The PolitiFact Evangelism & Revival Tour II

Thanks to a generous and wasteful grant from the Knight Foundation, PolitiFact is reaching out to red state voters!

These outreaches suspiciously correlate to new PolitiFact state franchises, in turn making it look like the Knight Foundation wants to help PolitiFact advertise itself.

Daniel Funke of the Poynter Institute posted a story about the Oklahoma leg of PolitiFact's dog & pony show. We reviewed that in our first part in this series. This installment concerns a Washington Post story about the third and final stage of the evangelism and revival tour, ending up in West Virginia.

What's the Purpose of This Tour, Again?

The Post article leads with a section that more-or-less paints PolitiFact's outreach as a failure.

PolitiFact planned to go out and tell people PolitiFact is nonpartisan and fair and let them see, at least to some degree, how PolitiFact works. That was supposed to lead to greater trust. But when given the opportunity to make that case, PolitiFact editor Amy Hollyfield comes across like Eeyore.

“I have discussions with people about the news all the time on Facebook, and I show them what I consider to be credible sources of information,” a man named Paul Epstein says from a middle row. “And they say, ‘Oh, that’s all biased.’ So how can you, or how can we, convince people to trust any mainstream media?”

Amy Hollyfield of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking organization, considers the question. She hesitates a beat before telling Epstein and about 65 others in the audience that maybe you can’t. Not all the time.

Well, that's encouraging! What else does Hollyfield have?

“We have a lot of things on our website” that attest to PolitiFact’s impartiality and credibility, Holly­field says. “But I don’t think that seeps in when you’re having that kind of conversation. That’s why we’re trying to tell our story.”

Specifics? Aren't specifics always foremost in the minds of journalists? Okay, maybe Hollyfield gave the specifics. Maybe the Post's Paul Farhi left them out. But it seems to us beyond question that if the idea of the evangelism tour is to build trust of PolitiFact in red states then PolitiFact should focus on those specifics, whatever they are.

The fact-checkers keep steering the conversation back to Politi­Fact and its 10-year track record of rating political speech, including how it assigns its most damning rating, “Pants on Fire.”

What? It would be great to have some specifics on that. Pretty much the best description we have of the difference between PolitiFact's "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings is PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan's immortal "Sometimes we decide one way and sometimes decide the other." We'd like to know even more about this occult-yet-objective (?) process. But there's nothing new in the Post article. So not today.

Sharockman has the Evidence of Neutral Nonpartisanship (not)!

Just a few days ago we published a chart showing PolitiFact has published more fact checks of President Trump between his inauguration and Oct. 18 than it did of President Obama over the same period in 2009 and 2013 combined. We did it to show the utter ridiculousness of Executive Director Aaron Sharockman's argument that fact-checking Obama frequently serves as an evidence of PolitiFact's neutrality.

Lo and behold, the Post captured Sharockman making that same argument again. Christmas in October (bold emphasis added):

(Sharockman) bristles a bit at the conservative critique [The basic critique is that fact-checkers cherry-pick statements and facts to create a false impression — usually that conservative candidates are less truthful than the liberal kind"--bww]. “People say, ‘Why didn’t you fact-check Hillary Clinton’s claim about coming under fire [as first lady] in Bosnia?’ Well, we did. The person we fact-checked more than anyone else is Barack Obama. . . . The person we fact-check the most is the president. We’re going to hold the president accountable.”

As we pointed out in our earlier article accompanying the graph, yes of course national fact checkers check the president the most. That will be true regardless of party and therefore serves as no evidence whatsoever of impartiality, particularly if a Republican president may have drawn greater scrutiny than Obama. Sharockman's argument is flim-flam.

This article about PolitiFact trying to convince conservatives it is neutral and non-partisan gives conservatives no evidence of PolitiFact's neutrality or non-partisanship. These people could use some talking points that have greater strength than wet toilet paper.

Hey, the article mentions "PolitiFact Bias"!

Plus: How PolitiFact could build trust across the board

At the risk of humeral fracture from patting ourselves on the back, the best section of the Post article is the one that mentions PolitiFact Bias. That's not because it mentions PolitiFact Bias, though that's part of it (bold emphasis added)

(Sharockman)’s fully aware of the free-floating cynicism about fact-checking, a form that has enjoyed a boomlet in the past few years with such outfits as PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker on the scene. In one poll last year, 88 percent of people who supported Trump during the 2016 campaign said they didn’t trust media fact-checking. (Overall, just 29 percent of likely voters in the survey said they did.) PolitiFact itself has come in for particularly intense criticism; a blog called PolitiFact Bias is devoted to “exposing [its] bias, mistakes and flimflammery.”

The basic critique is that fact-checkers cherry-pick statements and facts to create a false impression — usually that conservative candidates are less truthful than the liberal kind.

The fact is that the polls show that moderates and independents are more skeptical about mainstream media fact-checking than are Democrats. The corollary? The political group that most trusts political fact-checking is Democrats.

Shouldn't we expect moderates more than Democrats or Republicans to favor PolitiFact if it treats Democrats and Republicans with equal skepticism? Indeed, for years PolitiFact tried to argue for its neutrality by saying it gets attacked from both sides. Left unsaid was the fact that most of the attacking came from one side.

PolitiFact needs to hear the message in the numbers. Likely voters don't trust fact checkers (71 percent!). PolitiFact can't do meet-and-greets with 71 percent of likely voters.  To earn trust, PolitiFact needs to severely ramp up its transparency and address the criticism it receives. If the criticism is valid, make changes. If the criticism is invalid, then crush entities like PolitiFact Bias by publicly discrediting their arguments with better arguments.

Establish trust by modeling transparently trustworthy behavior, in other words.

Or PolitiFact can just keep doing what it's doing and see if that 30 percent or so that trusts it just happens to grow.

Good luck with that.


Afters

Is this true?

The fact of the matter is that both sides are becoming less moored to the truth, Sharockman says. The number of untrustworthy statements by Republicans and Democrats alike has grown over the past three presidential cycles, he noted.

Our numbers show that the number of false ("False" plus "Pants on Fire") statements from Democrats, as rated by PolitiFact, drop from PolitiFact's early years.  Though with a minor spike during the 2016 election cycle.

What data would support Sharockman's claim, we wonder?

PolitiFact turns liberal blogger into Obamacare expert (Updated)

"We go to original sources to verify the claims. We look for original government reports rather than news stories. We interview impartial experts."

--About PolitiFact

PolitiFact claims it interviews impartial experts. But is that the whole truth?

What if PolitiFact also interviewed partial experts, such as figures with a history of donating to one party or the other?

Or worse, what if PolitiFact arrogated to itself the privilege of elevating a liberal blogger to the status of trusted expert?

Would any conflict with PolitiFact's statement of its fact-checking procedure result?

Let's talk about Charles Gaba.

Charles Gaba

We ran across Gaba's blog quite some time ago. Gaba wrote blog posts claiming to represent the facts on the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as ObamaCare. We found Gaba's approach to his subject matter nakedly partisan, starting with the ObamaCare signup widget in the upper right hand corner of his blog. A Washington Post Wonkblog profile confirmed Gaba's personal partisanship:

He admits that he does have a rooting interest in seeing the law succeed – he’s a volunteer for the local Democratic Party. Still, he says he is just trying to figure out whether the law is working.

“I do think the good outweighs the bad, but I don’t think [Obamacare] is the greatest thing in the world," he said. "I’m a single-payer guy."

So basically neutral, right?

PolitiFact started to cite Gaba as an expert in February 2014:

Charles Gaba, a website developer and blogger in Michigan, has been tracking enrollment figures at his ACASignups.net site. His most recent estimate from late February shows 2.6 million Medicaid sign-ups once you subtract those falling into three categories -- those who signed up in states that didn’t expand Medicaid, those who were previously eligible and who "came out of the woodwork" to sign up, and an estimate of the typical "churn" for Medicaid sign-ups in those states.

In March 2014, April 2014 and November 2014 PolitiFact listed interviews with Gaba for stories on the ACA but did not quote him.

An October 2015 PolitiFact fact check of Donald Trump finally quoted Gaba:

"Yes, some people in some plans through some carriers in some states are, indeed, looking at rate hikes of ‘35 to 50 percent’ if they stick with those plans in 2016," said Charles Gaba, who runs the popular blog ACAsignups.net, which tracks Obamacare enrollment.

To be fair, the expert quoted in PolitiFact's following paragraph, Gail Wilensky, was part of the President George H.W. Bush administration. On the other hand, PolitiFact mentions that in the story. Gaba's apparently just one of those "impartial experts" PolitiFact says it interviews.

Perhaps nobody objected, or perhaps Gaba did nothing to jeopardize his status as an impartial expert, so PolitiFact went to him again in November 2015:

Here are some of the provisions of the law and estimates of how many people have benefited from each. The estimates are from Charles Gaba, who has spent several years crunching the numbers for usage of the law at the blog ACAsignups.net.

Is Gaba active in the Democratic Party and in favor of a national single-payer system? Sure. Though the Washington Post says he's "not a political operative" in the same article where it mentions the other facts. Credit to Newsbusters and P. J. Gladnick for highlighting that discrepancy back on March 20, 2014.

Our congratulations to Mr. Gaba for making the jump from liberal blogger to impartial expert.

We have PolitiFact to thank.


Update Nov. 20, 2015

Who can blame ActBlue for moving to support Gaba's supposedly non-partisan work documenting the truth about the Affordable Care Act?

Charles’s “ACA Signups” series was an incredible and hugely time-intensive undertaking that, as he explained in a recent diary, put a major strain on his life outside of Daily Kos:

“I'm absolutely swamped right now. … [K]eeping the site up to date has literally taken over my life. My business is suffering; my clients are losing patience; my family is starting to get concerned.” - Brainwrap, March 24

We don’t normally do this at Daily Kos, but Charles’s months-long contribution to the fight against right-wing lies about Obamacare was above and beyond. That’s why we’re asking Daily Kos readers to chip in as a way of thanking him for his work and to help him continue his “ACA Signups” series.

Kos diarist and PolitiFact's impartial expert. Nice work if you can get it.

The Washington Post: "Report: Republicans to hammer PolitiFact units on alleged bias"

Eric Wemple's Washington Post blog brings news via the Washington Examiner of a new GOP effort to engage in an aggressive pushback against PolitiFact in various states:

Via the Washington Examiner comes word that Republican operatives across the land will be targeting state PolitiFact operations. The move draws inspiration from the massive document that the Republican Party of Virginia compiled against PolitiFact Virginia earlier this month, a document covered extensively in this space.

Wemple goes on to give helpful hints to the GOP for the sake of its effort, and the hints double as criticisms of the Republican Party of Virginia's attack on PolitiFact Virginia.  Wemple's key points generally agree with what I published here before taking up this post.  Wemple says the claim that the timing of publication for PolitiFact's ratings harms the GOP is weak.  Wemple also tries to downplay the effect of the study's anecdotes by claiming they need to appear in the company of stories PolitiFact skipped that might have proved damaging to Democrats.  Though we think the latter is a good idea, we don't rate its importance as highly as Wemple does.

We disagree strongly with Wemple's conclusion featuring a quotation from PolitiFact's chief windbag, editor Bill Adair:

The Examiner story furnishes a Champagne-popping pretext for PolitiFact. After all, the brand name has now been attacked furiously from the left — see Rachel Maddow — and furiously from the right. Now they can lay claim to centrism. “This is testament to the fact that we have disrupted the status quo,” says PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair. “We’re holding people accountable for their words and they don’t like it.”

PolitiFact can pop all the Champagne it likes and keep right on chanting the claim that criticism from both sides allows it to lay claim to centrism, but that wouldn't make it true.  Shame on Wemple for not vigorously sticking a pin in that radically overblown idea.

The content of the criticism, as Wemple pointed out earlier, makes all the difference.  The criticism from the Left is weaker than that from the Right.  PolitiFact has always done a shoddy job of fact checking.  Rachel Maddow only started noticing when her ox was gored a few times too often.

As for Adair's claim that PolitiFact has "disrupted the status quo," he's finally right about something: Nobody was expecting PolitiFact do this bad a job of fact checking.  It has truly disrupted the status quo, and the politicians don't like it.  They were okay with reasonably competent fact checking from Annenberg, The Washington Post and the Associated Press.

And therein lies Wemple's apparently unasked follow up question for Adair:  "If you have disrupted the status quo, why do you think Annenberg Fact Check and The Washington Post fact checker did not disrupt the status quo?"

C'mon, Wemple.  Let's see you ask it.

The Washington Post: "Virginia Republican Party publishes huge attack paper on PolitiFact"

Erik Wemple and the Washington Post stand as the first mainstream media entities, not counting PolitiFact Virginia itself, to weigh in on the massive pushback PolitiFact Virginia received yesterday from the Republican Party of Virginia:

The Virginia Republican Party has compiled an attack on PolitiFact’s Virginia operation that is virtually unbloggable. An 86-page document with a cover page stating, “TO THE COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA: A COMPREHENSIVE ANALYSIS OF POLITIFACT VIRGINIA’S QUESTIONABLE OBJECTIVITY,” it starts with a two-page memorandum and a three-page table of contents. Even Rachel Maddow has never produced a PolitiFact critique as exquisitely formatted.

Exquisite formatting makes less gratuitous use of capitalization according to our tastes, but we credit Wemple for zeroing in on one of the most intriguing aspects of the ponderous critique:

To narrow the scope of its inquiry, the Erik Wemple Blog will start out by exploring only the most fascinating of the Republican Party’s allegations — namely, that PolitiFact Virginia attempts to bury good ratings about Republicans and tout bad ones.

The Virginia GOP may qualify as the first to notice a bias in the timing of the stories, so that makes it a good angle for Wemple's initial approach.

Journalists are still missing the big story:  No mainstream fact checker receives anywhere near the criticism that PolitiFact receives.  There's a story in there.  And it's an important one.

A debunking with bunkum added

Erik Wemple has a short article over at the Washington Post extolling PolitiFacter Louis Jacobson's investigation into an oft-repeated claim (take note of the final line):

Have you ever heard that 85 percent of recent college graduates are moving back home? If so, then perhaps you’ve seen that figure in Time magazine, in CNNMoney.com, in the New York Post, or in an ad from American Crossroads, a group that used the whopping figure in an ad to hammer President Obama.

So if you’ve heard it from all those places, how could this figure on “boomerang” children possibly be anything but stone-cold accurate? Well, perhaps no one ever once lifted a phone receiver, put a question in an e-mail or deployed other research techniques to fact-check it. (PolitiFact gave it a “false.”)

Our purpose here at PFB is to highlight PolitiFact's liberal bias. In this case, Jacobson appears to do a fair job of researching the numbers, and after reading Jacobson's work the 85 percent stat seems completely bogus. This isn't an ideological issue. The statistic is legitimate or it isn't. Partisans can quibble over its significance or causes, but that's irrelevant to its accuracy. Props to Jacobson for the legwork. If the story ended there then PolitiFact rendered a valuable service, period. But like Anthony Weiner on a Twitter binge, PolitiFact never seems to quit until they expose themselves. If the problem still isn't clear, have a look at Jacobson's original piece:

The ad attributes the claim to a Time magazine story dated May 10, 2011. We found the article in question, which was headlined, "Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back in with Mom and Dad."

The story begins, "The kids are coming home to roost. Surprise, surprise: Thanks to a high unemployment rate for new grads, many of those with diplomas fresh off the press are making a return to Mom and Dad’s place. In fact, according to a poll conducted by consulting firm Twentysomething Inc., some 85% of graduates will soon remember what Mom’s cooking tastes like."

Since the Time story didn’t give any details on the study or give any indication that a reporter had called the firm -- the same was true for the two other media reports that cited the statistic, the New York Post and CNNMoney.com -- we tried to contact Twentysomething Inc. for additional details on the methodology and date of the survey.
...
...The statistic has been repeated many times on websites and blogs -- twice in the Huffington Post, for instance, and once in the personal finance blog PT Money. It even was picked up by bloggers both liberal (Democratic Underground) and conservative (Free Republic), each with their own political spin. We did not hear back from the author of the Time magazine article.

 Still looking for the part that shows PolitiFact's liberal bias? Here's the missing piece:

Image from PolitiFact.com

Time, CNN, the Huffington Post, and Democratic Underground were all spared. Sure, the Free Republic and the New York Post went unscathed, but they're not nearly the shiny lure that attracts the liberal fish the way American Crossroads does. More importantly, this rating grants immunity to those most responsible for the bogus statistic: research firm TwentysomethingInc.

Wemple writes "PolitiFact gave it a False" (italics mine) referring to the claim, but that's not all PolitiFact did. PolitiFact put the American Crossroads logo right next to the official Truth-O-Meter with a big red False, implying not that American Crossroads is guilty of shoddy stat research, but is lying. Of the many outlets that used the statistic, it's only American Crossroads who end up with a demerit in their "Report Card" that PolitiFact so likes to peddle as a guide to a person or group's honesty.

If readers get the impression this is nitpicking on my part, it's worth noting that it's not the first time PolitiFact has burdened a conservative with a poor rating for a claim that was widely repeated in the mainstream media. Also keep in mind that in cases like this, the decision to lay blame on a specific source when so many are available is an editorial one. It is our contention that the bias of PolitiFact's editors will harm conservative sources more often than liberal ones.  An objective operation could (should and would) have simply uncovered the source of the bogus statistic, and then provided a list of all the media outlets that repeated it. PolitiFact's bias shows in the selection of just one entity--a conservative one--to shoulder the False rating.

Subtle slights like this, especially added to PolitiFact's many other tricks, allow PolitiFact to use otherwise solid journalism to contort verified facts into liberal propaganda. By all means Jacobson deserves credit for debunking a recurring myth. But as long as PolitiFact conducts itself like a Truth Pimp passing out chits to favored courtesans while branding less fortunate subjects with a scarlet letter F it should be acknowledged for what it is: an editorial page with a left-wing bias.



Update: 5/12/12: Yesterday PolitiFact announced on their Facebook page that NPR would air a segment discussing Jacobson's debunking of the 85% statistic. The comments on PolitiFact's Facebook page rarely disappoint when looking for comical examples of liberal angst and outrage, but there was at least one regarding this article that is worth noting here:

Image from Facebook

As can be expected, PolitiFact's presentation of this bogus statistic with the American Crossroads logo next to the False rating leaves readers with the impression that it was American Crossroads that came up with the figure. Notice too the commenter claims AC "keeps on lying" and "makes a purely false ad" as opposed to repeating statistics without due diligence.

PolitiFact has been doing this long enough to know that this is exactly how their readers will interpret the presentation of the rating. By selecting American Crossroads to bear the weight of the False rating on their own implies an intentional choice by the editors to influence their readers opinion about a conservative PAC. Congrats, PolitiFact. Mission accomplished.

WaPo Fact Checker: "Revisiting Romney’s ‘deceitful, dishonest’ ad about Obama"

Back in late October, PolitiFact was publicly wringing its hands over a story it published that was out of step with fact checks of the same material by Annenberg Fact Check and the Washington Post's "The Fact Checker" column by Glenn Kessler.

It's hand-wringing time again as Kessler writes about a Mitt Romney ad that PolitiFact found outrageous ("Pants on Fire") while Kessler and the Annenberg folks found the ad more middle-of-the-road misleading:

(T)here are three reasons why we have trouble being outraged.


 First, the ad makes clear that Obama is speaking in 2008.
(...)
 Second, Obama’s statement was actually a misleading quote itself.
(...)
 Finally, the Romney campaign made it very clear that it had truncated the quote.

Two out of three of Kessler's points appeared in our own analysis of Romney's claim in our review of the PolitiFact fact check.

Though Kessler doesn't mention our central point about the ad, that its point doesn't change significantly regardless of whether the context was included or not, Kessler does note PolitiFact's out-of-step fact check response:

(Fact Checkers can disagree: PolitiFact labeled it “Pants on Fire.” But Factcheck.org reached a conclusion similar to ours, saying the health-care line actually posed a “more serious problem.”)

Kessler treats PolitiFact very kindly.  The fact is that PolitiFact failed to make any mention of Kessler's three points.  In baseball terms, they whiffed on all three.

And Annenberg Fact Check?  The quotation issue was a sideshow so far as they were concerned:

What the Obama campaign chose to take issue with was how the then-candidate’s words were edited in a section where he is heard to say, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Obama was actually quoting his Republican opponent. The full quote is: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

Is that “deceitful and dishonest,” as Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt quickly claimed? Or “blatantly dishonest,” as the liberal group ThinkProgress described it? It is possible that a viewer might be misled into thinking that Obama said this about his own campaign in 2011, since the quote comes 23 seconds after a graphic cites Obama’s comments as being uttered in 2008. But we’ll leave that for our readers to determine.

PolitiFact is, uh, bolder than that.  That's why PolitiFact is closer to Media Matters than the other major fact check services.  They have the chutzpah to let their subjective judgments determine the position of the misnamed "Truth-O-Meter" and serve it up to their readers as though it is objective journalism.



Jeff adds: When I first read the original PolitiFact piece I was reminded of a rating they gave former congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL). Grayson ran an ad that referred to his opponent, Daniel Webster, as "Taliban Dan." In the ad, Grayson edited a video of Webster to distort Webster's words into the opposite of what he said. Check out PolitiFact's summary in that ruling (bold emphasis added):

The Grayson ad clearly suggests that Webster thinks wives should submit to their husbands, and the repeated refrain of "Submit to me," is an effort to scare off potential female voters. But the lines in the video are clearly taken out of context thanks to some heavy-handed editing. The actual point of Webster's 2009 speech was that husbands should love their wives.

We rate Grayson's claim False.

Now read PolitiFact's treatment of Romney's ad (emphasis added):

We certainly think it’s fair for Romney to attack Obama for his response to the economy. And the Romney camp can argue that Obama’s situation in 2011 is ironic considering the comments he made in 2008. But those points could have been made without distorting Obama’s words, which have been taken out of context in a ridiculously misleading way. We rate the Romney ad’s portrayal of Obama’s 2008 comments Pants on Fire.

As Bryan noted, including the context wouldn't have changed the point of Romney's ad. Yet in Grayson's ad he not only took Webster out of context, he distorted (removed) Webster's words in order to make it appear Webster said something contrary to what he actually said (to say nothing of associating his opponent with a terrorist group). What exactly is more ridiculous about Romney's editing than Grayson's? What standard is PolitiFact using to make these determinations?

Until PolitiFact comes up with a way to objectively quantify a statements ridiculousness the ratings will continue to be plagued by the editors' personal biases.

Edit 12/11/11 : Added link to the original WaPo article-Jeff