PolitiFact builds straw man for PolitiSplainer on unmasking

If PolitiFact's one-sided PolitiSplainer on the Justice Department's reversal on Gen. Michael Flynn's prosecution was not enough, now we have a PolitiSpainer on the Obama administration's unmasking efforts on Flynn and others.

The new PolitiSplainer could win awards for the way it buries the fundamental problem of the unmasking efforts--evidence that knowledge of Russia/Trump collusion falsehood went to the top of the Obama administration and included Vice President Biden--to focus instead on making the unmasking sound like a normal everyday thing at the top of an administration.

But our favorite PolitiMisfire involves PolitiFact's straw-manning of the Republicans' side of the story.

You don't get a taste of Andy McCarthy's expert analysis. And you don't get Jonathan Turley's view. You don't get a host of stories written by well-known and experienced conservative pundits or experts.

No, you get a Facebook post from Diamond & Silk.

No, we're not making this up.

Does the unmasking list show that top officials "knew" that concerns about Flynn were a "lie"?

The pro-Trump social media personalities Diamond and Silk drew this conclusion in a Facebook post that featured images of the list of Obama administration officials:

"Obama knew. Clinton knew. Biden knew. Comey knew. Brennan knew. McCabe knew. Strzok knew. Clapper knew. Rosenstein knew. FBI knew. DOJ knew. CIA knew. State knew. They all knew it was a lie, a witch-hunt, a scandal, a plot, a conspiracy, a hoax. #ObamaGate #SubpoenaObama."

Partisans have an easy time jumping to conclusions. And that tendency represents our best guess as to why PolitiFact assumed Obama, Clinton, Strok, Clapper, Rosenstein, FBI, CIA and State all knowing "it" was a lie referred to the Flynn unmasking all by itself.

That's the beauty of picking on a short Facebook post. The "fact checker" (liberal blogger) can see a set of dots and then freely connect them to construct an understanding that fits a preconceived narrative.

There's nothing in Diamond & Silk's Facebook post explaining that the list follows solely from the Flynn unmasking disclosure. PolitiFact invented that and presented it to readers as fact.

PolitiFact can do that, you see, because it does not apply to itself the "Burden of Proof" principle it applies (on occasion) to others.

It's a shameful example of fact-checking. It qualifies as the straw man fallacy, in fact.

It's likely Diamond & Silk were talking about the Trump/Russia collusion narrative being a lie. not "concerns about Flynn."

Fact checkers, if you want the conservative argument about some aspect of executive office procedures try Andrew McCarthy sometime:

This week’s revelations about unmasking are important and intriguing. They should be thoroughly examined. In fact, they are only a snapshot of the unmasking issue — involving just one U.S. person (Flynn) over a period of less than three months. It is highly irregular for government officials on the political side of the national-security realm to seek the unmasking of Americans. It is eye-opening to learn that Vice President Biden and President Obama’s chief-of-staff (McDonough) unmasked the incoming Trump administration’s national security advisor. It is downright scandalous that Samantha Power, Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, who had little reason to seek unmasking, reportedly requested 260 unmaskings . . . and then told Congress that she did not make the vast majority of requests attributed to her — though it remains unclear, years later, who did make them.

But let’s not miss the forest for the trees. This is not just about unmasking. It is about how pervasively the Obama administration was monitoring the Trump campaign.

PolitiFact's left-leaning fan base was spared any in-depth analysis from the right in favor of PolitiFact's straw man version of Diamond & Silk's Facebook post on the topic. And it got standard talking points from the left (unmasking is so totally normal!).

That kind of fact-checking qualifies as a disservice to readers who are interested in the truth.

Update May 17, 2020: clarified language in the second paragraph

PolitiFact's Michael Flynn case PolitiSplainer (Updated & Corrected)

We almost titled this post "PolitiFact's Michael Flynn case PolitiSplainerainerainerainer" in honor of way PolitiFact reinforces the liberal echo chamber effect surrounding the Michael Flynn prosecution and reversal.

This week the Justice Department filed a motion declaring it would no longer prosecute the case against Flynn, citing recent document releases that drew into serious question the materiality of the statements over which Flynn was prosecuted. The Washington Post published a piece in 2018 by Phillip Bump that helps explain the importance of materiality:

Clearly, telling an FBI agent something untrue during an interview at FBI headquarters as you face criminal charges subjects you to charges of making false statements. Equally clearly, if an FBI agent friend of yours asks to borrow a dollar and you lie and say you don’t have any cash, that’s not going to get you taken away in handcuffs. But where is the line drawn between the two?

The Justice Department's filing says it believed it could no longer prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Flynn communicated a material falsehood to the FBI. The main key to that reversal stemmed from the disclosure that the FBI had an investigation specific to Flynn ("Crossfire Razor") and that the FBI had recommended closing that investigation for lack of evidence before deciding to interview Flynn.

Adding insult to injury, prosecutors never revealed that exculpatory evidence during trial or via disclosure to the defense. That failure deprived Flynn of a valuable tool that might have aided his defense.

In what we would take as an astonishing move if PolitiFact was an objective and impartial fact checker, its PolitiSplainer explains none of that.

Here's the whole of the case for Flynn, by PolitiFact's telling:

After Attorney General William Barr asked Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney in St. Louis, to review the case, Jensen concluded that a dismissal of the case was warranted. Barr agreed.

In its filing, the Justice Department argued that the FBI had no basis to continue investigating Flynn after failing to find illegal acts. Flynn’s answers during the interview were equivocal, not false, and weren’t relevant to the investigation, the department said.

"A crime cannot be established here," the attorney general told CBS, saying "people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes."

 Sure, PolitiFact reports the Department said Flynn's answers "weren't relevant to the investigation" but it does not explain that answer in terms of the law.

None of the experts PolitiFact quoted for the story had anything to say about it, either. Only two of the four had records of giving to Democrats this time (Barbara McQuade, James Robenalt). Open Secrets had no record of political giving from the other two.

PolitiFact also curiously failed to either link to or quote from the DOJ filing in the Flynn case. We wonder if anyone from PolitiFact bothered to read it.

Oh, for what might have been!:

FBI executives decided to keep open an investigation into whether Flynn was a Russian asset based on a conversation that was innocuous save for its interpretation as a violation of the (virtually ignored) Logan Act.

It's as though PolitiFact's PolitiSplainer was designed to keep people in the dark, or at least support a rapidly eroding media narrative.

Update/Correction May 12, 2020: PolitiFact Bias asserted that PolitiFact failed to quote from the DOJ filing. We fixed that with a pair of strikethroughs. PolitiFact used a pair of very short snippets near the beginning of its PolitiSplainer (bold emphasis added):

The filing said that a key interview of Flynn did not have "a legitimate investigative basis" and therefore the department does not consider Flynn’s statements from the interview to be "material even if untrue."

We still say PolitiFact's 'Splainer fails to explain the legal importance of materiality. If Flynn's alleged falsehoods were not relevant (material) to the active investigation then they were not illegal.

We also note that this part of PolitiFact's article undercuts the "expert" testimony discussed in our critique. If only "a key interview of Flynn" did not have the legitimate investigative basis then what of the other parts of the Flynn investigation? PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson should have noticed the discrepancy.

 

'Objective' PolitiFact Uses Biased Framing

Though PolitiFact absurdly tries to claim it is unbiased, its work shows bias in a multitude of ways.

One bias that popped out this week was in PolitiFact's PolitiSplainer about Tara Reade and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. Reade has accused Biden of sexual harassment to the point of rape. Her description of the alleged incident would technically meet at least one statutory definition of "rape."

But get a load of PolitiFact introductory paragraph concerning Reade and Biden:

More than two dozen women have accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault, and many of the allegations emerged not long before his election in November 2016. In October of that year, multiple women said he forced himself on them. A few months earlier, another woman who worked with Trump in the 1990s claimed he once pushed her against a wall and put his hand up her skirt.

There's not a word in there about Reade or Biden. The focus is entirely on sexual assault accusations against President Trump.

Why would an explainer on Reade and Biden start out focusing on allegations made against Trump, readers may wonder?

It's journalistic framing. That is, telling a story in a way to convey a particular message. The message in this case is "both sides do it" but Trump did it worse (so if it's between Biden and Trump vote Biden).

This is from the fact-checking organization that in 2018 published an article assuring readers it is unbiased. Because we could not see their faces as they published it we cannot say they published it with straight faces.

Blasey Ford/Kavanaugh, Hill/Thomas

How did PolitiFact treat parallel allegations against Justice Kavanaugh when Christine Blasey Ford accused him of attempted rape? Both sides do it?

Not quite:

As senators weigh the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh amid allegations of sexual misconduct, many Americans are thinking back to a previous example of accusations against a Supreme Court nominee.

Instead of "both sides do it" PolitiFact offered us a frame telling us that Republicans are doing it again. Clarence Thomas, though black, represented male power, which back in the olden days could easily dismiss accusations from women such as Thomas' accuser, Anita Hill:

The 1991 hearing "exposed critical fault lines in the lived-experience of those at the crossroads of race and gender," said Deborah Douglas, a journalist and visiting professor at DePauw University. "Thomas, a black man, could evoke the image of a ‘high-tech lynching’ to plead both innocence and male privilege, trumping the lived experience of a woman who represents a class of woman, the black woman, arguably, the last thought in the American public imagination."

Though Ford is white, gender has played out similarly in both cases, said Douglas, who is African-American.

What's missing from PolitiFact's PolitiSplainer on Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh? PolitiFact offers no assessment of the strength of the evidence. The article notes Anita Hill supposedly had corroborating witnesses, but does nothing to emphasize that point of contrast with the Blasey Ford allegations. Blasey Ford had no helpful corroboration from the time period the incident allegedly occurred. And PolitiFact somehow fails to mention it.

PolitiFact's Reade/Biden story, in contrast, puts focus on the evidence, albeit with signs of bias against Reade.

Spinning the Reade Evidence

Regarding the Larry King Live episode where Reade's mother apparently talked to King about an incident regarding her daughter, PolitiFact left out details supporting Reade's account. PolitiFact allowed excessive doubt to hang over the idea that it was Reade's mother who called:

On April 24, the Intercept reported on an August 1993 Larry King Live episode in which a woman calls into the CNN show to discuss her daughter’s "problems" with a senator. Reade says that caller was her mother, who has since died.

So all we have is Reade's word for it?

No.

Circumstantial evidence PolitiFact left out strongly supports Reade's account. The time frame (1993) matches. PolitiFact mentions the call occurred in 1993 but does not remind readers how this helps support Reade's account.

More importantly, the show identified the caller with the town San Luis Obispo. That's where Reade's mother lived (The Tribune, San Luis Obispo).

The woman who says former Vice President Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993 used to live in Morro Bay and apparently returned here shortly after the alleged incident.

Video uncovered over the weekend and first reported by The Intercept shows an August 1993 segment on CNN’s “Larry King Live” in which a caller from San Luis Obispo County later confirmed by media outlets to be the mother of former Biden staffer Tara Reade appears to confirm that Reade had told her mother of an alleged sexual assault by Biden, who is the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for president.

Read more here: https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/article242343826.html#storylink=cpy

PolitiFact saw no reason for its readers to know that.

Note the story we quoted from The Tribune ran on April 28, 2020. PolitiFact's fact check published on April 30, 2020. In fact, CNN had reported the San Luis Obispo connection on April 25, 2020. And PolitiFact doesn't have it figured out by April 30?

Can an unbiased source leave out something like that?

When PolitiFact assures its readers it is unbiased it is lying to them, if not to itself.

PolitiFact claims, without evidence, Trump touted chloroquine as a coronavirus cure

Should fact checkers hold themselves to the standards they expect others to meet?

We say yes.

Should fact checkers meet the standards they claim to uphold?

We say yes.

What does PolitiFact say?

(President Donald) Trump has touted chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus cure in more than a half-dozen public events since March 19.

PolitiFact published the above claim in an April 8, 2020 PolitiSplainer about hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug doctors have used in the treatment of coronavirus patients.

We were familiar with instances where Mr. Trump mentioned hydroxychloroquine as a potential treatment for coronavirus sufferers. But we had not heard him call it a cure. Accordingly, we tried to follow up on the evidence PolitiFact offered in support of its claim.

The article did not contain any mention of a source identifying the "half-dozen public events since March 19," so we skipped to the end to look at PolitiFact's source list. That proved disappointing.

We tweeted at the article's authors expressing our dismay at the lack of supporting documentation. Our tweet garnered no reply, no attempt to supply the missing information and no change to the original article.

Of note, when co-author Funke tweeted out a link to the article on April 8 his accompanying description counted as far more responsible than the language in the article itself:

"Here's what you need to know about hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug that President Trump has repeatedly touted as a potential COVID-19 treatment."

Does "cure" mean the same thing as "potential treatment" in PolitiFactLand?

We've surveyed Mr. Trump's use of the terms "cure" and "game changer" at the White House website and found nothing that would justify the language PolitiFact used of the president.

What else does PolitiFact say?

The burden of proof is on the speaker, and we rate statements based on the information known at the time the statement is made.

 What if the speaker says "Trump has touted chloroquine or hydroxycloroquine as a coronavirus cure"? Does the speaker still have the burden of proof? If the speaker is PolitiFact, that is?

It looks like the fact-checkers have yet again allowed a(n apparently false) public narrative to guide their fact-checking.

A PolitiFact gloss on the Michael Brown "murder"

We've been tracking evidence of PolitiFact's look-the-other-way stance on Dem0crats' campaign rhetoric on race. PolitiFact sees no need to issue a "Truth-O-Meter" rating when Democrats call President Trump a racist, for example.

Now, with Democratic presidential candidates like Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren asserting that Michael Brown was murdered, again we see PolitiFact reluctant to apply fact-checking to Democratic Party falsehoods.

Instead of issuing a "Truth-O-Meter" rating for either Democratic Party candidate over their Michael Brown statements, PolitiFact published an absurd PolitiSplainer article.

A Fox News article hits most of the points that we would have emphasized:

The fact-checking website PolitiFact again came under fire for alleged political bias Wednesday after it posted a bizarre article that refused to rule on whether Michael Brown was in fact "murdered" by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo. in 2014, as Democratic presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren falsely claimed last week.

Indeed, Fox News emphasizes the key expert opinion from the PolitiFact PolitiSplainer:

Jacobson quoted Jean Brown, a communications professor who focuses on "media representations of African Americans," as saying that the entire question of whether Warren and Harris spread a falsehood was nothing more than an "attempt to shift the debate from a discussion about the killing of black and brown people by police."

The Fox article quotes the Washington Examiner's Alex Griswold asking why the expert opinion from Brown was included in the fact check.

We suggest that the quotation represents the reasoning PolitiFact used in deciding not to issue "Truth-O-Meter" ratings for Harris or Warren.

PolitiFact, per the Joe Biden gaffe, seems interested in truth, not facts.

Yet more sweet PolitiLies

Today, with a fresh executive order from President Donald Trump ending subsidies insurance companies had received from the Obama and Trump administrations, PolitiFact recycled a PolitiSplainer it published on July 31, 2017.

The story claimed to explain what it meant when Trump threatened to end an insurance company bailout:

We have no problem with the bulk of the story*, except for one glaring omission. PolitiFact writer John Kruzel somehow left out the fact that a court ruling found the payments to insurance companies were not authorized by the Affordable Care Act. The Court suspended its injunction to leave time for an appeal, but time ran out on the Obama administration and now any such appeal is up to the Trump administration.

Anyone want to hold their breath waiting for that to happen?

That makes the lead of Kruzel's story false (bold emphasis added):

President Donald Trump warned lawmakers he would cut off billions in federal funding that insurance companies receive through Obamacare if Congress fails to pass new health care legislation.

If the ACA legislation does not authorize the spending the insurance companies received, then the insurance companies do not receive their funding "through Obamacare."

How does a "nonpartisan" fact checker miss out on a key fact that is relatively common knowledge? And go beyond even that to misstate the fact of the matter?

Maybe PolitiFact is a liberal bubble?




*At the same time, we do not vouch for its accuracy

PolitiFact looking VOXier every day! (Updated)

Remember how Ezra Klein took his Washington Post Wonkblog act independent, starting the fact-challenged left-wing 'splainer site VOX?

PolitiFact is taking pages from the VOX playbook.

PolitiFact has always had VOX's ability to get things remarkably wrong, so the latest new sign of Voxiness comes from PolitiFact stories that venture into 'splaining instead of fact-checking. The item that especially caught our eye was one saying Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is incorrect for saying the United States should have taken Iraq's oil.

Trump's suggested policy on Iraq's oil is a choice with a moral, right/wrong dimension. As such PolitiFact's condemnation of the proposal amounts to moralizing. And isn't that exactly what we want from fact checkers?

We suspect the real reason PolitiFact is delving into overt PolitiSplaining has to do with its desire to share parts of expert interviews like this one:

"Insofar as Mr. Trump's proposals are coherent enough to be subject to analysis and judgment, they appear to be practically impossible, legally prohibited, and politically imbecilic," said Barnett Rubin, associate director of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation.

PolitiFact didn't say that about Trump! It was the expert! The expert did it! Was PolitiFact supposed to not print such a memorable quotation?

At PolitiFact Bias, we have long charged that PolitiFact's fact-checking routinely crosses the line from objective reporting into the realm of opinion journalism. An interview posted recently at Poynter.org, which owns PolitiFact through the Tampa Bay Times, underscores the accuracy of our assessment. Brad Scribner interviewed Lucas Graves, a recognized expert on fact-checking who did intern stints at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org. Scribner asked Graves about the relationship between fact-checking and the traditional "opinion page" in newspapers.

Graves:

It’s actually a misnomer to call the opinion page the opinion page. Really it’s the argument page. People are laying out fact-based arguments. We often confuse that sense of opinion with opinion as taste — where there’s no objective way to say which flavor of ice cream is better, but that’s not true of the kinds of points being made on the opinion page. They do involve facts — facts arrayed into arguments — and those arguments require interpretation. But any important or interesting factual question usually requires interpretation.

PolitiFact founder Bill Adair once called fact checking "reported conclusion journalism" and that’s a really good description.

 Find the whole interview at Poynter's website.


Update/Afters Sept. 12, 2016

We quoted PolitiFact's gem of a quotation from expert Barnett Rubin in our post above. It was quite uncomplimentary to Trump, so much so that we felt it reasonable to question Rubin's neutrality on that basis alone.

In our opinion, PolitiFact did Rubin no favors by quoting him.

We looked up Rubin's record on the FEC database. No surprise: He donates to Democrats.

Is it fine that PolitiFact does not inform its readers about stuff like this?

We wouldn't have that big a problem with it if it didn't represent such a marked pattern.


Correction Sept. 13, 2016: Our final mention of Barnett Rubin misspelled his last name as "Rubion." We apologize for the error, which is now corrected. Same day additional correction: The problem was worse than we noticed: We called Barnett Rubin "Barret" Rubin. We treble our apology.