Narrative-shepherding instead of fact-checking for America as stolen land

One has to hand it to PolitiFact's Yacob Reyes. Earlier this year, Reyes turned a mostly unoccupied barrier island into the whole of Lee County. Now, Reyes turns bad-faith treaties affecting a limited number of American lands into support for the narrative of the United States (plus other modern American nations north and south) consisting of stolen land.

Behold:

PolitiFact's left-wing editorial masquerading as a fact check published on Nov. 3, 2022.

It takes DeSantis out of context, and instead of devoting an "In Context" article to DeSantis' statement, akin to the cover PolitiFact provided for President Obama when he informed business owners "You didn't build that," DeSantis received a "Pants on Fire" rating.

Strikingly, PolitiFact apparently draws a complete blank in trying to figure out why DeSantis would say the United States is not build on stolen land. That comes through in two ways. First, PolitiFact opines in print that it "wondered what DeSantis was referring to and whether he was right in his assessment of whether the U.S. was built on 'stolen land.'" Second, PolitiFact offered absolutely nothing to represent DeSantis position other than tweets from DeSantis associate Christina Pushaw.

Pushaw tweeted an image promoted by Democratic Party candidate for Lieutenant Governor Karla Hernández-Mats saying "No one is illegal on stolen land." After reporting that Hernández-Mats offered no response to its questions about the image, PolitiFact drops that subject for the remainder of the article.

That's how PolitiFact treated the context.

With the context safely ignored, PolitiFact documents some of the admittedly raw deals the Native Americans got and declares DeSantis as wrong as can be:

It's well-documented that the U.S. repeatedly made treaties with Native Americans and then violated them using force and other means to accommodate non-Native settlement. Courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have time and again affirmed that as fact.

Government-endorsed actions to remove Native Americans from their ancestral lands included the 1830 passage of a federal law that led to war and resulted in thousands of Native deaths and more than 3,000 Seminoles being removed from Florida.

DeSantis' claim is wildly historically inaccurate. We rate it Pants on Fire!

How does that push back against a DeSantis objection to the immigration statement Hernández-Mats promoted? It doesn't. Instead, it blandly moves in step with liberal-progressive orthodoxy. PolitiFact can't be bothered to dig up articles that explain the objection to singling out Western nations as occupying stolen land.

The Spectator/Historian Jeff Fynn-Paul:

The narrative of the ‘stolen country’ or ‘Native American genocide’ does not stand up to scrutiny by any honest and clear-sighted historian. It is a dangerously myopic and one-sided interpretation of history. It has only gained currency because most practising historians and history teachers are either susceptible to groupthink, or else have been cowed into silence by fear of losing their jobs. Reduced to its puerile form of ‘statement of guilt’, this myth puts 100 per cent of the burden on Europeans who are held responsible for all historical evil, while the First Nations people are mere victims; martyrs even, whose saintlike innocence presumes that their civilisation and society were practically perfect in every way.

All Land is Stolen/Anthony Galli:

The only reason you can claim to “own” land is because of the implicit threat of military/police force against anyone who might try to take it from you. In the good ol’ prehistoric days, man would have to defend his own cave, but now our self-defense is largely done by our respective governments so that we can worry about other things like what’s on Netflix. In other words, a country is one big cave where the current occupant claims to own the cave by threatening force if you try to “steal” it.

In fact, what makes the United States of America so special is how well we treated the former inhabitants of the land we purchased… relative to how every other nation on Earth had treated conquered people up-till that point, which granted still isn’t saying much because the Trail of Tears definitely wasn’t a walk in the park.

Authors such as these help point out that viewing one's own nation as a thief will tend to erode society. And given that every nation qualifies as a thief in trivial "stolen land" terms, there is no real solution to the problem that doesn't involve destroying society. Further, in terms of permitting free immigration on the southern border, why should the descendants of land-stealing conquistadors have title to land stolen in an arguably more civilized way north of the Mexican border?

It doesn't make sense. But PolitiFact will not present those views.

PolitiFact has a narrative to nurture. And excluding competing narratives serves as one means toward that end.

Stanley Kurtz/National Review: "PolitiFact’s Failed Attack on DeSantis, over Civics Education"

With less time to devote to this website, we don't often highlight outside work. But that was actually our aim when we started out!

This article in National Review by Stanley Kurtz does a terrific job rebutting PolitiFact's latest screed targeting Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.

Late last Friday, PolitiFact issued a “fact check” claiming that Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s recent swipe against the Civics Secures Democracy Act (CSDA) was “false.” Actually, DeSantis’s criticism of CSDA is on the mark. It’s PolitiFact’s reporting that’s fallacious. PolitiFact’s failed attack on DeSantis can fairly be called an opinion piece in disguise. But it’s also something more — and worse — than that. Yacob Reyes of PolitiFact thoroughly misrepresents DeSantis, merely refuting a straw man of his own making. Let’s have a look, then, at the media’s latest bogus hit job on DeSantis.

Key to PolitiFact's argument was its contention that the Civics Secures Democracy Act has language supposedly barring it from being used to set education policy. PolitiFact noted arguments to the contrary but framed them as unsupported conservative opinion. 

 

Framing something as unsupported conservative opinion apparently means not needing to undercut the argument without a fallacious appeal.

The article [by Kurtz, in National Review] then suggested the criteria for receiving the grants could entice states to conform their curricula to "federal demands," such as when states began adopting Common Core, a set of national educational standards. 

Common Core’s critics have often accused the federal government of coercing states into adopting the standards in exchange for grant money. We have fact-checked similar claims about Common Core before and found them inaccurate.

PoliitiFact inaccurately claimed it fact checked similar claims. The claims it checked were only superficially similar.

For our part, we pointed out to the PolitiFact author, Yacob Reyes, that liberal Vox.com made a argument parallel to the one PolitiFact dismissed as unsupported conservative opinion.

The federal government didn't write the standards, but it has promoted them. The stimulus bill included $4.4 billion in Education Department grants for states that adopted "college- and career-ready standards."

States weren't explicitly required to adopt the Common Core in order to compete for the federal money; they could have used their own standards if they proved to the Education Department that those standards prepared students for college. Nearly all of them adopted Common Core instead, and all of the states who eventually won the grants were Common Core states.

Too bad for Vox that correlations are only "True" when PolitiFact says they are.

It's just another case of PolitiFact substituting its own straw men for claims while presenting evidence weighted toward one side.

Kurtz's article is worth reading through to the last word.

PolitiFact attack on DeSantis attacks a straw man

PolitiFact's supposed fact check of Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida did not fact check what DeSantis said. Instead it attacked a straw man version of DeSantis' words.

The tag we use on these kinds of stories here at PolitiFact Bias is "altered claims." It's a relatively common occurrence. We just don't have time to document them all.

The problem sticking out like a sore thumb yet invisible to PolitiFact? DeSantis didn't say anything about what's driving the coronavirus surge. Look for yourself. Here's PolitiFact's account of what DeSantis said, with our highlights of DeSantis' actual words:

DeSantis unloaded on Biden during an Aug. 4 news conference in Panama City, Fla. 

"He’s imported more virus from around the world by having a wide open southern border. You have hundreds of thousands of people pouring across every month," DeSantis said. "You have over 100 different countries where people are pouring through. Not only are they letting them through — they're then farming them out all across our communities across this country. Putting them on planes, putting them on buses."

DeSantis doubled down in a fundraising letter later that day: "Joe Biden has the nerve to tell me to get out of the way on COVID while he lets COVID-infected migrants pour over our southern border by the hundreds of thousands. No elected official is doing more to enable the transmission of COVID in America than Joe Biden with his open borders policies."

See? There's not a word from DeSantis about what's driving the current coronavirus surge.

Perhaps the fact checkers somehow derived the core of their fact check based on the news report they cited in the story (WPTV):

DeSantis accused Biden of accelerating the pandemic through lax security at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But again, DeSantis didn't say anything about accelerating the pandemic. He said Biden's border policy was "helping to facilitate" the spread of covid-19:

(")And so he's not shutting down the virus, he's helping to facilitate it in our country."

"Facilitate" is not the same word as "accelerate." They don't mean the same thing.

"Accelerate" is not the same word as "drive." They don't mean the same thing.

In like manner, "facilitate" doesn't mean the same thing as "drive." 

It's irresponsible and wrong for journalists to play the telephone game with key terms.

The fact check's conclusion derives almost entirely from PolitiFact's straw man focus:

DeSantis said Biden has driven the current coronavirus surge because he "imported more virus from around the world by having a wide open southern border." 

The available evidence shows that coronavirus hot spots tend to be clustered either far from the border or on the water, whereas the entire land border with Mexico has fairly low rates. The hotspot locations tend to correlate with low rates of vaccination among the public. 

In addition, the U.S. does not have a "wide open" border. Most people who are encountered are turned away under a Trump-era policy that Biden continued. 

We rate the statement False.

DeSantis did not say Biden has driven the current coronavirus surge. DeSantis said Biden had done more than any other elected official to facilitate the spread of covid. PolitiFact's experts affirmed that border crossings under Biden represent a valid concern. PolitiFact never bothered comparing Biden's border policy to that of any other elected official (Gov. Cuomo, maybe?).

PolitiFact put two other (post-publication note: we deal with one of them!) elements in its fact check that we find worthy of note.

'Hotspot Locations Tend to Correlate With Low Rates of Vaccination'

That sentence was a fact check of Biden, albeit carried out with a carelessness that totally undermines its validity.

Let's take a look at the map of "hotspots" PolitiFact provided.

 

Now take a look at the Johns Hopkins map (as of Aug. 8, 2021--archived version doesn't show the map) showing vaccine percentages by state (fully vaccinated, top; at least one dose, bottom):

 

The claim from President Biden and repeated by PolitiFact, deserved far more scrutiny than it got (look at Nebraska and Nevada, just for starters).

PolitiFact supposedly relied on The New York Times to support the notion that low vaccination rates explain the surge's current pattern:

There’s also a more plausible explanation for the coronavirus surge’s current pattern: Case rates are higher in places with lower rates of vaccination. 

An analysis by the New York Times found that at the end of July, counties with vaccination rates below 30% had coronavirus case rates well over double the case rates in counties with at least 60% vaccination. And five of the six least-vaccinated states — Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi — are all squarely within the geographical quadrant of the country that has the highest case rates.

PolitiFact's claim relies on specious reasoning, given that the Times conducted nothing like a controlled experiment. The Times showed some charts of test results in high-vaccinated counties compared to low-vaccinated counties. But a vaccinated person is more likely to dismiss mild illness as something other than covid and skip testing. Unvaccinated people would be more likely to get tested and artificially bump the percentage for positive tests in counties with low vaccination percentages.

We'd say that a fact checker who fails to realize this perhaps belongs in another line of work.

Instead of building a straw man out of DeSantis' claim, PolitiFact would have served the public better by doing a serious examination of Biden's implied claim that vaccination effectively provides a significant degree of immunity against covid--to the point where vaccinated persons do not need to worry much about passing the virus on to others (vaccinated and unvaccinated alike).

How does Iceland fit with PolitiFact's rubberstamping of Biden's claim, for example?

From the Brussels Times (bold emphasis added):

About one month ago, the country became the first in Europe to lift all its domestic restrictions, however, on 12 July, it faced a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases for the first time since October, registering 355 new infections, despite over 70% of the total population being vaccinated.

Three-quarters of these were among vaccinated people, and most were linked to the Delta variant of the virus, according to the health authorities. The last such spike in the country had been in late October.

How will mainstream media fact checkers wean themselves from preferring narratives instead of checking facts?