PolitiFact Tweezes Green New Deal Falsehoods

In our post "PolitiFact's Green New Deal Fiction Depiction" we noted how PolitiFact had decided that a Democrat posting a falsehood-laden FAQ about the Green New Deal on her official congressional website escaped receiving a negative rating on PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter."

At the time we noted that PolitiFact's forbearance held benefits for Democrats and Republicans alike:

Many will benefit from PolitiFact's apparent plan to give out "Truth-O-Meter" mulligans over claimed aspects of the Green New Deal resolution not actually in the resolution. Critics of those parts of the plan will not have their attacks rated on the Truth-O-Meter. And those responsible for generating the controversy in the first place by publishing FAQs based on something other than the actual resolution also find themselves off the hook.

 We were partly right.

Yes, PolitiFact let Democrats who published a false and misleading FAQ about the Green New Deal off the hook.

But apparently PolitiFact has reserved the right to fault Republicans and conservatives who base their criticisms of the Green New Deal on the false and misleading information published by the Democrats.

PolitiFact Florida tweezed out a such a tidbit from an editorial written by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.):

False? It doesn't matter at all that Ocasio-Cortez said otherwise on her official website? There is no truth to it whatsoever? And Ocasio-Cortez gets no "False" rating for making an essentially identical claim on her website?

This case will get our "tweezers or tongs" tag because PolitiFact is once again up to its traditional shenanigan of tweezing out one supposed falsehood from a background of apparent truths:

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., outlined his opposition to the Democrats’ Green New Deal in a Feb. 25th Orlando Sentinel op-ed:

"If you are not familiar with it, here’s the cliff notes version: It calls for rebuilding or retrofitting every building in America in the next 10 years, eliminating all fossil fuels in 10 years, eliminating nuclear power, and working towards ending air travel (to be replaced with high-speed rail)."

...

Let’s hit the brakes right there -- do the Democrats want to end air travel?

See what PolitiFact did, there?

Scott can get three out of four points right, but PolitiFact Florida will pick on one point to give Scott a "False" rating and build for him an unflattering graph of  "Truth-O-Meter" ratings shaped by PolitiFact's selection bias.

The Jestation Hypothesis

How does PolitiFact Florida go about discounting the fact that Ocasio-Cortez claimed on her website that the Green New Deal aimed to make air travel obsolete?

The objective and neutral fact checkers give us the Jestation Hypothesis. She must have been kidding.

No, really. Perhaps the idea came directly from one of the three decidedly non-neutral experts PolitiFact cited in its fact check (bold emphasis added):

"It seems to me those lines from the FAQ were lighthearted and ill-considered, and it’s not clear why they were posted," said Sean Hecht, Co-Executive Director, Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at UCLA law school.

Hecht's FEC contributions page is hilariously one-sided.

Does anyone need more evidence that the line about making air travel obsolete was just a joke?

"No serious climate experts advocate ending air travel -- that's simply a red-herring," said Bledsoe, who was a climate change advisor to the Clinton White House.

Former Clinton White House advisor Bledsoe is about as neutral as Hecht. The supposed "red-herring," we remind readers, was published on Ocasio-Cortez's official House of Representatives website.

The neutral and objective fact-checkers of PolitiFact Florida deliver their jestational verdict (bold emphasis added):

Scott wrote in an op-ed that the Democrats’ Green New Deal includes "working towards ending air travel."

The resolution makes no mention of ending air travel. Instead, it calls for "overhauling transportation systems," which includes "investment in high-speed rail." Scott seized on a messaging document from Democrats that mentioned, perhaps in jest, getting rid of "farting cows and airplanes." But we found no evidence that getting rid of airplanes is a serious policy idea from climate advocates.

Apparently it cannot count as evidence that Democrats have advocated getting rid of airplanes if a popular Democratic Party representative publishes this on her website:

The Green New Deal sets a goal to get to net-zero, rather than zero emissions, at the end of this 10-year plan because we aren’t sure that we will be able to fully get rid of, for example, emissions from cows or air travel before then. However, we do believe we can ramp up renewable manufacturing and power production, retrofit every building in America, build the smart grid, overhaul transportation and agriculture, restore our ecosystem, and more to get to net-zero emissions.

Oh! Ha ha ha ha ha! Get it? We may not be able to fully get rid of emissions from cows or air travel in only 10 years! Ha ha ha!

So the claim was quite possibly a joke, even if no real evidence supports that idea.

But it's all PolitiFact needs to give a Republican a "False" rating and the Democrat no rating at all for saying essentially the same thing.

This style of fact-checking undermines fact checkers' credibility with centrists and conservatives, as well as with discerning liberals.



Afters

There was one more expert PolitiFact cited apart from the two we showed/noted were blatantly partisan.

That was "David Weiskopf, climate policy director for NextGen Climate America."

Here's a snippet from the home page for NextGen Climate America:

So basically neutral, right?

PolitiFact Florida "fact checker" (liberal blogger) Amy Sherman seems to have a special gift for citing groups of experts who skew hilariously left.

All About That Base(line)

When we do not publish for days at a time it does not mean that PolitiFact has cleaned up its act and learned to fly straight.

We simply lack the time to do a thorough job policing PolitiFact's mistakes.

What caught our attention this week? A fact check authored by one of PolitiFact's interns, Lucia Geng.

We were curious about this fact check thanks to PolitiFact's shifting standards on what counts as a budget cut. In this case the cut itself was straightforward: A lower budget one year compared to the preceding year. In that respect the fact check wasn't a problem.

But we found a different problem--also a common one for PolitiFact. At least when PolitiFact is fact-checking Democrats.

The fact check does not question the baseline.

The baseline is simply the level chosen for comparison. The Florida Democratic Party chose to compare the 2011 water management districts' collective budgets with the ones in 2012 and found that they were about $700 million lower. Our readers should note that the FDP started making this claim in 2018, not 2012.

It's just crazy for a fact checker to perform a fact check without looking at other potential baselines. Usually politicians and political groups choose a baseline for a reason. Comparing 2011 to 2012 appears to make sense superficially. The year 2011 represents Republican-turned-Independent Governor Charlie Crist. The year 2012 represents the current governor, also a Republican, Rick Scott.

But what if there's more to it? Any fact checker should look at data covering a longer time period to get an idea of what the claimed cut would actually mean.

We suspected that 2010 and before might show much lower budget numbers. To our surprise, the budget numbers were far higher, at least for the South Florida Water Management District whose budget dwarfs those of the other districts.

From 2010 to 2011, Gov. Crist cut the SFWMD budget by about $443 million. From 2009 to 2010 Gov. Crist cut the SFWMD budget by almost $1.5 billion. That's not a typo.

The message here is not that Gov. Crist was some kind of anti-environmental zealot. What we have here is a sign that the water management district budgets are volatile. They can change dramatically from one year to the next. The big question is why, and a secondary question is whether the reason should affect our understanding of the $700 million Gov. Scott cut from the combined water management district budgets between 2011 and 2012.

A fact checker who looked at the volatile changes in spending could then use that knowledge to ask officials at the water management districts questions that would help answer our two questions above. Geng listed email exchanges with officials from each of Florida's water management districts. But the fact check contains no quotations from those officials. It does not even refer to their responses via paraphrase or summary. We don't even know what questions Geng asked.

We did not contact the water management districts. But we looked for a clue regarding the budget volatility in the SFWMD's fiscal year 2011 projections for its future budgets. The agency expected capital expenditures to drop by more than half after 2011.

Rick Scott had not been elected governor at that time (October 2010).

This suggests that the water management districts had a budget cut baked into their long-term program planning, quite possibly strongly influenced by budgeting for the Everglades restoration project (including land purchases). If so, that counts as critical context omitted from the PolitiFact Florida fact check.

We flagged these problems for PolitiFact on Twitter and via email. As usual, the faux-transparent fact checkers responded with a stony silence and made no apparent effort to fix the deficiencies.

Aside from the hole in the story we felt the "Mostly True" rating was very forgiving of the Florida Democratic Party's blatant cherry-picking. And somehow PolitiFact even resisted using the term "cherry-picking" or any close synonym.



Afters:
The Florida Democratic Party, in the same tweet PolitiFact fact-checked, recycled the claim that Gov. Scott "banned the term 'Climate Change.'"

We suppose that's not the sort of thing that makes PolitiFact editors wonder "Is that true?"

Fact checker avoids checking facts

A summary article by PolitiFact Wisconsin's Tom Kertscher contributes new evidence supporting our claims that PolitiFact checks facts poorly and applies its standards inconsistently. We'll address the latter point in a later post.

Kertscher's article reviewed statements made in Wisconsin by Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton. The following example from Kertscher's story grabbed our attention:

"The Republican governor of Florida has forbidden any state employee ever to use, either orally or in writing, the words ‘climate change.’ "

A news report in March 2015 made that assertion, though the governor, Rick Scott, denied it.

The story Kertscher linked in support, however, dealt only with Florida's Department of Environmental Protection. The State of Florida has quite a few employees outside of the DEP. On the face of it, Clinton exaggerated wildly and the best PolitiFact Wisconsin can do in response is prop up a he-said/she-said facade supporting Clinton.

PolitiFact Wisconsin reported falsely. The March 2015 news report made no assertion that Gov. Scott placed a "climate change" gag order on every state employee in Florida.

We sent a message to Tom Kertscher on March 30, 2016 pointing out the error.

We'll update this item if we receive any response.

PolitiFact Florida tweezes Governor Scott

We've noted PolitiFact's inconsistency in judging claims narrowly or broadly, using the tag "Tweezers or Tongs" to identify our stories highlighting those inconsistencies.

Our example this time comes from PolitiFact Florida. PF Florida has looked at Florida Governor Rick Scott's claims on environmental spending, working to ensure that people do not believe Florida is spending a record amount on environmental issues generally, even if it's true that the state is spending a record amount to revitalize the Everglades and its natural springs.

The latest rating, a "Pants on Fire" given to Scott for repeating the "record funding" claim drew our attention thanks to the lack of context PolitiFact offered. Supposedly Scott made the claim at a June 2 economic summit attended by, among others, a number of GOP presidential hopefuls.

PolitiFact Florida noted that Scott made his claim in the company of a number of other claims.

As he boasted about the state’s record during his economic summit for GOP presidential contenders in Orlando June 2, Scott reeled off a bunch of statistics about Florida’s budget and economy including this one: "If you care about the environment, we've got record funding."

We confirmed that by locating Scott's speech on CSPAN. We created a clip that provides the context of Scott's remarks.

We have two main questions.

What led PolitiFact Florida to tweeze out that one statement from Scott from the many it could have fact checked?

Should we consider the issue adequately fact-checked when PolitiFact Florida's story publishes no comparative spending totals and fails to separate state funding from federal funding?

We don't think so.

Lairs of editors at PolitiFact Florida

 2010

With this item we go back a few years into PolitiFact Florida's history to remind us of the extent to which fact checkers will allow inaccuracies to go into print or onto the Internet.

PolitiFact will sometimes pick on the accuracy of somebody else's headline. PolitiFact Florida's headline on a fact check of Gov. Rick Scott is a doozy:

The problem is obvious just from the image capture, but we'll explain it just in case it's not obvious to somebody.

The headline says Scott claimed Thomas Jefferson called regulations an "endemic weakness," which, by standard norms of interpretation, means Scott is saying Jefferson used the term "endemic weakness" in describing government regulations.

But the section above quoting Scott doesn't jibe with PolitiFact Florida's headline. It's Scott using the term "endemic weakness" and saying Jefferson's complaints against the King of England as expressed in the Declaration of Independence serve as a vintage example.

PolitiFact Florida's fact check never makes the case that "endemic weakness" was attributed to Jefferson.

Making matters worse, Scott didn't even imply that Jefferson was complaining in principle that regulations make up an endemic weakness of government. He just used Jefferson's complaint as one example supporting his own point.

PolitiFact ignores Scott's real point and fact checks a tangent:

Scott quotes Jefferson correctly. But we wondered, what did Jefferson mean when he wrote that line? Did he think regulations are an endemic weakness in government?

Poor PolitiFact Florida! Its fact check assumes it matters whether Jefferson was saying regulations were an endemic weakness of government! It doesn't matter. Was Scott using a solid example of a proliferation of government regulations? Not really. But that doesn't mean Scott was saying Jefferson called government relations an "endemic weakness."

How does this type of colossal blunder make it past layers of editors? Why is PolitiFact's cure for Scott's inaccuracy worse than the disease?

It's makes us think perhaps PolitiFact uses lairs of editors instead of layers of editors. Perhaps layers of lairs of editors.

With a hat tip to the old "Batman" television series, our conception of a PolitiFact lair of editors:

Afters

Another year has come around, and finds us still blessed with peace and friendship abroad; law, order, and religion at home; good affection and harmony with our Indian neighbors; our burthens lightened, yet our income sufficient for the public wants, and the produce of the year great beyond example. These, fellow-citizens, are the circumstances under which we meet, and we remark with special satisfaction those which under the smiles of Providence result from the skill, industry, and order of our citizens, managing their own affairs in their own way and for their own use, unembarrassed by too much regulation, unoppressed by fiscal exactions.

 --Thomas Jefferson, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 15, 1802

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yeild, and government to gain ground.

 --Thomas Jefferson to Edward Carrington, Paris, May 27, 1788