PolitiFact's Layers of Editors: Biden says he will ensure enough supply to vaccinate 300 Americans by early fall (Updated)

PolitiFact reported President Biden's plans would ensure covid-19 vaccine supplies large enough to vaccinate 300 Americans by early fall.

The Biden administration has envisioned a more prominent federal role, including setting up 100 vaccine centers across the nation by the end of February. Officials say the biggest roadblock is lack of vaccine supply. Biden announced that his administration aims to purchase enough doses to fully vaccinate 300 Americans by the end of the summer or beginning of the fall.

 That's an average of three vaccines per planned vaccine center, by our reckoning.

Of course, PolitiFact pretty obviously omitted the word "million" that belonged between "300" and "Americans." So why do we even bother to mention such a small error? It's not even an example of bias, is it?

There are two related reasons why.

First, because PolitiFact loves to trumpet its rigorous system for reporting accurately. Did you know that PolitiFact's system calls for three editors to review each fact check?

The reporter who researches and writes the fact-check suggests a rating when they turn in the report to an assigning editor. The editor and reporter review the report together, typically making clarifications and adding additional details. They come to agreement on the rating. Then, the assigning editor brings the rated fact-check to two additional editors.

The three editors and reporter then review the fact-check by discussing the following questions.

We hope we're correctly assuming that two editors aside from the assigning editor would not dream of discussing the critical questions without bothering to read the fact check. Under that assumption, three editors and one writer together failed to keep the fact check from including a figure that was off by a factor of one million.

So our first point consists of the observation that PolitiFact's system may allow for considerable error, even obvious error.

So far as we're concerned, that by itself is no big deal. Everybody makes mistakes. So that brings us to our second reason for writing this up.

Thanks to its performance since its inception, we have a very low expectation that PolitiFact will run a correction or update and include this item on its page of "corrections and updates."

That's troublesome.

The best journalists make thorough corrections a priority. Take a gander at the expectation the International Fact-Checking Network lays down for its verified signatory fact-checking organizations:

6.3 Where credible evidence is provided that the applicant has made a mistake worthy of correction, the applicant makes a correction openly and transparently, seeking as far as possible to ensure that users of the original see the correction and the corrected version.

PolitiFact makes many--perhaps most--of its corrections secretly and without transparency.

PolitiFact has a sort of loophole in its corrections policy allowing that lack of transparency. And we've written about it before.

Here's the loophole (bold emphasis from the original):

Typos, grammatical errors, misspellings – We correct typos, grammatical errors, misspellings, transpositions and other small errors without a mark of correction or tag and as soon as they are brought to our attention.

The section on "Typos, grammatical error, misspellings" sneaks in an extra category that PolitiFact feels needs no notice of correction. That is the "other small errors." We think that most likely PolitiFact will treat reporting 300 instead of 300 million as a small error and insert the correction without any notice at all to its readers. Under that scenario, PolitiFact will make no attempt to correct the error openly and transparently, and will likewise make no attempt to bring the corrected number to the attention of those who read the erroneous reporting in the original version.

If PolitiFact surprises us and issues a correction notice, we expect it to follow the form "We reported the wrong number of vaccines Biden promised in the original version of this story." PolitiFact prefers to report vaguely on its mistakes instead of detailing the exact nature of the error as full transparency would demand.

Doing the right thing isn't hard: "We reported Biden would acquire vaccines for 300 Americans when we intended to specify 300 million Americans." Nobody would have a real problem with that.

Whatever one thinks about the significance of the error, the PolitiFact method of treating substantive errors the same as it does typos, grammatical errors and misspellings does not scrupulously follow the IFCN's requirement on corrections.

Supposedly the IFCN requires its signatory organizations like PolitiFact to "scrupulously" follow its guidance on corrections. But the truth is the IFCN has turned a blind eye on PolitiFact's correction shenanigans for years. They know about it because I've informed them about it periodically. The IFCN has never directly addressed any of the reports I've sent detailing PolitiFact's failures to follow policy despite showing no clear evidence that the reports have in any way affected PolitiFact's signatory status.

If the complaints carry no validity, the IFCN should transparently declare the how and why of its judgments.

So this isn't evidence of bias. It's evidence that PolitiFact tries to trick its readers into believing it strives to meet the highest journalistic standards. It advertises a system with failsafes that would prevent the type of error it made. PolitiFact and the IFCN assure readers that PolitiFact performs corrections to appropriately high standards.

It's deception.

We'll update this post to report on whatever actions PolitiFact takes to correct its mistake. A sufficiently pathetic response may result in yet another complaint filed with the IFCN.


Update Jan 28, 2021: We sent an email pointing out PolitiFact's error about 1 p.m. When we checked at about 3:30 p.m., the error was fixed. PolitiFact also appended a correction with the milquetoast-style wording we expected. Oddly, neither the correction nor the tag denoting the correction show up for the archived version of the story. Only the corrected wording in the story shows up.

Here's the correction notice:

CORRECTION, Jan. 28: We corrected the number of Americans the Biden administration hopes to fully vaccinate by the end of summer or early fall.

On the plus side, PolitiFact corrected the error, posted a correction notice and even placed the "corrections and updates" tag.

On the negative side, the correction falls well short of full transparency. PolitiFact told readers on what specific topic it erred but not the specific error it made. That style of correction hides from readers the magnitude of the error. And that was probably the plan.

Facebook should flag itself

We got tagged on Facebook by a person who apparently had one of their posts flagged through Facebook's fact-checker partnership. The original post did not show for us (we're looking into that), but we found it amusing that Facebook's notice contains a falsehood:

It's this part: "All fact-checkers who partner with Facebook must be signatories of the International Fact-Checking Network and follow their Code of Principles."

The IFCN verification process is soft. For example, IFCN signatories agree to "scrupulously" follow a clearly stated corrections policy. Zebra Fact Check has pointed out numerous times PolitiFact has failed in its adherence to its own corrections policy. What happens to PolitiFact as a result? Nothing. We've seen no apparent break in the Facebook partnership. More concerning than that, PolitiFact has still not acted to correct the great bulk of the errors that we've pointed out over the years. That includes things like botching a quotation. It's mostly stuff that's black-and-white error, not any kind of matter of opinion.

So, when Facebook tells you its fact checkers follow the IFCN Code of Principles they're trusting the IFCN to do the enforcement. And it just isn't happening in any strict sense.

It's worth noting, of course, that the non-profit Poynter Institute owns both PolitiFact and the accountability organization that oversees PolitiFact. No problem there, right?

The Phantom Cherry-pick

Would Sen. Bernie Sanders' Medicare For All plan save $2 trillion over 10 years on U.S. health care expenses?

Sanders and the left were on fire this week trying to co-opt a Mercatus Center paper by Charles Blahous. Sanders and others claimed Blahous' paper confirmed the M4A plan would save $2 trillion over 10 years.

PolitiFact checked in on the question and found Sanders' claim "Half True":

PolitiFact's summary encapsulates its reasoning:

The $2 trillion figure can be traced back to the Mercatus report. But it is one of two scenarios the report offers, so Sanders’ use of the term "would" is too strong. The alternative figure, which assumes that a Medicare for All plan isn’t as successful in controlling costs as its sponsors hope it will be, would lead to an increase of almost $3.3 trillion in national health care expenditures, not a decline. Independent experts say the alternative scenario of weaker cost control is at least as plausible.

We rate the statement Half True.

Throughout its report, as pointed out at Zebra Fact Check, PolitiFact treats the $2 trillion in savings as a serious attempt to project the true effects of the M4A bill.

In fact, the Mercatus report use what its author sees as overly rosy assumptions about the bill's effects to estimate a lower boundary for the bill's very high costs and then proceeds to offer reasons why the bill will likely greatly exceed those costs.

In other words, the cherry Sanders tries to pick is a faux cherry. And a fact checker ought to recognize that fact. It's one thing to pick a cherry that's a cherry. It's another thing to pick a cherry that's a fake.

Making Matters Worse

PolitiFact makes matters worse by overlooking Sanders' central error: circular reasoning.

Sanders' takes a projection based on favorable assumptions as evidence that the favorable assumptions are reasonable assumptions. But a conclusion one reaches based on assumptions does not make the assumptions more true. Sanders' claim suggests the opposite, that when the Blahous paper says it is using unrealistic assumptions the conclusions it reaches using those assumptions makes the assumptions reasonable.

A fact checker ought to point out whaten a politician peddles such nonsensical ideas.

PolitiFact made itself guilty of bad reporting while overlooking Sanders' central error.

Zebra Fact Check: "Torture narrative trumps facts at PolitiFact"

Our previous post highlights a Flopping Aces critique of a PolitiFact Florida ruling on whether waterboarding works. Back on May 10, 2016, we posted "What is 'empirical evidence' to PolitiFact?" to highlight PolitiFact's mishandling of the evidence in an earlier waterboarding fact check of Hillary Clinton. At my fact check site, Zebra Fact Check, I sifted both PolitiFact fact checks for the evidence they used to find that waterboarding does not work.

That examination led to an article titled "Torture narrative trumps facts at PolitiFact" and its conclusion:

We don’t have the evidence to know whether waterboarding works. PolitiFact had no business issuing “True” and “False” ratings of statements it cannot verify as true or false. At least not while pretending to serve as a neutral fact checker.

Bias serves as the best explanation for PolitiFact’s treating the two claims according to different standards and justifying its ratings fallaciously.

See the article at Zebra Fact Check for a detailed examination of PolitiFact's evidences.

Find some of my older writing on waterboarding here.

Flopping Aces: "PolitiFact is PolitiWrong on Waterboarding"

I've been slow to post about my Zebra Fact Check critique of PolitiFact's reporting on waterboarding. I'll post that to PolitiFact bias soon, but it comes to my attention that the conservative blog Flopping Aces has a post, "PolitiFact is PolitiWrong on Waterboarding," that overlaps mine in quite a few ways.

"Wordsmith":

Epic fail and lazy research on the part of PolitiFact for not going beyond mainstream media’s superficial reporting which basically accepted and parroted the bullet points given out from the Feinstein Report.

They did consult Reed College political science professor Darius Rejali. But while an expert in what he knows, what he knows also reveals what he doesn’t know: Basically, that he’s ignorant of the arguments made from experts on the other side of the coin. He simply knocks down the strawman claims, hawked around ad nauseam by the critics for years now.

Wordsmith has the details to back up his assertions.

Visit Flopping Aces and read the whole thing.

PolitiFact: Lightning strikes still make a better comparison than alligator attacks

If you're tempted to illustrate the rarity of something by comparing it to something from real life, PolitiFact has a message for you: Take lightning strikes over alligator attacks.

On the issue of voter fraud, PolitiFact has given a number of "True" ratings to persons saying lightning strikes outnumber cases (that's cases considered for prosecution, mind you, not "cases" in the sense of "instances") of in-person voter impersonation.

PolitiFact's comparison is rigged by its narrow count of "cases," of course, but that's another story.

PolitiFact Wisconsin recycled the fact check with an April 7, 2016 item. The item offers no hint of criticism of the comparison of voter fraud to lightning strikes.

PolitiFact Wisconsin's "True" rating perpetuates the inconsistency we noted from a PolitiFact Florida fact check from 2015. It was claimed alligator attacks are more likely than a criminal attack by a Floridian with a concealed-carry gun permit. PolitiFact found the evidence broadly supported the claim but ruled it "Mostly False" since comparing alligator attacks to attacks with a firearm doesn't make sense:

(T)hese statistics, imperfect as they are, do support the notion that both kinds of attacks are uncommon. Whether this is a valid argument in favor of the bill is in the eye of the beholder. We find the statement has an element of truth but ignores other information that would give a different impression. So we rate it Mostly False.

There's an item a Zebra Fact Check criticizing PolitiFact Florida's ruling in detail.

It's worth noting that PolitiFact Wisconsin's evidence on voter fraud shared essentially the same weakness (no dependable count creating doubt):

It’s fair to say, however, that impersonation cases can be hard to count in that they are hard to prove -- particularly when no photo ID requirement is in place and a voter can cast a ballot simply by stating the name of a registered voter.

So the number of cases of in-person fraud by impersonation may be higher than that cited by Levitt, but no independent source suggests it is higher than the number of lightning strikes.

(...)

We rate Pocan’s statement True.

In both cases, then, PolitiFact doesn't really have the facts to fit the claim. But the liberal gets a "True" and the conservative gets a "Mostly False."

In other words, PolitiFact is objective and nonpartisan. Or something.

And if something happens rarely, compare it to lighting strikes instead of alligator attacks. Your PolitiFact report card may suffer otherwise.

Zebra Fact Check: "PolitiFact vs. Rubio on defense spending"

At my fact check site Zebra Fact Check, I took note of PolitiFact Florida's fact check of Marco Rubio from earlier this year:

Rubio said that the United States "is not building the aircraft, the long-range bombers, the additional aircraft carriers, the nuclear submarines."

The military has programs in place to build the types of equipment Rubio mentioned, including the largest aircraft procurement ever: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. It will take many years and billions of dollars to complete the procurement, but Rubio’s statement could mislead voters into thinking that the United States has closed up shop in the area of military equipment and isn’t building anything, which isn’t the case.

We rate this claim False.

In PolitiFact Florida's summary Rubio's statement gets shortened--PolitiFact quotes the full sentence earlier in the story (bold emphasis added): "We are the only nation that is not building the aircraft, the long-range bombers, the additional aircraft carriers, the nuclear submarines we need for our nation's defense."

The Zebra Fact Check article points out how PolitiFact Florida carelessly overlooked an alternative understanding of Rubio's words that is consistent with his speeches:

We  find it completely obvious that Rubio was saying the pace of and planning for defense acquisitions falls below what is needed for adequate defense.

What evidence supports our position? Rubio’s own past statements, for starters.

Rubio's speech from September 2014 goes over each of the military acquisition challenges he mentions in the statement PolitiFact gave its "fact check" treatment. How did PolitiFact Florida miss that information? Probably by not knowing the issue and by not bothering to look.

In other words, by allowing bias to influence the outcome of the fact check.

That's the meaning of these accumulated examples of flawed fact checks we highlight and analyze here at PolitiFact Bias. PolitiFact makes plenty of mistakes, and the tendency of those mistakes to more often unfairly harm conservatives and Republicans makes up one of our main evidences of PolitiFact's liberal bias.

No one example is intended to prove PolitiFact's bias. The bias comes through when considering its whole body of work, including the more rare cases where PolitiFact unfairly harms a liberal with its poor fact-checking.

We're finding it harder and harder to find serious criticism of PolitiFact coming from the political left, for what that's worth.

NewsBusters: "PolitiFact's 'Half True' Evaluation of Fiorina Layoffs Claim Is Utterly False and Dishonest"

NewsBusters' Tom Blumer exposes PolitiFact's ongoing difficulty in evaluating context with his article "PolitiFact's 'Half True' Evaluation of Fiorina Layoffs Claim Is Utterly False and Dishonest."

Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina made a statement in Forbes about layoffs she made at Hewlitt-Packard while she was CEO. A liberal site took the statement out of context. PolitiFact evaluated the out-of-context attack on Fiorina and found it "Half True."

Blumer:

On May 5, PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson kept with the alleged "fact-checking" web site's actual role as pack of leftist hacks by issuing a fundamentally dishonest "Half True" ruling on a statement made by CarlyFiorina.org's cybersquatter. I raise the matter now because the web site's critics, while raising most of the relevant points, haven't gone far enough in tearing apart Jacobson's work.

As his headline states, the cybersquatter "accuses Carly Fiorina of wishing she'd laid off 30,000 employees more quickly" during the Republican presidential candidate's tenure as Hewlett-Packard's CEO which ended a decade ago. The squatter is lying. She didn't make that statement in connection with HP's layoffs. That should have been the end of it, but Jacobson still pretended that the lie is "Half True" in his evaluation.

Blumer's article reminds us of another recent contextual failure by PolitiFact. This one we pointed out at Zebra Fact Check. Rep. Trey Gowdy, chair of the House Benghazi Committee, said on Fox News the committee had received "not a scrap of paper" in response to its requests for the emails of Secretary Clinton's senior staff. PolitiFact, ignoring the context, counted the release of some of Clinton's emails as papers contradicting Gowdy's claim.

We suggest bias might account for PolitiFact's difficulty in properly accounting for context.

Zebra Fact Check: The Importance of Interpretation

Bryan has written an article over at his fact checking site, Zebra Fact Check, that I think is worth highlighting here. Bryan discusses the importance and benefits of correctly interpreting a person's claims, and uses a recent PunditFact article as an example of botching this critical exercise:

PunditFact fails to apply one of the basic rules of interpretation, which is to interpret less clear passages by what more clear passages say. 

Bryan profiles PunditFact's article on Tom DeLay, who was discussing the indictment of Texas governor Rick Perry. In addition to pointing out PundiFact's shoddy journalism, Bryan spots several ways their apparent bias affected the fact check:

We think PunditFact’s faulty interpretation did much to color the results of the fact check. Though PolitiFact’s headline announced a check of DeLay’s claim of ties between McCrum and Democrats, it’s hard to reconcile PolitiFact’s confirmation of such ties with the “Mostly False” rating it gave DeLay. PunditFact affirms “weak ties” to Democrats. Weak ties are ties.

Even more damning evidence of PundiFact's liberal bent comes from their selective use of a CNN chyron placed next to its ubiquitous Truth-O-Meter graphic, allowing PolitiFact to reinforce the editorial slant of its fact check.

While I'm admittedly biased, Bryan's piece is well done and I recommend you read the whole thing.

Afters: 
Bryan didn't mention the main thing I noticed when I first read PunditFact's DeLay article, namely, the superfluous inclusion of a personal smear. PunditFact writer Linda Qiu offered up this paragraph in summation:

This record of bipartisanship is not unusual nor undesired in special prosecutors, said Wisenberg, who considers himself a conservative and opposes the prosecution against DeLay. He pointed out that special prosecutor Ken Starr, famous for investigating President Bill Clinton, also had ties to both parties, and DeLay did not oppose him.

We're not sure what probative value these two sentences have beyond suggesting DeLay is a hypocrite. Highlighting hypocrisy is a very persuasive argument, but it's also a fallacious one. Tom DeLay's support or opposition to Ken Starr bears no relevance to the factual accuracy of the current claim PunditFact is supposedly checking. It serves only to tarnish DeLay's character with readers. That's not fact checking, and that's not even editorializing. It's immature trolling.