Viva Frei: PolitiFact is Fake News

Rest assured, PFB readers, the recent lack of new content at PolitiFact Bias has nothing at all to do with improved work at PolitiFact. PolitiFact stinks as badly as ever. We just don't have the time right now to devote to publishing.

But it was worth taking a moment to highlight a video blog by Viva Frei, a Canadian neighbor who happened to notice some problems at PolitiFact.

Frei hits PolitiFact over a story on cash bail, and hits PolitiFact over a fact check of the claim Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Calif.) broke the law when she tore up the copy of the State of the Union address Trump delivered to her before Congress.

Frei's certainly caught PolitiFact grading a different claim than it claimed to fact check on the bail issue. Only the United States and the Philippines have money bail systems dominated by private commercial bond companies. A good number of other countries have money bail systems, and the claimant, Gavin Newsom, did not bother with that kind of specificity. The "Mostly True" rating could not apply for that reason alone.

Enjoy the video! And hat tip to reader "Brian" for bringing the video to our attention.

PolitiFact Bias fails to win a Pulitzer Prize for its Eighth Straight Year

Sad news: PolitiFact Bias failed to win a Pulitzer Prize in 2019. That makes eight years in a row PolitiFact Bias has failed to win a Pulitzer.

But there's an upside.

Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact has failed to win a Pulitzer for 10 straight years, beating our streak by two years.

We track these numbers, by the way, because PolitiFact tries to use its Pulitzer Prize from 2009 as a type of mark of excellence endorsing the quality of its fact-checking.

We call that a crock. We've documented that Pulitzer juries do not fact check entries submitted for Pulitzer Prize consideration. And PolitiFact's set of entries in 2009 included its preposterous ruling that it was "Mostly True" Barack Obama's uncle helped liberate Auschwitz.

We created this video a few years ago to commemorate PolitiFact's long-running failure to repeat its Pulitzer Prize success from 2009.

We still think it's funny. It's funnier every year, in fact.

PolitiFact: LeBron James is Colin Kaepernick

Yes, we confess to using a strange title for this post.

Yet as far as we can tell, that is what PolitiFact is saying with a Facebook post from earlier today:

A fact check on Colin Kaeperick's shirt? We followed the link. We did find a rating of Kaepernick's misattribution of a quotation to Winston Churchill. But there was nothing about his shirt.

The linked page was titled "All Sports statements."

But we remembered seeing a fact check related to a sports figure that wasn't on that page.

It was a fact check of a Photoshop that changed the text on Lebron James' shirt.

So ... Lebron James is Colin Kaepernick?

We wonder how PolitiFact handles Facebook corrections transparently.

PolitiFact: "There are no sharks swimming in the streets of Houston or anywhere else"

We were amused when we noticed PolitiFact inquiring about the faked image of a shark swimming on a Houston freeway thanks to Hurricane Harvey.

"Is it true PolitiFact wonders if that's true?" we wondered.

Our amusement multiplied when we saw the headline over PolitiFact's story, albeit not a scoop, exposing the fakery:

There are no sharks swimming in the streets of Houston or anywhere else

No, seriously. That is how PolitiFact titled its story.

No sharks swimming in the Mediterranean?

No sharks swimming in the Indian Ocean?

No sharks swimming in the Atlantic Ocean?

No sharks swimming in the Pacific Ocean?

Are these questions silly? Of course, until we consider that PolitiFact is the fact checker that fact checks something if it can be construed to mean something, basing the fact check on the ability of some to construe creatively.

If we have "the streets of Houston" and "anywhere else," we don't see why we can't construe that to mean the Pacific Ocean, or even the shark exhibit at Sea World.

Still, we believe in charitable interpretation. What if PolitiFact was just trying to say that there were no sharks swimming "in the streets" in Houston or anywhere else?

Well, immediately we put that together with PolitiFact's "Half True" ruling on President Obama's claim that fish swim in the streets of Miami at high tide.

If fish can swim in the streets of Miami at high tide, then what about a little 'ol bonnethead shark? Couldn't a Miami-area bonnethead put the lie to PolitiFact's claim that no sharks swim in any streets anywhere? And what about submerged cities such as Port Royal? What keeps the sharks away from those streets?

PolitiFact lives in a glass house, throwing stones.

A "Half True" update

Years ago, I pointed out to PolitiFact that it had offered readers two different definitions of "Half True." In November 2011, I posted to note PolitiFact's apparent acknowledgment of the problem, evidenced by its effort to resolve the discrepant definitions.

It's over five years later. But PolitiFact Florida (archived version, just in case PolitiFact Florida notices something amiss) either did not get the memo or failed to fully implement the change.

We then decide which of our six rulings should apply:

TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.
MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.
HALF TRUE – The statement is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.
MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.
FALSE – The statement is not accurate.
PANTS ON FIRE – The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.

PolitiFact Florida still publishes what was apparently the original standard PolitiFact definition of "Half True." PolitiFact National revised its definition in 2011, adding "partially" to the definition so it read "The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context."

PolitiFact Florida uses the updated definition on its main page, and directs readers to PolitiFact's main "principles" page for more information.

It's not even clear if PolitiFact Florida's main page links to PolitiFact Florida's "About" page. It may be a vestigial limb of sorts, helping us trace PolitiFact's evolution.

In one sense, the inconsistency means relatively little. After all, PolitiFact's founder, Bill Adair, has himself said that the "Truth-O-Meter" ratings are "entirely subjective." That being the case, it matters little whether "partially" occurs in the definition of "Half True."

The main problem from the changing definition comes from PolitiFact's irresponsible publication of candidate "report cards" that supposedly help voters decide which candidate they ought to support.

Why should subjective report cards make any difference in preferring one candidate over another?

The changing definition creates one other concern--one that I've written about before: Academic researchers (who really ought to know better) keep trying to use PolitiFact's ratings as though they represent reliable truth measurements. That by itself is a preposterous idea, given the level of subjectivity inherent in PolitiFact's system. But the inconsistency of the definition of "Half True" makes it even sillier.

PolitiFact's repeated failure to fix the problems we point out helps keep us convinced that PolitiFact checks facts poorly. We think a left-leaning ideological bubble combined with the Dunning-Kruger effect best explains PolitiFact's behavior in these cases.

Reminder: PolitiFact made a big to-do about changing the label "Barely True" to "Mostly False," but shifted the definition of "Half True" without letting the public in on the long-running discrepancy.

Too much transparency?



Clarification July 18, 2017: Changed "PolitiFact" to "PolitiFact Florida" in the second paragraph after the block quotation.

This post also appears at the blog "Sublime Bloviations"

Hugh Hewitt v. PolitiFact (Power Line Blog)

Via Power Line blog, the liberal bloggers at PolitiFact tangle with conservative radio show host Hugh Hewitt:

The issue: During a television appearance, Hewitt said the ACA is in a death spiral. PolitiFact did its usual limited survey of experts and ruled Hewitt's statement "False."

Part 1: PolitiFact Strikes Hugh Hewitt

A favorite part:

Allison Graves evaluates Hugh’s assertion regarding the Obamacare death spiral for PolitiFact. She defines the question in a manner that tends to belie Hugh’s assertion, cites some relevant authorities and rates Hugh’s assertion False.

I think this is a question on which reasonable minds can disagree, depending on how the question is framed. I would rate Graves’s judgment False in implying the contrary.

Part 2: Pol[i]tiFact strikes Hugh Hewitt (2)

A favorite part (quotation of Hewitt):

PolitiFact is a liberal-agenda-driven group of classically lefty “journalists” masquerading as a non-partisan evaluators of arguments. In this case their defense of their “journalism” rests on a partial and biased recounting of a 10:20 a.m. Meet the Press roundtable discussion, one which omits my stated acknowledgment of a differing argument therein, and their discounting of the expert testimony of a major insurance company president, along with a Sunday afternoon three-hour “deadline” window for response following a perfunctory email to a booker of a show that runs Monday through Friday, when the host is himself online and answering a journalists’ questions and comments.

To this we would add that PolitiFact's story misrepresents a Congressional Budget Office report.

PolitiFact cited the CBO in support of its finding that the ACA is not in a death spiral:

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as part of its recent analysis of the GOP legislation, described the Affordable Care Act as stable.

PolitiFact failed to link to the CBO in this fact check, but the source wasn't hard to find. The tough part was figuring out why PolitiFact added its own spin to the CBO's view (bold emphasis added):

Stability of the Health Insurance Market>

Decisions about offering and purchasing health insurance depend on the stability of the health insurance market—that is, on having insurers participating in most areas of the country and on the likelihood of premiums’ not rising in an unsustainable spiral. The market for insurance purchased individually (that is, nongroup coverage) would be unstable, for example, if the people who wanted to buy coverage at any offered price would have average health care expenditures so high that offering the insurance would be unprofitable. In CBO and JCT’s assessment, however, the nongroup market would probably be stable in most areas under either current law or the legislation.

Under current law, most subsidized enrollees purchasing health insurance coverage in the nongroup market are largely insulated from increases in premiums because their out-of-pocket payments for premiums are based on a percentage of their income; the government pays the difference. The subsidies to purchase coverage combined with the penalties paid by uninsured people stemming from the individual mandate are anticipated to cause sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures for the market to be stable.

Under the legislation, in the agencies’ view, key factors bringing about market stability include subsidies to purchase insurance, which would maintain sufficient demand for insurance by people with low health care expenditures, and grants to states from the Patient and State Stability Fund, which would reduce the costs to insurers of people with high health care expenditures. Even though the new tax credits would be structured differently from the current subsidies and would generally be less generous for those receiving subsidies under current law, the other changes would, in the agencies’ view, lower average premiums enough to attract a sufficient number of relatively healthy people to stabilize the market.

Is it defensible journalistic practice to leave out the "probably" and "most areas" caveats in the CBO report?

Something tells us that if PolitiFact caught a Republican omitting that kind of information, it would result in a rating of "Half True" or worse. Assuming the Republican wasn't making a point that a liberal would like, of course.

Afters:

We just finished listening to PolitiFact's Aaron Sharockman spending an hour on the Hugh Hewitt Show. Sharockman reaffirmed the paraphrase of the CBO we quoted above. When a transcript becomes available, we will look at whether Sharockman magnified the distortion from the original fact check.

PolitiFact catches Fiorina using hyperbole without a license

PolitiFact's statement of principles guidelines assures readers that PolitiFact allows license for hyperbole:

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. 

In practice, however, it's very difficult to uncover evidence that PolitiFact is able to identify hyperbole. The latest example involves GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina (bold emphasis added):

The Affordable Care Act -- Obamacare to some -- is a perennial target of Republicans. But at the GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee, Carly Fiorina made a particularly strong statement about the law’s ineffectiveness.

"Look, I'm a cancer survivor, okay?" Fiorina told moderator Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business Network. "I understand that you cannot have someone who's battled cancer just become known as a pre-existing condition. I understand that you cannot allow families to go bankrupt if they truly need help. But, I also understand that Obamacare isn't helping anyone."

 So PolitiFact fact checks the last sentence and rules it "Pants on Fire." No, we're not kidding.

We say it is odd PolitiFact can hear Fiorina's statement affirming two positive aspects of the Affordable Care Act yet fail to interpret her last statement (denying positive effects) as hyperbole.

Once again, PolitiFact catches a Republican using hyperbole without a license. Those lawless Republicans!

NewsBusters: "PolitiFact's 'Half True' Evaluation of Fiorina Layoffs Claim Is Utterly False and Dishonest"

NewsBusters' Tom Blumer exposes PolitiFact's ongoing difficulty in evaluating context with his article "PolitiFact's 'Half True' Evaluation of Fiorina Layoffs Claim Is Utterly False and Dishonest."

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina made a statement in Forbes about layoffs she made at Hewlitt-Packard while she was CEO. A liberal site took the statement out of context. PolitiFact evaluated the out-of-context attack on Fiorina and found it "Half True."

Blumer:

On May 5, PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson kept with the alleged "fact-checking" web site's actual role as pack of leftist hacks by issuing a fundamentally dishonest "Half True" ruling on a statement made by CarlyFiorina.org's cybersquatter. I raise the matter now because the web site's critics, while raising most of the relevant points, haven't gone far enough in tearing apart Jacobson's work.

As his headline states, the cybersquatter "accuses Carly Fiorina of wishing she'd laid off 30,000 employees more quickly" during the Republican presidential candidate's tenure as Hewlett-Packard's CEO which ended a decade ago. The squatter is lying. She didn't make that statement in connection with HP's layoffs. That should have been the end of it, but Jacobson still pretended that the lie is "Half True" in his evaluation.

Blumer's article reminds us of another recent contextual failure by PolitiFact. This one we pointed out at Zebra Fact Check. Rep. Trey Gowdy, chair of the House Benghazi Committee, said on Fox News the committee had received "not a scrap of paper" in response to its requests for the emails of Secretary Clinton's senior staff. PolitiFact, ignoring the context, counted the release of some of Clinton's emails as papers contradicting Gowdy's claim.

We suggest bias might account for PolitiFact's difficulty in properly accounting for context.

Tweezers: PolitiFact and the Indiana boycott

Sometimes PolitiFact focuses on one part of a statement. Sometimes PolitiFact spreads its focus to cover the whole of a statement. We use the "Tweezers or Tongs" tag for posts where we draw a contrast involving PolitiFact's choice of focus.

On April 2, 2015, PolitiFact published a story looking at a statement from Red State's Erick Erickson. Erickson wrote about Indiana's version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the willingness of some on the left to punish Indiana economically for passing the legislation.

PolitiFact lays out the basics, we provide the bold emphasis:

In a column for conservative grassroots site RedState.com, editor-in-chief Erick Erickson criticized business owners and people on the left who say the law will allow anyone to cite religious belief in refusing to serve gays and lesbians. Erickson’s opening sentence hones in on Apple chief executive Tim Cook for what he sees as hypocritical business practices.

"To recap: Tim Cook (please, please click this link) and the left are happy to do business in countries that stone to death or otherwise jail gay people, but will not do business with Indiana," Erickson wrote, "which merely passed a law insisting that the ‘free exercise’ clause of the first amendment be on the same legal footing in courts as the ‘free speech’ clause of the first amendment."

Obviously Erickson wasn't talking only about Apple CEO Tim Cook. He mentioned "the left." And Erickson has a point that some on the left took action to cut back business dealings with Indiana:

Companies, celebrities and even local and state governments have come out in opposition to Indiana's controversial "religious freedom" bill. Several have even cancelled plans to do business in the state, citing the potential for discrimination against gays and lesbians.

PolitiFact's story contains mention of only one boycott: the one PolitiFact says Erickson said was coming from Apple. Tweezers.

PolitiFact claimed Erickson was making the point that Cook was acting hypocritically by boycotting Indiana while continuing to do business with nations like Iran. But if that was really Erickson's point then why did he dedicate only one line in his entire column to that point? Tweezers.

Erickson was making a broader point about the reaction by some on the left. He accurately characterized reaction of some on the left in threatening Indiana with economic sanctions. And in the process he made it sound like Apple had committed to a concrete set of such sanctions against Indiana. That's where PolitiFact's tweezers came in, for Cook had simply written a column criticizing Indiana's RFRA law.

But here's the hole in PolitiFact's fact check: Did Apple have any sponsored events occurring in Indiana that it might have cancelled, like some other companies had done? If not, is it safe to assume Apple would not have joined some other companies in canceling such events?

The Apple convention "MacWorld/iWorld" took place in the middle of March earlier this year. In San Francisco. A lost opportunity to teach Indiana a lesson?

What did PolitiFact do wrong, if anything?

As we pointed out, if Erickson was making a point about a real Apple boycott of Indiana, he had plenty of opportunity to mention Apple specifically. But he did not. He lumped Cook in with the boycott, which was somewhat misleading, but Erickson was setting the stage for a general criticism of the left's intolerance to resistance of its mainstreaming of homosexuality. And Cook's a fair example to match with the point of Erickson's column. PolitiFact missed the point of the column and the reference to Cook, using its tweezers to ding Erickson while not even acknowledging the reality of the boycott threatened by companies aside from Apple.

Tweezers.

Impartial tweezers?

Nah. PolitiFact's trick is to often treat parallel statements from liberals or Democrats with tongs. Sure, part of the statement is false, but part of it is true! So, "Half True" or something!



Footnote:

The Erickson response: Erickson defended his column by saying sometimes a tweet is just a tweet. PolitiFact gleefully made light of that excuse, noting that Erickson's column was not a tweet. Note to Erickson: What PolitiFact did was ridiculous, but you need to do better than that.

Correction: Struck "Florida" from the title, as PolitiFact National was responsible for the Red State fact check, not PolitiFact Florida.

PolitiFact's compound problem

Why PolitiFact's rating of Steve Doocy was unfair

After criticizing PunditFact's failure to own up to its mistakes in post this Wednesday past, we promised an example of how PolitiFact applies its rule for compound claims inconsistently.

What is a compound claim?

 

A compound claim is a claim that asserts more than one truth.  For example:

• The car is a red Chrysler

The statement makes two assertions of truth:  The car is red, and the car is a Chrysler.

In its statement of principles, PolitiFact says it divides compound claims into segments, grades the segments separately, then rates the overall accuracy:

We sometimes rate compound statements that contain two or more factual assertions. In these cases, we rate the overall accuracy after looking at the individual pieces.

As is normal with PolitiFact, these principles are more like guidelines.  We'll look at the Doocy rating and compare it to another recent PolitiFact rating, this one looking at a statement from liberal columnist Sally Kohn.

Doocy:
"NASA scientists fudged the numbers to make 1998 the hottest year to overstate the extent of global warming."

PolitiFact rated Doocy's claim "Pants on Fire."

Kohn:
"Hobby Lobby provided this (birth control) coverage before they decided to drop it to file suit."

No, wait.  The above quotation is the one PolitiFact said it was checking.  But the actual sentence went on a bit longer (bold emphasis added):

"Hobby Lobby provided this (birth control) coverage before they decided to drop it to file suit, which was politically motivated."

PolitiFact rated Kohn's claim "Mostly True."

With the amputated ending restored, it's easy to see the parallel between the two claims.  Both Doocy and Kohn make assertions of fact, followed by judgments of motivation.  Doocy's claim arguably reports the results of the numbers-fudging rather than asserting that the scientist were motivated to achieve a particular end, but that point isn't necessary to show PolitiFact's inconsistency.

Given the similarity between the two claims, why did PolitiFact treat Doocy's compound claim as a unitary claim and Kohn's as a two-part compound claim?

Slanted.

We suggest a two-part theory.  Treating Doocy's statement as a compound claim might result in a "Mostly False" or better rating for a claim skeptical of human-caused climate change.  Liberals wouldn't like that.  Treating Kohn's claim as a unitary claim, or even dealing with her evidence-free claim of a political motivation for the Hobby Lobby lawsuit, harms the narrative liberals prefer on that topic.

In short, PolitiFact acted inconsistently because of political bias.  That's the theory.  If anybody has a better one, feel free to leave a comment.

The failure to consistently apply its principles provides avenues for the biases of PolitiFact's staffers to suffuse its fact checks.  This is just one example among many.


Additional note on the Kohn fact check

I can't figure out why PolitiFact fact checked Kohn if it wasn't intended to implicitly support her charge that the Hobby Lobby suit was not based on a sincere religious objection.  PolitiFact said "We can’t determine if politics motivated the company."  Without that charge, who cares if Hobby Lobby covered morning-after pills before it decided to bring a suit against the administration?  Despite its disclaimer, PolitiFact goes out of its way to make a circumstantial case supporting Kohn's charge:

The Greens re-examined the company’s health insurance policy back in 2012, shortly before filing the lawsuit. A Wall Street Journal story says they looked into their plan after being approached by an attorney from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty about possible legal action over the federal government’s contraceptives requirement.

That was when, according to the company’s complaint, they were surprised to learn their prescription drug policy included two drugs, Plan B and ella, which are emergency contraceptive pills that reduce the chance of pregnancy in the days after unprotected sex. The government does not consider morning-after pills as abortifacients because they are used to prevent eggs from being fertilized (not to induce abortions once a woman is pregnant). This is not, however, what the Green family believes, which is that life begins at conception and these drugs impede the survival of fertilized eggs.

We can't determine PolitiFact's motivation for doing this fact check, but ... you get the picture.

Additional additional note:

Somehow, PolitiFact neglected to include the following information from its implicit concurrence with Kohn's attack on the Hobby Lobby's owners, the Green family:

54.  Hobby Lobby's insurance policies have long explicitly excluded--consistent with their religious beliefs--contraceptive devices that might cause abortions and pregnancy-termination drugs like RU-486.

This is from a court document PolitiFact cited in its fact check of Kohn.  PolitiFact used the next item from the document, No. 55, out-of-context against Hobby Lobby.  That was Hobby Lobby's admission that it unwittingly covered two morning-after drugs that may cause abortion.  No. 54 just wouldn't have fit Kohn's narrative, would it?

Jeff Adds: (7-5-2014) It's worth noting that both the Doocy and Kohn ratings were edited by Aaron Sharockman, so the inconsistency cannot be explained by the different journalistic styles of two people.


Update 7/8/2014:

Here's another recent case of the same compound problem, this time featuring Hillary Clinton (bold emphasis added):

"It’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception," Clinton said.

No worries, Mrs. Clinton.  PolitiFact will just focus on the first part of the claim.  It's not really a fact checker's job to point out that Clinton's claim conflicts with Hobby Lobby's willingness to cover 16 kinds of contraception, right?  Nor should we consider Hobby Lobby's religious objection to paying for certain types of contraception.


Edit 7/5/2014: Added links to PolitiFact's Doocy and Kohn ratings - Jeff
Edit 7/5/2014:  Corrected some misspellings, including Mr. Doocy's name.

The New Republic: "'Politifact' Unfairly Attacks The GOP"

Jonathan Chait of The New Republic blasts PolitiFact for a story unfair to Republicans. Chait's story is notable because he and TNR lean decidedly left.

Chait:

Politifact slams the Republicans:

The important point in each examination is that $500 billion -- the figure confirmed by the NRSC's citations -- are not taken out of the current Medicare budget and are not actual cuts. Nowhere in the bill are benefits actually eliminated, experts said.

The $500 billion are reductions to future spending. The health care law attempts to slow the projected growth in Medicare spending by that amount over 10 years.

Medicare spending will still increase. The Congressional Budget Office estimated it will reach $929 billion in 2020, up from $499 billion in actual spending in 2009....

The NRSC’s claim cites a real figure -- $500 billion -- that is part of the health reform debate. But it incorrectly describes it as $500 billion in Medicare cuts, rather than as decreases in the rate of growth of future spending.

Sorry, this is just wrong. Indeed, it's ridiculous, and nobody should listen to Politifact on this topic.

Chait argues that for a program like Medicare, where the costs are expected to dramatically spike, it is ridiculous not to allow some truth to equating a flat cap with a cut.  Chait likewise argues that cutting Medicare Advantage clearly removes the Medicare Advantage benefit (a subsidy).

The only part of the TNR criticism that I don't quite get is Chait's suggestion that this error accords with a PolitiFact bias that favors cutting entitlement programs.

Why then should PolitiFact object to calling the elimination of the Medicare Advantage subsidy a cut?  Does Chait suppose that ObamaCare represents an attempt to cut entitlement programs?  On that point his argument seems strained.  The rest of it appears pretty solid.

Kaiser Health News: "Just Call Me Liar of the Year"

Kaiser Health News publishes Cato Institute's Michael F. Cannon's politely blistering rebuke of PolitiFact's Lie of the Year for 2010:

ObamaCare is not a government takeover, I learned from PolitiFact, because it "uses the private health insurance system to expand health care coverage."
 
But wait. In my research, I found that distinction between public and private to be illusory: what difference is there between a public system where the government taxes and spends your money, and a "private" system where the government forces you to spend your money in the same way?

 Cannon's column is a must-read.

Though Cannon makes the same point made by other critics including the Wall Street Journal, the Kaiser name carries a certain cachet that boosts the power of this critique.

To reiterate what I've written before, PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" for 2010 will hurt them more in the long run than it will hurt anybody else.  It goes a long way toward cementing PolitiFact's reputation as a partisan news source.

Peg Kaplan on the why of it

JD brought my attention to a blog post by one Peg Kaplan.

Kaplan has had some opportunity to roam the halls at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.  The Poynter Institute owns the St. Petersburg Times, which in turn brought PolitiFact into being.

Kaplan's take:

I agree with those in Professor Burgess-Jackson's post who slam Politifact for its analysis about Obamacare. Nevertheless, I know some of the people who work at Politifact, through the Poynter Institute. These people are not stupid and they are not dishonest. I am certain that they believe what they write.

If they are wrong, then how is this possible?

Kaplan's experience agrees with mine.  The journalists I have met are sincere and conscientious as a rule.  Kaplan's explanation also agrees with the one to which I hold:  The newsroom culture steeps its membership in a cloud of accepted wisdom.  That accepted wisdom isn't always particularly wise.  The homogeneity of the newsroom culture discourages journalists from asking some of the right questions.  The blind spot in their perceptions can't help but manifest in their work. 

This type of bias, by the way, is an institutional bias.

Do read the whole of Kaplan's post, and follow the links to Burgess-Jackson's post.