David Friedman: "Problems with 'Fact Checking'"

Academic David Friedman, on his personal blog "Ideas," fired off a Sunday salvo aimed at PunditFact, the wing of PolitiFact that fact checks pundits.

Friedman has plenty to say and says it well, so we'll just tease our readers with his first paragraph and provide our usual encouragement to click the link and read the whole thing:

I recently came across a link on Facebook to a claim that "Over Half of all Statements Made on Fox News are False," based on a story in the Tampa Bay Times' PunditFact. My first reaction was that I had no more reason to trust the Tampa Bay Times than to trust Fox, making the story pure partisan assertion, so I followed the link to see what support it offered. To their credit, they listed the statements on Fox that they based their claim on and provided the basis for their conclusions. But looking at them in detail, their evaluation was clearly biased in favor of what they wanted to believe.

We never tire of highlighting good criticism of PolitiFact. If only there were more hours in the day.

PolitiFact's layers of inaccuracy

Do mainstream media outlets ever tire of their self-serving mantra that their layers of editors give them an insurmountable edge over mere bloggers?

Puny bloggers!  Mainstream Media will SMASH!

The problem?  The mainstream media have trouble with serious self-criticism.  We'll get our example, of course, from PolitiFact's PunditFact.

On May 28, 2014, PunditFact fact-checked tea party icon Sarah Palin's claim that the federal government spent money on a plan to deal with a zombie apocalypse.  PunditFact found only a Centers for Disease Control public relations campaign that used mention of zombies to help communicate the need for disaster preparedness.  That wasn't a plan, PunditFact ruled, so Palin received a "False" rating.

However, PunditFact soon heard from people pointing out the Department of Homeland Security used a campaign similar to the CDC's.  And, more importantly, the Pentagon kept a zombie apocalypse response plan in its computer database for use in training operations.  Not for real zombies, necessarily, but just to make preparedness drills more interesting and (hopefully) facilitate effective training.  So there was a plan after all, and the government apparently spent money on it.  So PolitiFact immediately revised its rating to "Half True."  And PolitiFact stuck with its rating of "False" since the "plan" wasn't really a plan.

The fact check was an epic fail, in other words.  But PolitiFact's layers of editors and fact checkers will make sure that its misinformation spreads as much as possible.   PolitiFact Oregon writer Dana Tims does his part for Oregon Live the day after PolitiFact's update to its story:

PunditFact's check, not surprisingly, found that the government has no contingency plan to cope with an invasion of the Undead. While the Centers for Disease Control did play off the zombie apocalypse craze in 2011 "as a way to pass along real information about preparing for emergencies that don't involve zombies. They wrote up a tongue-in-cheek blog post, which successfully generated plenty of attention." Palin, for her post touching on Undeath Panels, walked away with a False rating.

 Not surprisingly, eh?  Almost sounds like a bias against Palin's claim.

Either Tims wasn't aware of the fact check's afternoon update admitting the existence of a plan to cope with a zombie apocalypse, or else he just isn't good at reporting the facts.  Either way, Tims shows us the way faux checkers of facts manufacture false legends and refuse to let facts get in the way of attacking a favorite target.