolitiFact Pennsylvania from January 2017? Lawyers pointed out that the Pennsylvania PolitiFact franchise incorrectly described the standard of evidence courts use for criminal cases. PolitiFact Pennsylvania ran a correction (the correction made the fact check incoherent, but that's another story), but added no tag to the story.

So, contrary to what Hollyfield claims, the corrected story is not transparently presented on its "Corrections and Updates" page.

PolitiFact's spotty compliance with its statement of principles is not new. We even complained about the problem to Paul Tash, the president of the Tampa Bay Times (Nov. 18, 2016). But we've noticed no improvement.

PolitiFact does not have a page that transparently informs readers of all of its corrections.

Will you believe Amy Hollyfield or your own lyin' eyes?

Hans Bader: "The Strange Ignorance of PolitiFact"

Hans Bader, writing at Liberty Unyielding, points out a Jan. 19, 2017 fact-checking train wreck from PolitiFact Pennsylvania. PolitiFact Pennsylvania looked at a claim Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) used to try to discredit President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

Bader's article initially emphasized PolitiFact Pennsylvania's apparent ignorance of the "reasonable doubt" standard in United States criminal cases:

In an error-filled January 19 “fact-check,” PolitiFact’s Anna Orso wrote about “the ‘clear and convincing’ standard used in criminal trials.”  The clear and convincing evidence standard is not used in criminal trials. Even my 9-year old daughter knows that the correct standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

By the time we started looking at this one, PolitiFact Pennsylvania had started trying to spackle over its faults. The record (at the Internet Archive) makes clear that PolitiFact's changes to its text got ahead of its policy of announcing corrections or updates.

Eventually, PolitiFact continued its redefinition of the word "transparency" with this vague description of its corrections:

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized the standard of evidence used in criminal convictions.

Though PolitiFact Pennsylvania corrected the most obvious and embarrassing problem with its fact check, other problems Bader pointed out still remain, such as its questionable characterization of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's civil rights stance as "controversial."

For our part, we question PolitiFact Pennsylvania for apparently uncritically accepting a key premise connected to the statement it claimed to fact check:

Specifically, Casey said the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education supports a bill that "would change the standard of evidence." He said the group is in favor of ditching the "preponderance of the evidence" standard most commonly used in Title IX investigations on college campuses and instead using the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard used in criminal cases.

PolitiFact claimed to simply fact check whether DeVos had contributed to FIRE. But without the implication that FIRE is some kind of far-outside-the-mainstream group, who cares?

We say that given PolitiFact Pennsylvania's explanation of Casey's attack on DeVos, a fact checker needs to investigate whether FIRE supported a bill that would change the standard of evidence.

PolitiFact Pennsylvania offers its readers no evidence at all regarding any such bill. If there is no bill as Casey described, then PolitiFact Pennsylvania's "Mostly True" rating serves to buoy a false charge against DeVos (and FIRE).

Ultimately, PolitiFact Pennsylvania fails to coherently explain the point of contention. The Obama administration tried to restrict schools from using the "clear and convincing" standard.

Thus, in order for a school’s grievance procedures to be consistent with Title IX standards, the school must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred). The “clear and convincing” standard (i.e., it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred), currently used by some schools, is a higher standard of proof. Grievance procedures that use this higher standard are inconsistent with the standard of proof established for violations of the civil rights laws, and are thus not equitable under Title IX. Therefore, preponderance of the evidence is the appropriate standard for investigating allegations of sexual harassment or violence.

FIRE objected to that. But objecting to that move from the Obama administration does not mean FIRE advocated using the "beyond a reasonable doubt" (how PolitiFact's story reads now) standard. That also goes for the "clear and convincing" standard mentioned in the original version.

PolitiFact Pennsylvania simply skipped out on investigating the linchpin of Casey's argument.

There's more hole than story to this PolitiFact Pennsylvania fact check.

Be sure to read Bader's article for more.


Update Jan 21, 2017: Added link to the Department of Education's April 4, 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter
Update Jan 24, 2017: Added a proper ending to the second sentence in the third-to-last paragraph 
Update Feb. 2, 2017: Added "article" after "Bader's" in the second paragraph to make the sentence more sensible