The collapse of PolitiFact's favorite claim to neutrality

"What's funny is sometimes I'll get an email that'll say 'You guys are so biased.'  But I won't know who we're supposed to be biased in favor of, because we get criticized a lot by both sides."
--Bill Adair, from a 2012 NPR interview

For years, PolitiFact creator Bill Adair has excused PolitiFact from charges of bias by saying it receives criticism from both sides.

The line received such customary use that it found its way into Lucas Graves' account of the rise of the fact-checking movement, "Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism" (numbered citation omitted):

Fact-checkers anticipate political criticism and develop reflexes for trying to defuse it. "We're going to make the best calls we can, in a pretty gutsy form of journalism," Bill Adair told NPR. "And when we do, I think it's natural for people on one side or the other of this very partisan world we live in are going to be unhappy." One strategy is responding only minimally or in carefully chosen venues, and always asserting their balance, often by showing the criticism they receive from the other side of the spectrum. Fact-checkers make this point constantly.

The point of this strategy is obvious. The fact checkers imply that getting criticized from both sides indicates they are neutral--a form of the middle ground fallacy.

But this month Adair, now ensconced in academia at Duke University helping run the Duke Reporters Lab, published research suggesting that the criticism fact checkers receive comes predominantly from conservatives (reviewed here).

Color us shocked?

We find it disingenuous for Adair to use the "we get criticized from both sides" argument to emphasize PolitiFact's neutrality and then fail to question PolitiFact's neutrality after admitting the criticism from both sides is mostly from one side.

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.

Big Journalism: "PolitiFact Bases Entire Fact Check on Author's Intuition"

John Sexton of Big Journalism (and Verum Serum fame) joins Matthew Hoy in slamming PolitiFact's rating of a recent Crossroads GPS ad.

Sexton notes that the ad says one thing and PolitiFact claims the ad says something else:

The ad is clearly about the President's promise that you could keep your insurance, not some insurance. Instead of staying on that point, PolitiFact's introduces a novel new interpretation of the ad's meaning. Suddenly, it's not about the President's promise at all, rather " Its point seems to be simply that a lot of people will lose coverage." Really? Where does it say that?

Sexton draws attention to a recurrent problem at PolitiFact.  Statements that fail to accord with the views inside the left-skewed journalistic bubble often receive an uncharitable interpretation that the original speaker would scarcely recognize.  PolitiFact ends up appearing either unable or unwilling to understand the readily apparent meaning.

Sexton makes other good points as well, so visit Big Journalism and read it through start to finish.  Sexton gets Bill Adair on the record defending PolitiFact's journalistic malpractice, and that's always worth seeing even if it draws  from one of Adair's two favorite cliches:  People won't always agree with PolitiFact's ratings and PolitiFact gets criticized from conservatives and liberals (PolitiFact, therefore, is fair).

NPR and truth-hustler guests Adair and Nyhan

Crossposted from Sublime Bloviations.



National Public Radio brought two of my favorite truth-hustlers on its "All Things Considered" program.   I refer to Bill Adair and Brendan Nyhan.

(clipped from npr.org 4/29/12)

Bill Adair serves as founding editor for Politico PolitiFact, a fact-checking operation started by a left-leaning Florida newspaper.  PolitiFact sacrifices journalistic objectivity in part for the sake of its marketing gimmick, called the "Truth-O-Meter."

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan mangles facts from the realm of academia.  Nyhan has tried to show that partisans don't accept facts that contradict their ideology.  His research often uses facts that beg the question (more on Nyhan), suggesting that Nyhan falls victim to his own research goal.

The relevant radio program segment deals with a column from Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke, who bemoaned the state of truth following Rep. Allen West's statement, using Huppke's paraphrase, that "as many as 81" members of the Democratic Party are members of the Communist Party.

Huppke gets some kind of award for irony.  Journalists took West out of context.  West was jokingly, though to make a seriously point, referring to the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  The context makes that absolutely clear.

Stories like these are to Adair and Nyhan what the Trayvon Martin case is to Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton.  The media want the narrative that the former two spin and so seek them out for commentary when these issues make the news.  Adair and Nyhan are the truth-hustler counterparts to race-hustlers.

Adair shows up to remind us how great it is that Politico PolitiFact is there to save the day, if only we can place sufficient trust in its work.

Adair (transcript mine, from the NPR audio):

"What's funny is sometimes I'll get an email that'll say 'You guys are so biased.'  But I won't know who we're supposed to be biased in favor of, because we get criticized a lot by both sides.  And I think that's just the nature of a very rough-and-tumble political discourse."

Funny is Adair still using the "we get criticized from both sides" dodge to avoid the issue of bias.  Fortunately a journalist asked Adair exactly the right question earlier this year with equally hilarious results.

PolitiFact's system is perfect for filtering the truth according to media ideology.

Academia, unfortunately, carries an ideological slant somewhat akin to that found in the U.S. media.  Nyhan perhaps represents one of academic liberalism's top leaders in the war over political truth. 

NPR brought forth an old example of Nyhan's supposed "backfire" effect, where a correction of a falsehood leads to stronger belief in the falsehood. Though Nyhan's own research  (see descriptions of "Study 2") appears to show that the phenomenon does not occur with clear corrections, that hardly dampens mainstream media enthusiasm for the idea.  They can claim they're doing a great job but the audience is the problem.

There is something of an information crisis, but Adair and Nyhan probably do as much damage as good in addressing the problem.  We're not getting the best information from either journalists or academia.  Journalists typically do not have the expertise to sift through complex issues of truth.  Academics have shifted left ideologically and do an inadequate job of critically reviewing the journals that ought to provide our best sources of trustworthy information.

We don't have a reliable gatekeeper for our pool of information.  And it's hard to come up with good solutions to the problem.

Test everything. Hold on to the good.
--Paul the Apostle, 1 Thess. 5:21

PolitiFact's Bill Adair dismisses charges of bias

USA Today's semi-fawning review of the world of fact checking gives PolitiFact editor Bill Adair another opportunity to address the issue of journalistic bias at PolitiFact:

PolitiFact editor Bill Adair dimisses [sic] the bias charges. "Which charge of political bias? That we're biased in favor of the liberals or biased in favor of the conservatives? Because we've heard both charges in the past three months," Adair says. "When you're a loyal fan of a team, you're going to think the referee is biased against your team."

This is a redux of Adair's self-defense of PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" for 2011.  To all you biased people in your echo chambers of course (objective) PolitiFact appears biased.  The problem is you.

Funny thing about referees, though.  Research indicates that referees are biased*.

Adair's defense is no defense at all.  In fact, it is an evasion of an important issue--an issue that should be of acute interest to a fact checker.

Do we want to trust our fact checking to a person who can't address the issue of media bias any better than the "we get criticism from both sides" blather?



*It's unlikely I would have thought to reference scientific studies of referee bias prior to reading Tim Groseclose's book "Left Turn."