PolitiFact consistent on congressional pay raises: prefers Democrats

Monday's ruling by PolitiFact Ohio on a claim from the Josh Mandel senate campaign brought back some memories.

Mandel accused incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown of voting himself six pay raises.  PolitiFact Ohio was all over it.  PolitiFact Ohio dove into the weeds to discover that since 1989 congressional pay raises occur automatically without a vote.

PolitiFact's Tom Feran:

Because the pay raises are essentially automatic, the only thing Congress can do is vote to stop them. There are roll call votes on whether members of Congress were willing to hear amendments to suspend their pay increases. And it is those procedural votes that the Mandel ad relies on for support.

PolitiFact notes that in two of the six cases Mandel cites, Brown was against the pay raise after he was for it.  I believe that one's called a "reverse Kerry."

PolitiFact Ohio says the point is that members of Congress cannot raise their own pay because the pay raises only take effect when the next Congress takes office.  PolitiFact Ohio rates the Mandel claim "False."

Now, why did this pay raise thing bring back memories?

The Florida Democratic Party tried much the same tactic on Republican gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum.  The FDP said McCollum voted four times to raise his own pay, along with naming the amount of McCollum's congressional pension.  The ruling from PolitiFact Florida?  "True."

Ace PolitiFact journalist Louis Jacobson bought it hook, line and sinker:

Both claims are supported by the evidence, so we're assigning it a rating of True.

There are a few differences between the claims, to be sure, but two things are equally sure:  If the PolitiFact Ohio rating is accurate then the PolitiFact Florida rating is wrong.  And if the PolitiFact Florida rating is accurate then the PolitiFact Ohio rating is wrong.

Welcome to the wonderful world of PolitiFact fact checking.

Balancing act at PolitiFact Ohio?

Since its 2011 "Lie of the Year," the claim from Democrats that Republicans voted to end Medicare, PolitiFact has found itself trying to answer the criticism that it tries to achieve a false balance in its fact checking operations.

Past questions about the dangers of selection bias should have amply prepared PolitiFact editors to answer this sort of question.

Should have.

PolitiFact Ohio editor Robert Higgs of the Cleveland Plain Dealer took a shot at addressing the issue of balance in comments to the Plain Dealer's reader representative, Ted Diadium:

I asked Bob Higgs, the editor who oversees the PolitiFact Ohio operation, if he deliberately tries for balance:

"The belief is that if we apply the same constructive standards to all claims, we'll end up treating all sides fairly," he said. "Some of the state operations (there are 10 in the PolitiFact organization), as well as the national operation, do not tally the rankings at all."

Higgs admits that he does tally up the results by party (which shows them remarkably even), "but only to see after the fact how we've done."

Even if PolitiFact Ohio applies its evaluation standards consistently to all its stories, balanced treatment need not result. In fact, it probably won't result.

It won't result because selection bias will occur without active steps taken to avoid the problem.

Select nine stories likely to make Democrats look bad while selecting one that will likely made Republicans look good will not achieve balance regardless of applying identical standards in the evaluation--not that we at PolitiFact Bias believe PolitiFact applies its standards consistently.

Newsflash for Higgs:  Every writer and editor at PolitiFact likely has a sense of how the stories break down by party.  The "remarkably even" count that results at PolitiFact Ohio helps prove the point.

PolitiFact markets its stats as candidate report cards and the like, but the real value of PolitiFact's numbers comes from the insights we obtain into PolitiFact's behavior--not the behavior of those featured in the stories.


Correction:  Changed the first of two consecutive instances of "the" to a "from" in the concluding paragraph.  Hat tip to Jeff Dyberg for catching the the error.

CJR's interview with Robert Higgs

Columbia Journalism Review has posted online an interview with the editor of PolitiFact Ohio, Robert Higgs.

Though it was tempting to quote the positive, where Higgs expressed reservations about labeling a subject as a "liar," the winner for the PFB spotlight was this cringe-worthy response by Higgs:

What is your audience like? Do you have any sense of how it compares to the audience for the regular political or news coverage?

It is very diverse. I know we have readers who are very conservative, and I know we have readers who are very liberal who read it every day. I get email from all ends of the political spectrum, both criticizing us because they don’t like what we wrote or suggesting items to take a look at. I like that. I get hit from both sides, with people accusing me of having a leftist bias or an obvious conservative bent. It’s refreshing to know we are hitting somewhere down the middle.

Dude.


Afters:

Recommended question for the next Higgs interview:

Mr. Higgs, when PolitiFact Ohio uses the "Half True" grade on the 'Truth-O-Meter,' is it defined as "The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context" or is it defined as "The statement is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context"?

Follow up: 

Has that definition ever changed at PolitiFact Ohio?



Jeff adds: This oft repeated notion that if PolitiFact is upsetting both sides, they must be doing something right, is grossly flawed. "If I put this foot in a bucket of ice, and my other foot in a smelting pot, it follows that I'll be perfectly comfortable." If the best self-analysis PolitiFact editors can come up with is a cliche that doesn't work, it's no surprise their fact checks get the same uncritical review.

The Weekly Standard: "PolitiFact’s Problem with Long Division"

Jeffrey H. Anderson may have a Ph.D., but it's not in mathematics. So when he's faced with the daunting task of taking one number and dividing by another number, he should just leave it to the rocket surgeons over at PolitiFact. This is especially important if old math doesn't produce PolitiFact's desired result.

Anderson sums up the numerical details while answering a PolitiFact analysis:

Last month, I wrote that President Obama’s own handpicked Council of Economic Advisors had released an estimate that the president’s economic “stimulus” had added or saved just one job for every $278,000 of taxpayer money spent. Obama’s economists said the “stimulus” had cost $666 billion to date and had added or saved 2.4 million jobs. $666 billion divided by 2.4 million is $278,000. Yet when Speaker John Boehner tweeted, “POTUS’ economists: ‘Stimulus’ Has Cost $278,000 per job,” PolitiFact Ohio rated [*] his tweet as “False.” PolitiFact Texas and PolitiFact Wisconsin have chimed in with identical scoring of similar statements.

So, what does PolitiFact have against long division?

Had Anderson been a reader of this blog, he would know that when numbers act in defiance of predetermined talking points, PolitiFact simply invents new standards to measure them against. And when it comes to inventing new standards, PolitiFact Ohio gets its cue straight from the top:

After Republicans began to circulate the blog item, White House spokesman Jay Carney said its conclusions were "based on partial information and simply false analysis." White House spokeswoman Liz Oxhorn issued a statement that noted the Recovery Act bolstered infrastructure, education, and industries "that are critical to America’s long-term success and an investment in the economic future of America’s working families."

The White House points out that Recovery Act dollars didn’t just fund salaries - as the blog item implies - it also funded numerous capital improvements and infrastructure projects.

Lumping all costs together and classifying it as salaries produces an inflated figure.

Of course, PolitiFact fails to offer evidence that Anderson did classify the entire stimulus spending as salaries.

Here's where PolitiFact Ohio tags out, and PolitiFact Texas brings some new moves to the ring:

The White House points out that Recovery Act dollars didn’t just fund salaries — as the blog item implies. Lumping all stimulus costs together and classifying the total as salaries produces an inflated figure.

Oops! PF Ohio already said that. Let's try again:

We checked the White House report, and of the $666 billion stimulus total, 43 percent was spent on tax cuts for individuals and businesses; 19 percent went to state governments, primarily for education and Medicaid; and 13 percent paid for government benefits to individuals such as unemployment and food stamps.

The remainder, about 24 percent, was spent on projects such as infrastructure improvement, health information technology and research on renewable energy.

How would Anderson respond to this arithmetical assault?

There are a number of problems with these claims.

First, I never said that the $278,000 per job was all spent on salaries or wages. I would never attribute anything close to that degree of efficiency to the federal government.

I'm really starting to like this Anderson guy.

He continues:

As I wrote in my response to the White House, “This much is clear: Based on an estimate by Obama’s own economists, for every $278,000 in taxpayer-funded “stimulus” money that the Obama administration has spent — whatever it may have spent it on — the “stimulus” has added or saved just one job.” That remains an undeniable fact.

Anderson's article takes up another issue with the stimulus, which is that not only is it incredibly expensive per job created, he also contends that the stimulus is actually causing jobs to be lost. PolitiFact, unsurprisingly, took issue with that claim as well. But Anderson effortlessly debunks PolitiFact's debunkery:

The entire response on this point from PolitiFact (both the Ohio and Texas versions) is to cite Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi, who told the left-leaning website TPMDC that “the Weekly Standard misinterpreted that data.” That was good enough for PolitiFact. Never mind that Zandi is a Keynesian economist whose estimates of the stimulus’s likely effects were cited (see table 4) by Christina Romer, the first head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, before the “stimulus” was even passed. In other words, Zandi said it would work, and now he says it worked.

In the end we're left with yet another (and multiple) examples of PolitiFact taking an objective, verifiable statement, constructing a straw man, and quickly demolishing their creation. Anderson never implied that the $278,000 figure represented salaries per job. He was making a point regarding the expense of the stimulus overall and putting it into a context that was easily digested by readers. It's impressive (if not disturbing) the lengths PolitiFact went to in order to distort and discard Anderson's valid premise.

Our goal at PolitiFact Bias is to consolidate and condense the best critiques of PolitiFact and provide a collection point of those criticisms. It is not our prerogative nor desire to reprint full articles.This brief review doesn't do justice to Anderson's excellent and thorough work. As always, we encourage you to go to the source and read the whole thing.

On a side note, I'd like to add something I found amusing, repeated verbatim in both the PF Ohio and Texas editions:

Furthermore, the publication created its statistic with the report's low-end jobs estimate. Had it gone with the 3.6 million job figure at the top end of the range, it would have come up with a smaller $185,000 per job figure.

Are we to assume $185,000 per job created would bump the stimulus into the "successful" category?



Bryan adds:

I find it amusing that PolitiFact accepts Mark Zandi's opinions without comment yet spends much of another recent fact check attacking Florida governor Rick Scott's source because of its supposed partiality.

PolitiFact's work generally leaves the impression that it favors liberal sources in terms of both numbers and reputation.  One might say PolitiFact represents Groseclose liberal media syndrome on steroids.

Pending a rigorous evaluation, of course.


*In Anderson's article the original "PolitiFact Ohio rated" hyperlink linked back to Anderson's own piece. I changed it to link to the PF Ohio rating of Boehner's tweet that was described.-Jeff