PolitiFact vs Ted Cruz

PolitiFact demonstrates the wrong way to fact check

When we criticize PolitiFact's subjective rating system, we often see responses like "I don't pay attention to the ratings."

We tend to respond that PolitiFact reasons poorly, offering fact check consumers yet another reason to avoid PolitiFact. PolitiFact's January 22, 2018 fact check of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) helps illustrate the point. The fact checkers use equivocal language and straw man argumentation to support their conclusion.

Cruz claimed he has consistently opposed government shutdowns, which PolitiFact contrasted to "popular belief":

With an end to the federal government shutdown in sight, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, tried to argue that, contrary to popular belief, he was not the driving force behind the previous government shutdown in 2013.

Should we excuse PolitiFact from supporting its claim that most think Cruz was the driving force behind the 2013 shutdown?

The 2018 shutdown originated in the Senate, which had a funding bill but no attempt to force cloture before the funding deadline. A cloture vote would have reportedly failed, meaning the Democrats had a modern filibuster going. The 2013 shutdown stemmed from disagreement between the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-controlled Senate.

PolitiFact tells part of the story, sending a misleading message in the process (bold emphasis added):

Back in 2013, Cruz -- then a junior member of the Senate’s minority party -- had tried to end funding for the Affordable Care Act. He pushed for language to defund Obamacare in spending bills, which would have forced then-President Barack Obama to choose between keeping the government open and crippling his signature legislative achievement.

As the high-stakes legislative game played out, Obama and his fellow Democrats refused to agree to gut the law, and the Republicans, as a minority party, didn’t have the numbers to force their will. Following a 16-day shutdown, lawmakers voted to fund both the government and the Affordable Care Act.

Cruz was widely identified at the time as the leader of the defunding effort.

We have two types of defunding going on in PolitiFact's explanation. First, we have Cruz's effort to defund the ACA. Then we have general defunding of the government.

See what PolitiFact did there? PolitiFact asserts that most believe Cruz led the effort to defund the government, and slips in the line "Cruz was widely identified at the time as the leader of the defunding effort." Yes, Cruz was the leader, in the Senate, of the attempt to defund the ACA. But defunding the ACA is not the same thing as defunding the government.

PolitiFact then included a little tidbit about a Cruz speech on the Senate floor using portions of Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs & Ham." So it was a Cruz filibuster? Maybe PolitiFact wants its readers to think it was a Cruz filibuster. But it wasn't.

“This is not a filibuster. This is an agreement that he and I made that he could talk,” (Senate Majority Leader Harry) Reid said Wednesday.

Is there any good excuse for a journalist to offer such a sketchy account of history?

What PolitiFact got right

PolitiFact was right when it reported that Cruz's proposal to defund the ACA would have forced President Obama to choose between signing a bill that undercut the ACA and allowing a government shutdown. It follows that Cruz was playing the politics of government shutdown, though his method placed the onus on Mr. Obama, and of the two options Cruz would plainly prefer defunding the ACA to defunding the entire government.

So even though Cruz's effort to defund the ACA turned out a dismal failure, the effort carried a silver lining for Cruz: Cruz never needed to advocate or support shutting down the government.

... and what PolitiFact got wrong

Given that Cruz voted against the funding bill that eventually ended the 2013 shutdown, PolitiFact had what it needed to show Cruz supporting a government shutdown at least in some form.

Instead, PolitiFact opted for a hilarious overreach comparable to Cruz's failed plan to defund the ACA.

PolitiFact took the route of trying to show Cruz supported the shutdown according to his own standard:

However, even if, for the sake of argument, you accept Cruz’s line of thinking, his hallway comments offered a very specific definition of determining whether a lawmaker had "consistently opposed shutdowns."

In fact, Cruz offered a very specific definition of something else, as we see when PolitiFact picks up its narrative (bold emphasis added):

Specifically, Cruz said that "only one thing causes a shutdown: when you have senators vote to deny cloture on a funding bill." Cloture refers to a Senate vote to cut off debate and proceed to a bill; it’s a prerequisite for considering a bill, and these days, it typically takes 60 votes.

PolitiFact's notion that Cruz defined whether a lawmaker has consistently opposed government shutdowns counts as a fantasy, not a fact check. But for the sake of argument, let us accept PolitiFact's line of thinking.

Cruz said a shutdown only occurs when senators vote to deny cloture on a funding bill. In context, his statement obviously means enough senators opposed cloture for the cloture motion to fail. Why? Because over 30 senators can vote to deny cloture and find themselves overruled by the others. And in that case, no shutdown results.

But understanding what Cruz said in context will not allow PolitiFact's argument to succeed. PolitiFact can only stick the hypocrisy tag on Cruz if voting against cloture on a funding bill counts as causing a shutdown regardless of the outcome of the vote.

That's crazy. But that's PolitiFact's argument:

So did Cruz ever "vote to deny cloture on a funding bill"?

He did.

It came on the legislation to end the 16-day shutdown -- a bill that didn’t include the Obamacare defunding language that he had been seeking. If this spending bill didn’t pass, the government wouldn’t be funded and would have to remain closed. As it happened, the bill passed by a large bipartisan majority, but Cruz was one of 16 senators to vote against cloture. He was also one of 18 to vote against the bill itself.

Regardless of whether Cruz ever supported a government shutdown, taking Cruz's statement out of context is not the way to make the argument. It's simply a fact that one can vote against cloture on principle apart from a filibuster strategy. Cruz has plausible deniability going for him.

Cruz's was one of only 16 voting in opposition to cloture, and it could not be more obvious that such a vote does not meet Cruz's definition for what causes a shutdown. Sixteen senators voting against cloture cannot start a shutdown. Nor can they sustain a shutdown, as PolitiFact's example resoundingly illustrates.

PolitiFact altered Cruz's argument in its fact-checking process.

These fact checkers stink at fact-checking.

Ted Cruz fully to blame for giving Obama too much blame?

Does PolitiFact show a left-leaning bias in the blame game?

We thought PolitiFact went a bit easy on President Obama in a State of the Union speech some time ago. Obama said businesses had created so many jobs. PolitiFact said Obama's claim was "Half True" but then later elevated the rating to "Mostly True" because the president did not take as much credit as PolitiFact had first believed.

No, of course there was no concrete explanation for why PolitiFact changed its opinion.

PolitiFact played the blame game again on March 16, 2016, this time with Ted Cruz.

Here's how it looked:

PolitiFact said Cruz said President Obama has been presiding over U.S. jobs going overseas. PolitiFact reasons that Cruz gives Obama too much blame and so rates Cruz's claim "Mostly False."

Whatever plausibility PolitiFact's rating carries from its headline and deck material ought to fade pretty quickly once readers stumble over what Cruz actually said (bold emphasis added):

[Meet the Press host] Chuck Todd played a clip of Obama saying the Republicans are significantly to blame for the angry tone of politics today.

Cruz responded, "You know, Chuck, Barack Obama's a world-class demagogue. That language there is designed to divide us. No, Mr. President, we're not angry at that. We're angry at politicians in Washington, including you, who ignore the men and women who elected you, who have been presiding over our jobs going overseas for seven years."

The part of Cruz’s comment that caught our eye was that Obama has "been presiding over our jobs going overseas for seven years." We decided to take a look. (Cruz’s staff did not respond to inquiries.)

To factually conclude that too much blame was placed, the fact checker needs a blame baseline. Knowing whether Cruz blamed the president too much requires the fact checker to reasonably gauge how much blame Cruz placed on the president.

We think Cruz made that very difficult for PolitiFact with the wording he used, for Cruz did not single out the president. Cruz first mentions anger at "politicians in Washington" and after that makes clear Obama is included in the group ("including you").

So how much blame is Cruz placing on Obama, based on what Cruz said? How is the blame divided up between "politicians in Washington" and President Obama?

We don't see any way for PolitiFact to make that determination without simply making an assumption. Cruz offered no guidance. There's nothing in the context that helps. At least in the earlier case featuring President Obama we have the context of the State of the Union address. Presidents use that address to implicitly play up the benefits of their policies.

PolitiFact apparently assumes Cruz is blaming the president particularly for some unspecified role in allowing jobs to go overseas. Cruz doesn't even specify how much blame falls on Washington politicians, let alone the president. It isn't even necessary to assume that the anger at Obama and other Washington politicians is justified anger.

Is this fact-checking? It's hard to see how it qualifies.

PolitiFact has no trouble at all, despite the ambiguous nature of Cruz's claim, finding that Cruz placed too much blame on Obama. And PolitiFact likewise has an easy time assigning blame to Cruz for wrongly assigning blame, ergo the "Mostly False" rating.

PolitiFact considered no Cruz blame on "Washington politicians" other than President Obama.

In a way, it's easy to understand why PolitiFact left the other Washington politicians out of its consideration. Keeping them in consideration makes the fact check even more difficult than doing one that places an unspecified degree of blame on Obama. Pretending Cruz did not spread the blame around makes it easier for PolitiFact to maintain the fiction that Cruz placed too much blame on Obama.

We hasten to point out that such an approach hardly qualifies as unbiased.

PolitiFact judges job-killers

What's new from "Objective, Nonpartisan" PolitiFact?

The expert fact-checkers/liberal bloggers at PolitiFact show everyone how to figure out whether legislation kills jobs.

PolitiFact uses two methods. The first method shows whether the Affordable Care Act caused job loss. The second method shows whether the North American Free Trade Agreement caused job loss.

Here's PolitiFact's method for the ACA, from a fact check of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas, bold emphasis added):

Cruz said that Obamacare cost the country millions of jobs and had forced millions into working part-time.

The government’s employment surveys show no sign of that occurring. By every measure, millions more people are working and millions fewer are stuck unwillingly in part-time work since the time the Affordable Care Act became law. The law might have affected part-time work for certain kinds of people, but that didn’t change the improvement in the overall numbers.

PolitiFact apparently reasons that if that overall employment numbers improved then it doesn't count toward Cruz's point that "The law might have affected part-time work for certain kinds of people."

Here's PolitiFact's method for NAFTA, as related in a fact check of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.):

Sanders said that NAFTA, which Clinton used to support, cost the U.S. economy 800,000 jobs. There is a report from a left-leaning policy group that reached that conclusion. On the other hand, many other nonpartisan reports found that the trade deal produced neither significant job losses nor job gains. This is a result of competing economic models and the challenges of teasing out the effects of NAFTA from everything else that has taken place in the economy.

The report Sanders cited is an outlier, and his use of its findings ignores important facts that would give a different impression. We rate his statement Mostly False.

The biggest difference between the two methods comes from PolitiFact's reliance on raw employment numbers when checking the claim from Cruz. Raw employment numbers were a non-factor in checking Sanders but the key to giving a "Pants on Fire" rating to Cruz.

PolitiFact cited studies supporting and contradicting Sanders, but gave no evidence supporting Cruz. The fact check of Cruz omitted mention of a Congressional Budget Office report estimating supply-side net reductions in labor (workers deciding not to work or to work fewer hours), the equivalent of about 700,000 full-time jobs.

We reason that since PolitiFact is objective and non-partisan, it follows that only a non-objective and non-non-partisan (okay, partisan!) source would mention the findings of the CBO relating to unusually slow job recovery following the 2008 recession. In the world of PolitiFact, supply-side job loss doesn't count and doesn't even apparently affect the economy.

Or, to borrow a bit from Stephen Colbert, the fact[checker]s have a liberal bias.


Jeff Adds: Note that Jon Greenberg wrote both the NAFTA and ACA pieces. This makes it even more difficult to reconcile the use of two different methods in performing the fact checks.


Correction March 10, 2016 (bww): I inexplicably identified Delaware as the state Bernie Sanders represents. The text has been changed to identify Vermont as the state Sanders represents in the Senate.

As The "Wheel O' Meter" Turns

In the dog-bites-man department, PolitiFact continues to do fact-checking the wrong way this week.

It started with a fact check of Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Cruz said blacks gained $5,000 in median income under Reagan. PolitiFact's crack fact-checking team, veteran writer Louis Jacobson and founding editor Bill Adair's heir, Angie Drobnic Holan performed their fact-checking magic and found Cruz's claim "Mostly True."

But a day passed, and PolitiFact unpublished the article and replaced it with a rewritten version giving Cruz a "Mostly False" rating. Why? Somebody complained:

CORRECTION, Feb. 4, 2016: After we published this fact-check, a reader wrote us to say that in our original article, we had used the wrong Census Bureau data table to analyze Cruz’s statement and rate it Mostly True. However, using the proper data table, Cruz is actually incorrect, so we have changed the rating to Mostly False. 

This case gives us a smorgasbord of items to criticize.

• PolitiFact's A team committed a substantial flub
• The archived "original version" hides Holan's role in editing the flawed version
• The archived "original version" wipes (with a cloth?) the hotlinks leading to the wrong table 
• Neither the new nor the old version bothered to look at how Cruz fared using nominal dollars

Having noted the main problems with PolitiFact's treatment of this issue, we'll address two questions. First, what specific mistake did PolitiFact make before publishing its less-than-totally-transparent correction? Second, was Cruz correct using nominal dollars?

The Wrong Chart

We found PolitiFact's key figures from its original article on the same chart it used in its revised article. The chart gave figures for the United States as a whole followed by corresponding figures for different regions of the country. It appears PolitiFact used figures for the West region to test Cruz's claim.

Nominal Dollars

Using nominal dollars, Cruz's claim was correct. That's typically enough to eke a "Half True" from the PolitiFact gang's "Truth-O-Meter."

We reproduced the relevant part of the chart, putting the figures PolitiFact used in its new fact check in black boxes. The adjacent figures for nominal dollars ("Current dollars") we placed within red boxes. The difference over Reagan's two terms in office was $5,643.

We're not saying there's nothing wrong with giving increases in median income using nominal dollars. It's potentially every bit as misleading as when Democrats use the raw gender wage gap to emphasize the need for legislation punishing pay differences based solely on gender discrimination. What we are saying is Cruz made a true statement given a normal interpretation of his words and PolitiFact failed to acknowledge it either in the text of the story or in its (new) rating of Cruz.

PolitiFact tends to rate that bit of liberal misdirection no lower than "Half True," by the way.

What will it take for PolitiFact to regard its "Truth-O-Meter" rating system as a mistake?


Afters

Does PolitiFact's faulty first rating of Cruz show PolitiFact has a pro-conservative bias?

We don't think that's the best explanation. The more parsimonious explanation is that PolitiFact simply made a mistake. So this example shows PolitiFact's fallibility. This was the type of mistake bloggers make.

This example does point toward another potential evidence of bias at PolitiFact. Which political party receives the most benefit when PolitiFact runs a correction?

Just wondering

A Dec. 2, 2015 fact check from the national PolitiFact outfit looks at Democratic Party presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's claim that Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has tried to ban contraception five times.

PolitiFact researched the issue and concluded Cruz had never tried to ban contraception, but at most might ban some types of birth control or make it more difficult in some cases to access birth control.

PolitiFact:

The strongest conclusion about Cruz’s views that one could draw from these examples is that he might support a ban on certain types of contraception (but not all) through his support for a personhood amendment. The other examples are even more limited and deal with what employers would be required to pay for, for instance, or whether a major birth control provider should continue to receive federal funding.

The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression, so we rate it Mostly False.

 The "Mostly False" ruling set us to wondering: If  PolitiFact can give a "Mostly False rating when none of the five examples from the Clinton ad featured Cruz banning birth control, what would it take to get a "Half True" rating?

What if Cruz had tried to ban all birth control in one of the five examples? Mostly False? Half True?

What if Cruz had tried to ban all birth control in two of the five examples? Half True? Mostly True?

What if Cruz had tried to ban all birth control in three of the five examples? Half True? Mostly True? Just plain True?

We're just wondering.

Hoystory: 'The Hacks at PolitiFact'

We're delighted to point readers toward a new(ish) critique of PolitiFact by Matthew Hoy, one of the critics who saw PolitiFact for what it was very early in the game.

Hoy takes a look at PolitiFact Texas' gnat-straining rating of Ted Cruz's claim the Democratic Party is shrinking. Then Hoy contrasts PolitiFact's treatment of Cruz with the national PolitiFact's kid gloves treatment of President Obama's claim of having contained ISIS (ISIL).

As we said, it did not take Hoy long to see PolitiFact's true face:

They are not fact-checkers, they’re political operatives with bylines.

Please visit Hoystory and read it all.