This article is a companion to Bryan's forthcoming review of former PolitiFact editor Bill Adair's book, "The Big Lie."
In my review of Bill Adair's book I refer to the way PolitiFact's state operations like PolitiFact Wisconsin tended to favor Republicans during years Adair excluded from his dataset. Readers of that Substack article may find this explanation helpful.
Research published here at PolitiFact Bias has examined the bias PolitiFact applies in the use of its "Pants on Fire" ratings. The difference between "False" and "Pants on Fire" appears entirely subjective and based squarely on the term "ridiculous." Until PolitiFact defines "ridiculous" in a reasonably objective way, its descriptions up through this point strongly encourage the view that the term is subjective.
Until 2020, a "Wisconsin" tag on a PolitiFact story dependably indicated that staffers from PolitiFact's affiliate performed the fact checks. We stopped tracking state data after 2020 because the stories could as easily come from PolitiFact National staffers. We also had reason to believe the state affiliates were no longer in charge of determining the "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.
"Pants on Fire" Bias at PolitiFact Wisconsin
Wisconsin was unusually tough on its Democrats compared to most other PolitiFact operations. Whereas PolitiFact National gave Democrats a "Pants of Fire" for about 17 percent of their false statements from 2007 through 2019, PolitiFact Wisconsin gave them over 27 percent, slightly higher than the 27 percent average Republicans received from PolitiFact National.
Raw Numbers at PolitiFact Wisconsin
Adair's claim that Republicans lie more doesn't rest on percentages, though. Adair sticks with raw numbers of disparaging ratings.
There, too, PolitiFact Wisconsin moderated the bias of the larger organization.
Republicans "earned" about 40 percent more "False" plus "Pants on Fire" ratings than did Democrats from PolitiFact Wisconsin. In contrast, PolitiFact National gave Republicans over 300 percent (3x) more such ratings than Democrats.
The tendency in Wisconsin, as this graph helps show, matches that for PolitiFact as a whole. It isn't that Republicans lie more. It's that Democrats lie less and less.
Where did the Democrat lies go? Did PolitiFact and other fact checkers force them to clean up their act? Did fact checkers at long last realize that they had been too tough on Democrats early on?
As our "Pants on Fire" bias study regularly points out, PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" rating counts as substantially if not wholly subjective. Surveying PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" ratings serves as one of the most direct routes for finding flawed fact checks. And that brings us to April 1, 2024 and Donald J. Trump.
We'll grant that Trump lost the state of Wisconsin to Joe Biden in 2020. That doesn't make PolitiFact's rating or its reasoning correct, however. PolitiFact spent considerable effort trying to lump in Trump's claim that his campaign "did much better" in 2020 than in 2016.
PolitiFact:
Let’s tackle the first part of Trump’s claim: That he performed better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016.
That is unequivocally false. And it’s something PolitiFact Wisconsin has checked on multiple occasions, including in 2021.
Is it "unequivocally false" that Trump did better in Wisconsin in 2020 than he did in 2016? What's false is that PolitiFact debunked the claim with the article linked in the second sentence. The link leads to a fact check examining whether Trump won Wisconsin in 2020.
PolitiFact itself provides the evidence that Trump's claim is not unequivocally false (bold emphasis added):
We noted then, and we’ll repeat here, that President Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020. Biden took 1,630,866 votes compared to Trump’s 1,610,184 in the state, so Trump lost by 20,682 votes.
Trump did win the state in 2016, taking more than 22,000 votes over Democrat Hillary Clinton. He netted 1,405,284 votes in Wisconsin in 2016.
So, according to PolitiFact, Trump received 1.4 million votes in Wisconsin in 2016 and 1.6 million votes in 2020 but he "unequivocally" did not do better in 2020 than in 2016.
That's 2+2=5 level logic.
Trump's vote total in Wisconsin was better in 2020 than in 2016. That means that in a real sense Trump did better in Wisconsin in 2020 than in 2016 even if he lost the state in 2020. By analogy, it's like a sprinter winning the 100 meter dash at one meet with a time of 9.99 seconds but subsequently losing the event with a time of 9.97 seconds. The runner performed better in terms of time but worse in terms of the competition.
The runner did not "unequivocally" perform worse in the second meet.
If PolitiFact wanted to fairly call Trump's claim false, let alone "Pants on Fire," it should have stuck with the claim Trump won Wisconsin in 2020.
How does a fair and objective fact checker make an error like that?
The principle of charitable interpretation is pretty simple. It consists of offering a claim the interpretation that best favors the speaker or writer without undue acrobatics.
Grothman's statement offers two readily apparent interpretations. He may think the United States Constitution does not afford birthright citizenship on persons in the country illegally. Or, he may think that the birthright citizenship the Constitution affords to illegal residences counts as a bad policy due for a change.
PolitiFact opted for the first interpretation.
Why did PolitiFact opt for the first interpretation instead of the second one? That's the part that's of interest to those of us who want to see fact checkers do a better job of fact-checking. We looked for PolitiFact to give reasons to prefer one interpretation over the other but this was the best we could find:
Grothman didn’t respond to our inquiry seeking clarification and backup
for the claim, which is known as "birthright citizenship." But his
statement aligns with that of some other conservatives, who argue
birthright citizenship does not apply to children of people living in
the country illegally.
PolitiFact later points out that some other conservatives propose changing the Constitution to disallow birthright citizenship for illegals, but fails to note that Grothman's ambiguous statement aligns with both positions. It depends on whether Grothman used "wrongly" to mean "unconstitutionally" instead of it representing a moral wrong even if in accord with the meaning of the Constitution.
A fact checker ought to iron out that question before proceeding with the fact check. PolitiFact didn't do that. Instead, PolitiFact asked Grothman's office what he meant, received no reply and took it on themselves to supply Grothman's meaning without apparently considering one of the two main alternatives.
PolitiFact's fact check thus counts as journalistic malpractice.
Double Helping of Afters
PolitiFact invented the context of Grothman's speech (bold emphasis added):
During his speech Dec. 1, 2023, Grothman expressed contempt for ways foreign nationals and their children are illegally getting into and living in America.
When listing legal ways migrants can become U.S. citizens, Grothman
pivoted and said citizenship is incorrectly granted to their children
born in America.
Check the audio. Grothman did not list ways migrants can become U.S. citizens (3:25 transcript ours).
"I, one more time, attended a ceremony in Milawaukee of over 250 people in one day in one city, who were sworn in to be new citizens. We are now swearing in over a million people a year that do things right. Taht are vetted, we know they're not breaking the law, that, uh, they almost always have jobs, sometimes have opened up businesses by themselves. So it's not like America is saying you can never get into America, or we're so xenophobic that we're no longer a country of immigrants. No, we have, uh, over 1 million people every year coming here are sworn in. And that's not including children who are born here to parents who are not immigrants because right now our government wrongly is saying that if you're born in this country you're automatically an American citizen."
Second Helping
Refer again to the second sentence from PolitiFact we highlighted in the "afters" section. PolitiFact said Grothman "said citizenship is incorrectly granted to their children born in America." That's before PolitiFact's paragraph about reaching out to Grothman to ask what he meant. We see in PolitiFact's choice of words that it already decided what Grothman meant. What did Grothman mean by "wrongly"? Not a moral wrong in PolitiFact's eyes. PolitiFact switches to the term "incorrectly," fitting with their interpretation that Grothman said the government applies the Constitution incorrectly.
Last Word
As for whether PolitiFact's legal experts settled the question correctly regarding the Constitution, it seems PolitiFact's work was again careless. PolitiFact said the cases setting precedent disregarded immigration status in affirming birthright citizenship. Yet the English Common Law cases on which the U.S. court relied in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark places some importance on the alien offering allegiance to the sovereign. Thus the children of enemies of the Crown were not accepted as natural born citizens regardless of their place of birth.
PolitiFact's fact check offers no whiff of that sentiment from the decision. That aspect of the common law throws a potential spanner in the works of PolitiFact's simplistic explanation.
Here find more about the "certificate of residence" expects of Chinese migrants, which in the late 19th century lacked a clear concept of illegal immigration. The Ark case was from 1898.
PolitiFact appears to count Plyler vs. Doe as a birthright citizenship case ("The issue came up again in the Supreme Court's 1982 Plyler v. Doe case"), but we could find no evidence in support of that notion. That decision hinged on residence within the state affording the resident equal protection under the 14th amendment, regardless of citizenship:
Held: A Texas statute which withholds
from local school districts any state funds for the education of
children who were not "legally admitted" into the United States, and
which authorizes local school districts to deny enrollment to such
children, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment.
PolitiFact has completed quite a few fact checks touching the gender wage gap. And a Dec. 16, 2022 item from PolitiFact Wisconsin carries on PolitiFact's rich tradition of left-leaning inconsistency.
As we have noted here and at Zebra Fact Check, PolitiFact wanders all over the map on gender pay gap claims. Here's the central thing to remember, for those seeking consistency: The raw gender wage gap, such as the one cited by Sen. Tammy Baldwin in the claim pictured above, serves as no measure of gender (or racial) discrimination. PolitiFact Wisconsin both acknowledges that and ignores it for the sake of Baldwin's "Truth-O-Meter" rating.
PolitiFact Wisconsin:
As PolitiFact National, which has reviewed numerous pay-gap claims over the years, has noted: "a speaker’s choice of words can significantly affect whether their point about the gender pay gap is right or wrong."
...
... (T)he government data isn’t based on men and women doing the
same jobs. Rather, it’s an average that widens or closes by factors such
as race, job type and age. Research suggests women are overrepresented
in jobs that tend to pay less, for a variety of reasons.
PolitiFact Wisconsin explains why Baldwin does not deserve a "True" rating and proceeds to award Baldwin a "True" rating.
Review what Baldwin said. Again, from PolitiFact Wisconsin:
"On Latina Equal Pay Day, we bring attention to the fact that Latina
workers make 54 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic
men. It’s past time that Latina workers are given equal pay for equal
work."
Using the raw wage gap figure while appealing for equal pay for equal work implies that the raw wage gap represents the gap between groups doing equal work.
That's exactly what Baldwin did. It's flatly deceptive, but "earns" a "True" from PolitiFact.
PolitiFact simply ignores the problem with Baldwin's implied argument, except for purposes of amplifying it.
It works like this: Explicitly say that the raw wage gap occurs between groups doing the same job and get a "Mostly False" (unless you're extremely lucky!) Merely imply that the raw wage gap occurs between groups, as Baldwin did, and get "True" (unless you're unlucky!).
PolitiFact's inconsistency on the gender wage gap all by itself should dispel the notion that PolitiFact does its job in a non-partisan or objective manner.
It's a journalistic disgrace.
Afters:
PolitiFact's fact check is marvelously horrible. The deck reads "Yes, wage gap does have big impact on Latina workers." The wage gap itself is an effect, primarily of Latina women's choices of low-paying, unskilled jobs. It's not the wage gap driving them into those jobs. It's those jobs driving the effect of a pay gap. The job choices create the impact of the wage gap, not vice-versa.
PolitiFact repeatedly mentions that the wage gap represents the difference between what the average white man makes compared to Latina women. But it's a median figure, not an average. Past PolitiFact gender gap stories likewise tend to ignore the distinction. PolitiFact writes "The averages were based on median earnings for full- and part-time workers." We can think of no solid justification for averaging averages or averaging medians. It's the kind of math people invent to mislead others.
PolitiFact routinely applies uncharitable interpretation to reach nonsensical conclusions with its trademarked "Truth-O-Meter" ratings. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wisc.) received that treatment from PolitiFact Wisconsin on June 10, 2022.
Grothman said the proposed loan forgiveness plan would primarily benefit the wealthy. And he went on to emphasize the program occurs while low income Americans struggle.
PolitiFact did a fair job at first of presenting Grothman's words:
"Nearly 60% of all student loan debt is held by the rich and
upper-middle class," he said in a May 21, 2022 newsletter. "So, by
forgiving student loan debt, we would be handing the wealthy a financial
windfall while low income Americans suffer further from inflation and
rising costs."
DALL-E image of "Enter Strawman"
Enter Strawman
But then the twisting began:
For the purposes of this fact-check, we’re going to look at the portion
of the claim about who holds student loan debt, and whether or not
forgiveness would help low-income people.
Out of the blue, PolitiFact Wisconsin jumps to the conclusion Grothman's saying loan forgiveness extended to low-income persons would do little to help them.
PolitiFact simply declines to consider Grothmann might mean that executing a policy that most benefits the wealthy makes little sense during an inflation crunch that's particularly hurting lower-income Americans. PolitiFact confirms Grothman was right that the policy would tend to benefit the wealthy. But by pursuing its far-fetched interpretation of Grothman's claim, PolitiFact ends up defeating a straw man:
(Grothmann) misfires a bit in suggesting that loan forgiveness would not matter
much to low-income people. For college graduates in lesser-paying jobs,
it might make a huge difference in terms of their finances.
"Suggesting." That's PolitiFact-ese for "We made it up."
Grothman wasn't saying loan forgiveness would not help lower income people who received it. He was saying loan forgiveness mostly would benefit the wealthy when lower income people are the ones in need of relief.
But try to tell that to a liberal blogger wearing the "fact checker" label.
Update: Grok's image generation is leaps and bounds beyond what I used for that earlier image. But it was pretty much impossible to get Grok to give James Hetfield straw-textured skin all over. Closest I got was the hands. But this image is pretty darned good. May have to re-use it sometime.
We've pointed out the bias inherent in PolitiFact's choices about what parts of a claim to rate. And they're at it again at PolitiFact, this time at PolitiFact Wisconsin:
PolitiFact Wisconsin based its "Pants on Fire" judgment solely on the source of the money.
Cost: about $50k (true)
Source of funds: tax dollars (false)
Rock considered a symbol of racism by some (true)
So guess where PolitiFact puts its story focus? Take it away, PF:
For this fact-check, we’ll be focusing on her claim that Wisconsin taxpayers were on the hook for the rock removal.
So PolitiFact didn't consider the amount spent on the rock removal or the reason it was moved.
Totally legit? No. It's one of the easy avenues for bias to enter fact-checking, which some people hilariously believe is strictly the telling of facts.
We've brought up in the past the "Mostly True" rating Barack Obama received during the Democratic presidential primaries when he claimed his uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz.
Here's that set of claims, for comparison:
Uncle among Allied troops liberating concentration camp (true/truish)
In Obama's case, PolitiFact downplayed a claim it could have chosen to make the focus of its fact check. Instead, it prioritized everything else in the claim to justify the "Mostly True" rating.
To avoid that manifestation of bias, a fact checker needs to employ the same standards consistently. Picking and choosing story focus counts as yet another subjective aspect of fact check ratings.
To be clear, PolitiFact has, as far as we know, no program it calls "Rubberstamps for Democrats." We invented that name for PolitiFact's propensity to put only enough effort into a fact check of a Democrat to find a result that reflects favorably on the Democrat.
During a television appearance, Sen. Baldwin said the Department of Homeland Security said the 2020 election was the most secure in the history of the United States.
PolitiFact offered no context to speak of for Sen. Baldwin's remark. See for yourself:
"We heard from the Department of Homeland Security this week that
this was probably the most secure election that’s ever been run in the
United States," Baldwin said.
Is it true that some of the nation’s own top cybersecurity experts disagree with Trump?
We're always curious about the context, even if PolitiFact isn't. In this case, we found that the journalist interviewing Sen. Baldwin, Matt Smith, led the senator toward her statement when he introduced her segment of the show (transcript ours, see starting at 1:05 of the video):
Trump has made unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud about an election the Department of Homeland Security this week called the most secure in American history.
While it's certainly possible Smith and Baldwin heard that report independently, the interview gives the impression Baldwin is just echoing back what Smith had said.
That's clue No. 1 that PolitiFact was looking to give Sen. Baldwin a rubberstamped positive rating. Do fact checkers truly wonder "Is that true?" when a politician echoes back what a journalist said just a couple of minutes before?
More importantly, did the Department of Homeland Security say what Sen. Baldwin and Smith claimed?
Fuzzy Math: (EIS-GCC)+SCC=DHS
Looking at the joint statement to which Sen. Baldwin referred, it is credited to members of the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council (EIS-GCC) and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Committee (SCC).
PolitiFact, judging from its story and its source list, did no digging to find out the specifics of the relationship between the committees and the Department of Homeland Security. Instead, we get this:
On Nov. 12, 2020, officials from two Department of Homeland Security
committees — the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council and
the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council overseeing
cybersecurity — released a joint statement debunking their own boss’s rampant misinformation campaign.
How did PolitiFact conclude that the people who signed the letter were DHS employees under the Trump administration, other than by jumping to conclusions based on similarly spotty reporting from one of its listed sources, Axios?
PolitiFact and Axios simply leave out relevant information. While the committees have members (at least one, anyway) who work under DHS, most, by far, are in the private sector or state government working in a partnership organized by DHS. DHS developed the partnership to improve election security infrastructure. So, when members of the committees release a statement telling us that our election was supremely secure, they are patting themselves on the back: Hey, we did a great job! How about that?!
It's not as if these committees were objectively examining this election compared to others to judge the level of security. If they had done that, we'd have it from them in a detailed report. Now, to be fair, the joint statement lists specific reasons for saying the 2020 election showed improved security. They mention the widespread use of paper ballot backups, allowing elections officials to go back and correct various types of mistakes. And they may have good reason to believe elections systems now have greater resistance to hacking than in the past. However, it is unlikely on its face that the signing members have any solid reason for judging this election more secure than any particular election in the past. If they had any such solid reason they didn't bother mentioning it in their letter.
When journalists like Smith or politicians like Baldwin say the statement came from the Department of Homeland Security they apply or echo misleading spin, implying that the statement has the direct backing of DHS. There is apparently no such backing. The strongest backing apparently comes from the decision of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency--directly under DHS--to publish the joint letter from members of the committees.
ABC News reported President Trump fired the head of CISA, Christopher Krebs, on Nov. 17, 2020 after Krebs said there was no evidence of fraud in the 2020 election.
Did PolitiFact make any connection between these events? Not at all. Or if it did, it was deemed unimportant.
In short, the Department of Homeland Security kinda-sorta-but-not-really said what Smith and Baldwin claimed it said. Which is to say it wasn't really DHS but at least one DHS official along with others working in partnership with DHS.
Finally, here's a link to a list of the active parties for the elections GCC and SCC. The SCC has representation by voting system companies including Dominion. See for yourself.
To reiterate, it is nothing short of deceptive to represent the joint statement of a GCC and SCC as coming from the Department of Homeland Security. DHS has a finger in the pie, but that's about it.
And it's important to note that it isn't clear at all the select members who put their names on the joint statement carry the authority of their respective councils.
Afters
We could do another article on this PolitiFact "fact check" noting that it provides no specific evidence to support its claim that the joint statement "debunks" claims from President Trump.
The statement notably debunks claims from President Donald Trump and others that have alleged massive fraud.
We hope that red flags went up for every person reading that sentence.
"Real Wages" takes inflation into account. If real wages stay perfectly flat, then wages are keeping even with inflation. If real wages increase then wages are increasing faster than inflation.
The fact check is something to behold. It may perhaps be the early leader for worst fact check of 2020.
We faulted this fact check right away for failing to link to the source of the Pocan quotation.
Here's the source:
We're seeing the failure to link to the primary source of claims all too often from PolitiFact lately.
As the image above the video embed shows, PolitiFact Wisconsin focused on Pocan's wage comparison involving the Amazon distribution center in Kenosha.
Ignore Illogical Spox?
It didn't take long for us to find a second reason to fault PolitiFact Wisconsin. As PolitiFact related in its fact check, Pocan's communications director, Usamah Andrabi, said Pocan was talking about pay in the auto industry in the 1990s.
PolitiFact Wisconsin blew Andrabi off, in effect:
Andrabi said Pocan often uses auto worker pay to make his point, because auto manufacturing was the dominant industry in Kenosha when he was growing up there.
But Pocan did not mention auto pay in his claim, and pay in that industry historically is far higher than many other jobs. So, we focused on the weekly and hourly earnings data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Instead of looking at the comparison Andrabi specified, PolitiFact Wisconsin decided to look at whether real wages were flat nationally over the past 30 years.
Just $3 in Thirty Years?
Before we knew it, we had a third reason to fault PolitiFact Wisconsin. After reporting the wage difference over 30 years without adjusting for inflation, PolitiFact tried to show the insignificance of the increase by adjusting for inflation. But PolitiFact used misleading language to make its point:
But using the Bureau’s inflation calculator, the 1990 weekly wage translates to $800.88 per week in today’s dollars, or $20.02 an hour. So, that’s a roughly $3 increase in 30 years.
To communicate clearly, a journalist would express the increase to the weekly wage in dollars and the increase in the hourly pay in dollars per hour.
PolitiFact Wisconsin used dollars to refer to the increase in dollars per hour, leaving readers with the impression that weekly pay increased from about $800 to $804.
Here's what one fix of that misleading error of ambiguity might look like (bold emphasis to highlight the change):
But using the Bureau’s inflation calculator, the 1990 weekly wage translates to $800.88 per week in today’s dollars, or $20.02 an hour. So, that’s an increase of roughly $3 an hour in 30 years.
Using the same language as in the preceding sentence ("an hour") tips the reader to connect the $3 change to the hourly rate instead of the weekly rate.
The Coup de Grace
Finally, we encountered the gigantic error we highlighted at the beginning.
Ah, but that literal untruth only came to light by looking narrowly at Pocan's claim. PolitiFact said Pocan's true point, Andrabi notwithstanding, was "that wage growth has been largely stagnant."
PolitiFact cited a Pew Research Study that supposedly showed that the growth of real wages for groups below the top 10 percent of earners were "nearly flat" from 2000 through 2018.
All of them went up noticeably (look), but PolitiFact said they were "nearly flat."
We call that spin.
And it quickly got worse:
What’s more, the cost of living has undergone a much steeper hike: from 1983 to 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a roughly 3% annual increase in rent and food prices, and a 1.3% annual increase in new vehicle prices.
So, a small growth in median wages is dwarfed next to the rise in cost of other goods.
That's fact check baloney.
It's true the BLS reported annual increases in rent, food and vehicle prices between 1983 and 2013, but those were inflationary changes, not inflation-adjusted changes.
It's wrong to say that inflation outpaced wage growth if real wages increased. It's startling that a fact checker could commit that error.
To be sure, real wages are calculated in a way that counts as arbitrary in a sense, totaling the price of a "basket of goods" where the goods in the basket vary over time. But still, it's ludicrous to say wages that have gone up after adjusting for inflation--that's what "real wages" are--failed to keep pace with inflation. Some items in the "basket of goods" might see higher inflation than others, but would it be proper to cherry pick those to claim that wages generally weren't keeping pace with inflation?
We don't think so.
PolitiFact Wisconsin wildly altered Rep. Pocan's point and after that completely blew its fact check of what it had decided he must be saying.
Afters
We alerted PolitiFact Wisconsin about these problems by responding to its tweet of its fact check and followed that up with a message to truthometer@politifact.com in the late afternoon of March 3, 2020.
We won't be surprised if PolitiFact never corrects its mistakes in the Pocan fact check.
But we will update this item if we see that PolitiFact Wisconsin has updated it.
Correction Feb. 13, 2021: Fixed three instances where we misspelled Usamah Andrabi's last name as "Adrabi." Our apologies to Andrabi and our readers for the errors.
A funny thing happened when PolitiFact examined Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard's claim the Trump administration deports service members.
Instead of ruling on whether the Trump administration was deporting service members, PolitiFact Wisconsin decided to look at whether the Trump administration was deporting non-naturalized service veterans.
Therefore "service members" are the same thing as non-naturalized service veterans?
We wish we were kidding. But read PolitiFact's summary conclusion. PolitiFact equates "service members" with "veterans" as though it's the most natural thing in the world, and doesn't even mention citizenship status:
Our ruling
Gabbard said at the same time Trump talks about supporting veterans, "he is deporting service members who have volunteered to serve this country."
The Trump administration expanded the grounds under which people, including veterans, can be deported, which some blame for more veterans being forced to leave the country. That said, GAO documents make clear the issue existed before Trump took office -- something that wasn’t acknowledged in Gabbard’s claim.
Our definition for Mostly True is "the statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information." That fits here.
PolitiFact does mention citizenship issues in the body of the story. It opens, for example, with a frame emphasizing military service and illegal immigration:
Military matters and illegal immigration.
Both are hot-button issues for voters in the 2020 presidential election, though for different reasons.
U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, a Democratic presidential hopeful and major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, linked them when she spoke July 11, 2019 at the League of United Latin American Citizens convention in Milwaukee.
In the quotation PolitiFact Wisconsin provided, Gabbard did nothing to explicitly link military service with illegal immigration. The journalist (or reader) would have to infer the connection. And PolitiFact Wisconsin failed to link to a transcript of Gabbard's speech, linking us instead to the Journal Sentinel's news report that fails to supply any additional context to Gabbard's remarks.
Intentional Spin?
We see evidence suggesting PolitiFact Wisconsin applied intentional spin in its story to minimize the misleading nature of Gabbard's statement.
In context, Gabbard referred to "lip service" Trump offers to "our veterans, to our troops," but PolitiFact lops off "to our troops" in its headline and deck material. That truncated version of Gabbard's statement makes it appear reasonable to assume Gabbard was talking about veterans and not active service members.
Put simply, PolitiFact manipulated Gabbard's statement to help make it match the interpretation PolitiFact's liberal bloggers gave it in the story. PolitiFact not only chose not to deal with the obvious way Gabbard's statement might mislead people, but also chose not to transparently disclose that decision to its readers.
Principles Forsaken
PolitiFact's statement of principles is a sham. Why? Because PolitiFact applies the principles so haphazardly that we might as well call the result situational ethics. The ideology of the claimant appears to serve as one of the situational conditions driving the decision as to which principle to apply in any given case.
In Gabbard's case, she made a statement that could easily be interpreted in a way that makes it false. And PolitiFact often uses that as the justification for a harsh rating. In its statement of principles PolitiFact says it takes into account whether a statement is literally true (or false). It also says PolitiFact takes into account whether the statement is open to interpretation (bold emphasis added).:
The three editors and reporter then review the fact-check by discussing the following questions.
• Is the statement literally true?
• Is there another way to read the statement? Is the statement open to interpretation?
• Did the speaker provide evidence? Did the speaker prove the statement to be true?
• How have we handled similar statements in the past? What is PolitiFact’s jurisprudence?
PolitiFact effectively discarded two of its principles for the Gabbard fact check.
We say that a fact-checking organization that does not apply its principles consistently cannot receive credit for consistent non-partisanship or fairness.
A May 2, 2018 fact check from PolitiFact Wisconsin uses projected numbers from the 2018-2019 budget year to assess a claim that Wisconsinites are now paying twice as much for debt service on road work as they were paying in 2010-2011 before Republican Scott Walker took over as Wisconsin's governor.
Democratic candidate for governor Kelda Helen Roys and her interviewer used a 22-23 percent figure to represent current spending on road work debt service in Wisconsin.
PolitiFact Wisconsin gave both a pass on their fudging of the facts, but lowered Roys' rating from "True" down to "Mostly True" because the numbers used were mere estimates:
The figure is projected to reach 20.9 percent during the second year of the current two-year state budget Walker signed, which is nearly doubling.
With the caveat that the figure for the current budget is an estimate, we rate Roys’ statement Mostly True.
We think that reasoning would work better as a fact check of Roys' claim if the estimated number represented what Wisconsin is paying now for debt service on its road work. Unless PolitiFact Wisconsin is saying the future is now, the estimate for budget year 2017-2018 would better fit the bill.
PolitiFact Wisconsin reported the 2017-2018 estimate as 20 percent but used the higher figure for the following budget year to judge Roys' accuracy.
And that was just one of three ways PolitiFact Wisconsin massaged the Democrat's statement into a closer semblance of the truth.
What is "Just Basic Road Repair and Maintenance"?
Roys' claimed the debt service was "for just basic road repair and maintenance," which would apparently exclude new construction. PolitiFact tested her claim using the numbers for the transportation-related share of the budget (bold emphasis added):
In analyzing 2017-’19 two-year state budget enacted by Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature, the bureau provided figures on the total of all transportation debt service as a percentage of gross transportation fund revenue -- in other words, what portion of transportation revenue for road work would be going to paying off debt.
PolitiFact's other truth-massage credited Roys with making clear that the debt service increase she spoke of was the debt service amount as a percentage of total spending on roads. Aside from the fact Roys talked about "just basic road repair and maintenance," she offered listeners no clue that she used the same measure PolitiFact Wisconsin used to fact check her claim.
The clue that likely drove PolitiFact to check the debt service as a percentage of road work expenses came from WisconsinEye senior producer Steve Walters, who conducted the interview of Roys. Walter referred no less than twice to a "22 to 23 percent" figure for debt service during the interview.
Since that number came from Walters, PolitiFact Wisconsin apparently felt no need to fact check its accuracy.
Does Some Road Construction Go Beyond 'Basic'?
We think the phrase "basic road repair and maintenance" may leave some members of the audience with the impression that more involved road work such as replacing bridges would balloon the cost of debt service even higher than described.
Description of work: The project consists of a full reconstruction of WIS 55 (Delanglade Street) from I-41 to Lawe Street in the city of Kaukauna. Improvements will include roundabouts at the intersections of I-41 ramps, Maloney/Gertrude, and County OO. New traffic signals will be installed at County J/WIS 55/WIS 96, and bike/pedestrian accommodations will be added throughout the project limits along WIS 55. Other work includes storm sewer, sanitary sewer, water main, sidewalks, retaining walls, street lighting, and incidentals.
It appears to us that PolitiFact Wisconsin simply assumed that all the described work rightly fits under Roys' description.
We're skeptical that such assumptions hold a rightful place among the best practices for fact checkers.
Summary
If we assume that Roys was talking about all expenses attached to road work, and also assume she was talking about the increase in the estimated dollar amount of debt service in raw dollars, her estimate is off by only about 7 percent. In that case, PolitiFact Wisconsin did not really need to use future estimates to justify Roys' statement about how much Wisconsin is spending now. It could have just used the measure Roys' described and rated that against the estimate for this year's spending.
But a fact checker could easily have justified asking Roys to define what she meant by "basic road repair and maintenance" and then using that definition to grade her accuracy. A better fact check would likely result.
We wonder if Roys would need to join the Republican Party to make that happen.
Vukmir, a Republican looking for an opportunity to run against Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) in the 2018 election cycle, has used a hyperbolic ad campaign to paint Baldwin as weak on terrorism. Vukmir said Baldwin worried more about the architect of the 9-11 terrorist attacks than confirming Gina Haspel to head the CIA.
The key to Democrat opposition to the Haspel nomination stemmed from Haspel's involvement in the enhanced interrogation program, which included the technique of waterboarding. The CIA released a disciplinary review saying Haspel had no involvement in the decision to use enhanced interrogation, but that she simply carried out the orders she was issued.
PolitiFact Wisconsin adroitly skipped over all that and took the liberty of re-interpreting Vukmir's claim:
Does U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin have so much more concern for a 9/11 terrorist, compared to the president’s nominee to run the CIA, that she would vote against the nominee?
Vukmir's claim was more simple than PolitiFact Wisconsin's creative paraphrase (source: PolitiFact):
Tammy and her party are more interested, and they’re more worried about, the mastermind of 9/11 -- the individual that plotted and ultimately killed over 3,000 Americans on our soil. And she‘s more worried about those individuals than to support a very strong woman with a track record to be the head of the CIA.
Note that Vukmir did not say anything about what motivated Baldwin to withhold support for Haspel.
PolitiFact Wisconsin's fact check spent not a word on that angle of the story, sticking instead to its own idea that Vukmir must show that Baldwin personally showed significant worry about Khalid Sheik Mohammed in order to earn a rating better than "Pants on Fire."
Farcical Fact-Checking
To fact check what Vukmir actually said, PolitiFact Wisconsin would have needed evidence not only showing Baldwin's level of worry for Mohammed but also her level of worry for Haspel's nomination. Otherwise there's no baseline for determining one is greater than the other.
After all, Vukmir clearly made a claim comparing the two.
And how does one assess levels of worry without asserting an opinion? One might go by what a person said, but that assumes an entirely forthright subject. We don't know the answer. And PolitiFact offered no evidence it has an answer.
PolitiFact's approach was preposterous from the outset. It showed no specific level of worry over Mohammed and no specific level of worry over the Haspel nomination. And yet concluded that one was not lower than the other.
Vukmir's statement was best interpreted as hyperbole expressing the damage to CIA operations stemming from refusing a leadership role to a fully qualified woman for nothing more than following orders associated with the enhanced interrogation program--a program that the CIA described to leading congressional members of both parties without apparent objection at the time.
• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable? We don’t check opinions, and we recognize that in the world of speechmaking and political rhetoric, there is license for hyperbole.
PolitiFact says it doesn't rate opinions. We suppose PolitiFact is entitled to its own opinion.
After Vukmir made her claim about Baldwin, Baldwin ended up voting in opposition to the Haspel nomination.
Tim Graham of Newsbusters scores a hit on PolitiFact Wisconsin with his Aug. 2, 2017 item on a rating from PolitiFact Wisconsin.
Rep. Gwen Moore (D--Wis) said, according to PolitiFact, "If you’re killed at 31 years old like Dontre Hamilton, who was shot 14 times by police for resting on a park bench in Milwaukee, nursing home care is not your priority."
PolitiFact Wisconsin admitted Moore's statement was not literally true:
Literally speaking, Hamilton was not killed simply for resting on a bench. He was shot after striking an officer with the officer’s baton.
PolitiFact Wisconsin rated the false statement "Mostly True."
In PolitiFact Wisconsin's defense, it imagined into being a way of viewing Moore's statement as true:
But in making a rhetorical point, Moore is correct that Hamilton had done nothing to attract the attention of police but fall asleep in a park.
Bless PolitiFact's heart for relieving Moore of the responsibility for using appropriate words to make her supposed rhetorical point. Moore did not talk at all about simply "drawing the attention of police." She talked specifically about Hamilton being shot (14 times) "for resting on a park bench."
This case helps illustrate how PolitiFact's "star chamber" feels little constraint from its stated definitions for its "Truth-O-Meter" ratings. PolitiFact defines "Mostly True" as "The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information."
In what manner was Moore's statement accurate without PolitiFact rewriting it to focus on the way Hamilton drew the attention of police?
If PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" definitions were worth anything, then no false statement like Moore's would ever receive a rating of "Mostly True" or better. But it happens often.
Is it any wonder that people do not trust mainstream media fact checkers like PolitiFact?
In PolitiFact's zeal to defend the Affordable Care Act from criticism, it contradicts itself.
In declaring it "False" that the ACA has entered a death spiral, PolitiFact Wisconsin affirms three aspects of a death spiral, one being rising premiums. PolitiFact affirms that premiums are rising. Then, PolitiFact states that none of the three conditions that make up a death spiral have occurred. We must conclude, via PolitiFact, that premiums are increasing and that premiums are not increasing.
In PolitiFact Wisconsin's own words (bold emphasis added):
Our rating
A death spiral is a health industry term for a cycle with three components — shrinking enrollment, healthy people leaving the system and rising premiums.
The latest data shows enrollment is increasing slightly and younger (typically healthier) people are signing up at the same rate as last year. And while premiums are increasing, that isn’t affecting the cost to most consumers due to built-in subsidies.
So none of the three criteria are met, much less all three.
It's not hard to fix. PolitiFact Wisconsin could alter its fact check to note that only one of the conditions of a death spiral is occurring across the board, but that subsidies insulate many customers from the effects of rising premiums.
Subsidizing the cost of buying insurance does not make the cost of the premiums shrink, exactly. Instead, it places part of the responsibility for paying on somebody else. When somebody else foots the bill, higher prices do not drive off consumers nearly as effectively.
We're still waiting for PolitiFact to recognize that the insurance market is not monolithic. When the rules of the ACA leave individual markets without any insurers because adverse selection has driven them out, the conditions of a death spiral have obtained in that market.
We also note, in the context of the ACA, that when the only people who elect to pay for insurance are those who are receiving subsidies, it is fair to say the share of the market that pays full price encountered a death spiral.
In part one of "PolitiLies at PolitiFact Wisconsin," we shared our experience questioning PolitiFact's reporting from a fact check of U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.).
In part two, we will look at PolitiFact Wisconsin's response to having a clear error pointed out in one of its stories.
On May 11, 2017, PolitiFact Wisconsin published a "Pants on Fire" rating of U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan's claim that "Air Force pilots were going to museums to find spare parts over the last eight years."
PolitiFact issued the "Pants on Fire" ruling despite a Fox News report which featured an Air Force captain, identified by name, who said the Air Force had on seven occasions obtained parts for B-1 bombers from museums.
PolitiFact Wisconsin objected to the thin evidence, apparently including the failure of the report to identify any of the museums that allegedly served as parts repositories (bold emphasis added):
The only example Ryan’s office cited was a May 2016 Fox News article in which an Air Force captain said spare parts needed for a B-1 bomber at a base in South Dakota were taken from seven "museum aircraft" from around the country. The museums weren’t identified and no other details were provided.
Yet when we attempted to verify PolitiFact Wisconsin's reporting, we found the text version of the story said Capt. Travis Lytton (no other details were provided?) showed the Fox reporters a museum aircraft from which a part was stripped. Lytton also described the function of the part in the story (no other details were provided?).
The accompanying video showed a B-1 bomber situated next to the name of the museum: South Dakota Air and Space Museum.
If one of the seven museums was not the South Dakota Air and Space Museum, then the Fox News video was highly misleading. The viewer would conclude the South Dakota Air and Space Museum was one of the seven museums.
How did PolitiFact Wisconsin miss this information? And why, when Lytton was plainly identified in the Fox News report, did PolitiFact Wisconsin not try to contact Lytton to find out the names of the other museums?
We like to contact the writer and the editor when we see an error.
In this case, we contacted writer Tom Kertscher and editor Greg Borowski (May 31, 2017):
Dear Tom Kertscher, Greg Borowski,
Your rating of Speaker Ryan's claim about the Air Force pulling parts from museum planes falsely claims that none of the seven museums were identified.
Yet the Fox News report said the Air Force officer showed reporters the museum plane from which a part was taken. And if you bothered to watch the video associated with the story, the name of the museum appears very plainly in front of the B-1 bomber the officer identified.
And if the names of the museums was a point worth mentioning, then why not contact the officer (identified by name in the Fox News report) and ask him? If he identified one of the museums, would he not identify the others?
Update June 10, 2017: On June 2017 we received a message from PolitiFact Wisconsin editor Greg Borowski. Borowski said he had not received our email message (we do not know if writer Tom Kertscher, to whom it was also sent, had the same experience). Borowski said after finding out about the criticism PolitiFact Wisconsin "added a note to the item."
PolitiFact Wisconsin removed two false statements from its fact check, one stating that the Fox News report identified none of the museums from which airplane parts were taken, and one stating that the report featured no other details beyond those mentioned in the fact check.
This editor's note was added at the end of the fact check:
Editor's note: This item was updated on June 9, 2017 to say that the Fox News report did identify one museum. That information does not change the rating.
As with the other correction we helped prompt this week, we are impressed by PolitiFact Wisconsin's ability to commit an error and then fix the error without admitting any mistake. The editor's note says the fact check was changed "to say the Fox News report did identify one museum." Why was that change made? The editor's note doesn't say. The truth is the change was made because PolitiFact Wisconsin made a mistake.
It's appropriate for journalists to admit to making mistakes when they make them. We do not care for the spin we see in PolitiFact Wisconsin's update notices.
Rather than destroying trust, corrections are a powerful tool to reinforce how accountable and transparent we are.
“If you’re willing to admit you’re wrong, people will trust you more,” said Mathew Ingram of Gigaom. “If I said to someone ‘You know, I’m never wrong’ they would think I was a psychopath or a liar, so they would trust me less. That’s versus if I said ‘I screw up all the time.’ They trust you more because you’re more human.”
That’s the paradox of trust: admitting our mistakes and failings make us more deserving of trust.
Correction June 14, 2017: Commenter Vinni BoD noticed our update was dated Sept. 2017. The month was actually June, which was the correct month in two spots where we (inexplicably) had "Sept." instead.
Grothman’s quick response: "Planned Parenthood is the biggest abortion provider in the country."
He added that the group is an outspoken advocate for what he termed "controversial" services such as birth control.
The notion that birth control services count as controversial looked suspiciously like the result of a liberal press filter. Curious whether the context of Grothman's statement supported PolitiFact Wisconsin's telling, we had a look at the context (17:55 through 20:55).
The crosstalk made it a bit hard for us to follow the conversation, but a partial transcript from an article by Jen Hayden at the left-leaning Daily Kos seemed reasonably accurate to us. Note the site also features a trimmed video of the same exchange.
It looked to us as though Grothman mentioned the "controversial programs" without naming them, instead moving on to talk about why his constituents can do without Planned Parenthood's role in providing contraceptive services. Just before Grothman started talking about alternatives to Planned Parenthood's contraceptive services, an audience member called out asking Grothman for examples of the "controversial programs." That question may have led to an assumption that Grothman was naming contraceptive services as an example of "controversial programs."
In short, we could not see any solid justification for PolitiFact Wisconsin's reporting. So we emailed PolitiFact Wisconsin (writer Dave Umhoefer and editor Greg Borowski) to ask whether its evidence was better than it appeared:
Upon reading your recent fact check of Republican Glen Grothman, I was curious about the line claiming Grothman called birth control a "controversial" service.
He added that the group is an outspoken advocate for what he termed "controversial" services such as birth control.
I watched the video and had trouble hearing the audio (I've foundtranscriptsthat seem pretty much correct, however). It sounded like Grothman mentioned Planned Parenthood's support for some controversial services, then went on to talk about the ease with which people might obtain birth control. Was there some particular part of event that you might transcribe in clear support of your summary? From what I can tell, the context does not support your account. If people can easily obtain birth control without Planned Parenthood's help, how would that make the service "controversial"? It would make the service less necessary, not controversial, right? I urge you to either make clear the portion of the event that supports your interpretation, or else alter the interpretation to square with the facts of the event. By that I mean notguessingwhat Grothman meant when he referred to "controversial programs." If Grothman did not make clear what he was talking about, your account should not suggest otherwise. If you asked Grothman what he was talking about and he made clear he believes birth control is a controversial service, likewise make that clear to your readers.
The replies we received offered no evidence in support of PolitiFact Wisconsin's reporting. In fact, the reply we received on May 18 from Borowski suggested that Umhoefer had (belatedly?) reached out to Grothman's office for clarification:
Dave has reached out to Grothman's office. So, you;ll [sic] have to be patient.
By June 4, 2017 we had yet to receive any further message with evidence backing the claim from the article. We sent a reminder message that day that has likewise failed to draw a reply.
[Update June 8, 2017: PolitiFact Wisconsin editor Greg Borowski alerted us that the fact check of Grothman was updated. We have reproduced the PolitiFact Wisconsin "Editor's note" at the end of this post]
What does it mean?
It looks like PolitiFact Wisconsin did careless reporting on the Grothman story. The story very likely misrepresented Grothman's view of the "controversial programs" he spoke about.
Grothman's government website offers a more reliable account of what Grothman views as Planned Parenthood's "controversial" programs.
It appears PolitiFact Wisconsin is aware it published something as fact without adequate backing information, and intends to keep its flawed article as-is so long as it anticipates no significant consequences will follow.
Integrity.
Afters
Also see PolitiLies at PolitiFact Wisconsin II, published the same day as this part.
Update June 8, 2017: PolitiFact removed "such as birth control" from its summary of Grothman's statement about "controversial services." PolitiFact Wisconsin appended the following editor's note to the story:
(Editor's note, June 7, 2017: An earlier version of this item quoted Grothman as saying that Planned Parenthood is an outspoken advocate for "controversial" services such as birth control. A spokesperson for his office said on June 7, 2017 that the video, in which Grothman's voice is hard to hear at times, may have led people to that conclusion, but that Grothman does not believe birth control is a controversial service. The birth control quote had no bearing on the congressman’s statement about Planned Parenthood and its role in abortions, so the rating of True is unchanged.)
We are impressed by PolitiFact Wisconsin's ability to run a correction while offering the appearance that it committed no error. Saying the original item "quoted Grothman" gives the reader the impression that Grothman must have misspoke. But benevolent PolitiFact Wisconsin covered for Grothman's mistake after his office clarified what he meant to say.
It's really not a model of transparency, and offers Grothman no apology for misrepresenting his views.
We stick with our assessment that PolitiFact Wisconsin reported carelessly. And we suggest that PolitiFact Wisconsin's error was the type of error that occurs when journalists think they know how conservatives think when in reality the journalists do not know how conservatives think (ideological bias).
On the bright side, the portion of the fact check that we criticized now reads as it should have read from the start. We credit PolitiFact Wisconsin for making that change. That fixes the main issue, for there's nothing wrong with having a bias if it doesn't show up in the reporting.
Of secondary importance, we judge the editor's note was subtly misleading and lacking in transparency.
We also note with sadness that the changes to PolitiFact Wisconsin's story do not count as either corrections or updates. We know this because PolitiFact Wisconsin added no "corrections and updates" tag to the story. Adding that tag would make a fact check appear on PolitiFact's page of stories that have been corrected or updated.
Correction June 9, 2017: Removed a redundant "because" from the final paragraph of the update.
Is a fact check a fact check if it doesn't bother checking facts?
PolitiFact Wisconsin brings this question to the fore with its Dec. 16, 2016 fact check of former Democratic senator Russ Feingold. Feingold said Social Security was pretty much invented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and that's where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt got the idea.
PolitiFact agreed, giving Feingold's claim a "True" rating:
But a funny thing happened when we looked for PolitiFact Wisconsin's evidence in support of Feingold's claims. The fact check omits those facts, if they exist.
Let's review what PolitiFact offered as evidence:
When we asked Feingold spokesman Josh Orton for backup, he pointed to several Wisconsinites and people tied to the University of Wisconsin-Madison — where Feingold graduated in 1975 — who were influential in developing Social Security.
PolitiFact went on to list four persons with UW-Madison connections (among many) who were influential in bringing Social Security to pass in the United States.
Then PolitiFact Wisconsin summarized its evidence, with help from an unbiased expert from UW-Madison:
Current UW-Madison professor Pamela Herd agreed that Wisconsinites tied to the university were key figures in the development of Social Security.
"There were a lot of people involved in the creation of this program, but some of the most important players were from Wisconsin," said Herd, an expert on Social Security.
Okay, got it? Now on to the conclusion:
Feingold said that the idea for Social Security "was basically invented up on Bascom Hill, my alma mater here; that's where Franklin Roosevelt got the idea."
Historical accounts show, and an expert agrees, that officials who helped propose and initially operate Social Security had deep ties to UW-Madison.
We rate Feingold’s statement True.
And there you have it. Fact-checking.
If officials who helped propose and initially operate Social Security had deep ties to UW-Madison, then Social Security was basically invented at UW-Madison. And that's where President Roosevelt got the idea. "True."
Where was PolitiFact when Al Gore claimed to have taken the initiative in creating the Internet?
Seriously: PolitiFact Wisconsin's fact check produces no solid or unequivocal evidence supporting one of Feingold's claims and completely ignores fact-checking the other (why?). Yet Feingold's claims receive a "True" rating?
What happened to comparing the content of the federal Social Security Act to its precursor from UW-Madison? What happened to looking at where Roosevelt got his ideas about providing social insurance?
That's not fact-checking. That's rubber-stamping.
Afters:
The silver lining from PolitiFact Wisconsin's fact check comes from its links to the Social Security Administration website, which offer facts instead of supposition about the history of Social Security.
PolitiFact Wisconsin did a stellar job of keeping inconvenient facts from the Social Security website out of its fact check.
Did Republican Donald Trump win the electoral college in a landslide?
We typically think of a "landslide" as an overwhelming victory, and there's certainly doubt whether Trump's margin of victory in the electoral college unequivocally counts as overwhelming.
"Overwhelming" itself is hard to pin down in objective terms.
So that's why we have PolitiFact, the group of liberal bloggers that puts "fact" in its name and then proceeds to publish "fact check journalism" based on subjective "Truth-O-Meter" judgments.
When RNC Chairman Reince Priebus (and Trump's pick for his chief of staff) called Trump's electoral college victory a "landslide," PolitiFact Wisconsin's liberal bloggers sprang into action to do their thing (bold emphasis added):
Landslide, of course, is not technically defined. When we asked for information to back Priebus’ claim, the Republican National Committee merely recited the electoral figures and repeated that it was a landslide.
If "landslide" is not technically defined then what fact is PolitiFact Wisconsin checking? Is "landslide" non-technically defined to the point one can judge it true or false?
PolitiFact Wisconsin follows typical PolitiFact procedure in collecting expert opinions about whether Priebus' use of "landslide" matches its non-technical definition. One of the 10 experts PolitiFact consulted said Trump's margin was "close" to a landslide. PolitiFact said the other nine said it fell short, so PolitiFact ruled Priebus' claim "False."
Priebus said Trump’s win was "an electoral landslide."
But aside from the fact Trump lost the popular vote, his margin in the Electoral College isn’t all that high, either. None of the 10 experts we contacted said Trump’s win crosses that threshold.
We rate Priebus’ claim False.
One has to marvel at expertise sufficient to say whether the use of a term meets a non-technical definition.
One has to marvel all the more at fact checkers who concede that a term has a mushy definition ("not technically defined") and then declare that some use of the term fails to cross "that threshold."
What threshold?
One of the election experts said if Trump won by a landslide then Obama won by an even greater landslide.
Obama Wins Landslide Victory, Charts New Course for United States.
Since Obama did not win by a landslide, therefore one cannot claim Trump won by a landslide? Is that it?
It is folly for fact checkers to try to judge the truth of ambiguous claims. PolitiFact often pursues that folly, of course, and in the end simply underscores what it occasionally admits: The ratings are subjective.
Finding experts willing to participate in the folly does not reduce the magnitude of the folly. This would have been a good subject for PolitiFact to use in continuing its Voxification trend. PolitiFact might have produced an "In context" article to talk about electoral landslides and how experts view the matter. But trying to corral the use of a term that is traditionally hard to tame simply makes a mockery of fact-checking.
Jeff Adds (Dec. 1, 2016):
Add this to a long list of opinions that PolitiFact treats as verifiable facts, including these two gems:
- Radio host John DePetro opined that the Boston Marathon bomber was buried "not far" from President John Kennedy. PolitiFact used their magical powers of objective divinity to determine the unarguable demarcation of "not far."
- Rush Limbaugh claimed "some of the wealthiest American's are African-Americans now." Using the divine wizardry of the nonpartisan Truth-O-Meter, PolitiFact's highly trained social scientists were able to conjure up a determinant definition of what "wealthiest" means, and specifically which people were included in the list.
Reasonable people may discount Trump's claim of a "landslide" victory assuming the conventional use of the term, but it's not a verifiable fact that can be confirmed or dismissed with evidence. It's an opinion.
The reality is that the charlatans at PolitiFact masquerade as truthsayers when they do little more than contribute to the supposed fake news epidemic by shilling their own opinions as unarguable fact. They're dangerous frauds whose declaration of objectivity doesn't withstand the slightest scrutiny.
