It's a fact! It's from a Republican! It's "Pants on Fire"!

Computer access problems stopped us from joining the vanguard in trashing  PolitiFact's recent "Pants on Fire" rating given to Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio for saying Reagan's strength compared to Carter's weakness led to the release of hostages on the day Reagan was inaugurated in early 1981.

PolitiFact:

Fortunately, Power Line and Red State admirably filled the breach.

Power Line faults PolitiFact for citing the controversial Gary Sick as an expert historical source, then skewers PolitiFact for simply ignoring the evidence supporting Rubio:

Anyway, Politifact continues:

Instead, the Iranians had tired of holding the hostages, and that the administration of Jimmy Carter did the legwork to get the hostages released.

They got tired of it, you see. Riiiight. Okay, if you’re done being convulsed with laughter on the floor, let’s recall what the Washington Post editorial page (!!) had to say about the matter on January 21, 1981:

“Who doubts that among Iran’s reasons for coming to terms now was a desire to beat [Reagan] to town?”

And who doubts that Politifact and other “fact checkers” are too clueless to grasp Rubio’s argument that your reputation in the world counts for something—especially with your enemies.

Red State noted:

The release did coincide with Reagan’s inauguration. Any critique of Rubio’s statement must include an very solid bit of proof that the two events were disconnected. As a matter of fact, the negotiations that led to the release of the hostages were not even signed until January 19, 1981. If as Gary Sick states, it was that the Iranians were afraid of having to start all over again with Reagan then why was the release not effected earlier. While the Reagan administration, rightfully, had nothing to do with the negotiations it is utter lunacy to assert that Reagan’s election did not have a demonstrable effect.

Power Line and Red State do a nice job in pointing out the holes in PolitiFact's version of the events surrounding the hostage crisis. But we would add to their criticisms the point that PolitiFact also pulled its all-too-typical creative straw man technique on Rubio.

Where Rubio staked out the very defensible position that Iran cut its deal with the president from which it thought it would get the better deal, PolitiFact implies Rubio claimed that Reagan's inauguration caused the release of the hostages:

We flagged Rubio’s comment as a misleading framing of history. Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 may have coincided with the release of the hostages, but historians say it did not cause it.

Is that how PolitiFact framed the issue when it contacted its select panel of experts?

Regardless, this looks like a case of PolitiFact non-transparently interviewing a half-dozen experts and then declaring an expert consensus where no such consensus exists in reality.

Via the United States Institute for Peace (bold emphasis added):

Ronald Reagan was sworn into office on January 20, 1981, just as Iran released 52 Americans held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for 444 days. The timing was deliberate. The young revolutionary regime did not want the hostages freed until after Jimmy Carter, who had supported the shah and allowed him into the United States, left office. At the same time, Tehran wanted to clear the slate in the face of a new Republican administration that had vowed to take a tougher stand on terrorism and hostage-taking.

 So totally nothing to do with Reagan.

Whatever.

Here's predicting PolitiFact will do what it usually does when confronted with a strong critique from the right: Nothing.

Red State: "PolitiFact Proves Yet Again It Is a Left Wing Attack Machine With Nonpartisan Veneer"

Red State's Erick Erickson is all over PolitiFact for its grading of a recent claim by Texas governor and presidential hopeful Rick Perry.

Erickson works quite a few angles against the PolitiFact effort.  We think Erickson perhaps shorted the basic obvious criticism that Perry's statement was never intended to hold up tort reform as the sole explanation for Texas' increase in physicians, but Erickson hits his target with such gusto that his piece is certainly worth a read.

The introductory material is particularly good:

As a general rule of thumb I heard somewhere, fact checkers don’t check facts.

Fact checkers exist to put an objective, nonpartisan veneer on whatever some reporter wants to say. And when fact checkers take it upon themselves to be arbiters of truth, they use their own biases. One of the worst is Politifact, which the media now hides (sic) behind routinely to give cover to a left-of-center spin on truth.

The fact check is striking for its acknowledgment of expert opinion to the effect that tort reform helped attract doctors coupled with its flat finding of "False."

There is no question that tort reform drove down medical malpractice insurance premiums and reduced the number of malpractice suits. And there is no question that most health care providers like the change and say it’s a factor that leads them to practice in the state.

Bold emphasis added.



Note:  This post was accidentally reverted to draft form at some point.  Restored to published status 1/15/2012

RedState: "Politifact’s Review of Josh Trevino: Mostly Hackery"

Red State, thanks to Leon H. Wolf, has another excellent criticism of a PolitiFact fact check.

Wolf takes PolitiFact Texas to task over its rating of RedState Co-Founder Josh Treviño. Treviño cited a poll on an MSNBC program. PolitiFact subjected (pun intended) the statement to its Truth-O-Meter.

And that gets Wolf to wondering:

Politifact was forced to concede that Trevino’s characterization of the poll showing a plurality opposed to raising the debt ceiling was 100% correct and accurate. So what caused them to rate Trevino’s remarks as “mostly true” instead of “completely and entirely true”?

I'll supply a bit more context than did Wolf in summing up PolitiFact's complaint (he quotes only the latter paragraph):

Treviño’s other point — that Americans favor mostly budget cuts to deal with the deficit — didn’t poll as neatly as his recap suggests.

Asked how they’d prefer members of Congress to address the deficit, 20 percent said only by cutting spending and another 30 percent said mostly with spending cuts. Four percent favored solely tax increases, while 7 percent said they’d prefer to tackle the deficit mostly by tax hikes.

Wolf notes that the 20 percent and 30 percent figures add up to exactly the plurality Treviño describes.  So Treviño's numbers and underlying argument both stand as "True."  Yet contrast the rating of Treviño with a "Mostly True" PolitiFact rating of President Obama using a similar set of figures:

Getting back to Obama's statement, he said, "You have 80 percent of the American people who support a balanced approach. Eighty percent of the American people support an approach that includes revenues and includes cuts." Even the best poll doesn't show support quite that high -- he would more accurately have accounted for the small numbers that support only tax increases or were unsure, putting the number at 70 percent. But his overall point is correct that polls show most Americans support a balanced approach when given a choice between cutting spending or raising taxes. So we rate his statement Mostly True.

The president, using the most favorable numbers, therefore inflates his figure by 14 percent (10 percentage points).  And the president leaves at least as much context unstated as did Treviño.  Treviño arguably left out nothing of importance.

Wolf (bold emphasis added):

Memo to Politifact: the fact that a poll contains additional information that Trevino did not discuss does not make his statement less than entirely truthful. For example: if Trevino had been discussing the latest poll of the Republican caucus in Iowa and had claimed (correctly) that “Bachmann leads Romney 32%-29%,” his statement would not be rated merely “mostly true” because he did not disclose that Pawlenty was at 7%, Santorum at 6%, etc. Trevino by his own statement wasnt’ (sic) discussing the people who wanted the deficit solution split roughly down the middle, he was discussing people who favored “mostly cuts” versus “mostly taxes,” and his statement was (and should have been scored) completely correct.

Treviño used the poll data responsibly and accurately.  The president didn't.  If Treviño is at fault for failing to point out that a plurality are open to additional revenue/tax increases then isn't the president at fault for failing to mention the plurality who favor more reliance on budget cuts than on tax increases?  Yet PolitiFact mentions only Treviño's supposed omission.  The president gets a pass.

Do both men deserve the same grade, PolitiFact?  Seriously?

Red State: "PolitiFact or PolitiSpin?"

Red State blogger "Flagstaff" published a survey of PolitiFact's fact checking in early July.  Though the survey was limited in scope and lacked any apparent scientific construction, the conclusion is solid:

In the end, we can’t trust a newspaper service to grade the truthfulness of politicians for us.  The grades turn on the political bias of the paper, and you can imagine where that is.  We can’t simply believe claims that they’re non-partisan; we must make them prove it by what they write, then do our own evaluation anyway, based on whether what they say makes sense or not.

Flagstaff made a valuable addition in the subsequent commentary thread:

The bias mostly seems to present by nit-picking at petty mistakes of the right, insisting on strict definitional usage of words, finding fault with what is NOT said, and glossing over major errors from the left, supplying exculpatory explanations for obvious mistakes, allowing broad interpretation of leftist words and their intent, basically behaving exactly as the MSM does every day

Yeah.  That.

Visit Red State to read it all.

Red State: "'What liberal media?' (Texas edition.)"

Writing at Red State, the Texas Public Policy Foundation's vice president of communications Joshua Treviño provides a perfect take-down of PolitiFact's perfidious fact checking, this time touching the issue of job creation.

PolitiFact graded an ad touting Texas' job creation numbers "Half True" because the ad used the standard metric of net jobs created to laud Texas' performance with job creation rather than also taking into account gross job creation.

Or, as Treviño phrased it:

So what’s the bottom line on PolitiFact’s assessment that TPPF has promulgated a “half truth”? On the negative side, PolitiFact engaged in tendentious interpretive exercises in an effort to promulgate a jobs-creation metric that absolutely no one uses — and then penalized us for not using it. On the positive side, PolitiFact did acknowledge that TPPF’s Rollins is objectively correct by every reasonable standard, and they spelled our name right.

Treat yourself by reading the whole of Treviño's post.

Red State: "Yet Again Politifact Shows Itself to be Leftist Propaganda Masquerading as an Agent of Truth"

Red State's Erick Erickson noticed a compelling similarity between PolitiFact and the political left:

Now Politifact is going after Senator Rob Portman for saying

As an immediate bridge, we should increase access for oil exploration and production in energy-rich areas of the country like the Outer Continental Shelf, and in parts of Alaska

Get ready. What is Politifact saying?

Not so fast, say the experts. Pretend that environmentalists dropped all objections to drilling for oil on the Outer Continental Shelf — that area that lies offshore between states’ jurisdictions and the end of United States oceanic boundaries. Also pretend that the public decided its need for oil trumped what environmentalists see as the sanctity of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. Since we’re just pretending, everyone join in: Drill, baby, drill.
Then wait.
See ya around 2021.

That is exactly what the Democrats said in 2001 when George Bush tried it. Today is the tomorrow the Democrats told us yesterday was too far away to do anything about. Politifact continues the Democrats’ talking points.

I could wish that Erickson, in the entirety of his post, provided a more thorough account of PolitiFact's flim-flam.  But his basic point is accurate enough, even if it is expressed in terms unlikely to move persons not already in agreement with political conservatism.

I'll fill in a few details to help out the liberals and progressives.

Even if we forgive PolitiFact for taking "immediate" in an absolute sense probably not intended by Portman, PolitiFact loses sight of the fact that merely demonstrating a willingness to exploit our own energy resources immediately reduces dependence on foreign energy.

"Why is that?" the progressive or mainstream journalist might wonder.

When foreign nations see the U.S. move to exploit its energy resources it immediately starts to close a window of time foreign nations can use to hold us over a political barrel.

Suppose OPEC starts an embargo.  The longer OPEC can expect the U.S. to provide an increase in its own energy exploitation, the stronger the political power of the embargo.  Anything that shrinks the window immediately shrinks the power of the embargo.

So even taken hyper-literally, Portman's claim is no less than "Barely True" using PolitiFact's grading system (Portman was graded "False" on this item).

The PolitiFact story is blind to these facts.  The story is reliant on the opinion of an official linked to the administration (U.S. Energy Information Agency) and on extrapolated information from other of PolitiFact's fact checks.