Example Umpteen Showing How PolitiFact Goes Easier on Democrats

We only wish we had the time and money needed to document as much as 10 percent of PolitiFact's flawed and biased work.

We've documented a number of times PolitiFact's penchant for ignoring its central principle for grading numbers claims. PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair declared that the most important part of a numbers claim is its underlying point. But PolitiFact will ignore the underlying point at the drop of a hat if it will benefit a Democrat.

Newsom vs Haley

Newsom and "per capita" interstate migration

Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, defending himself from the charge that California is losing population while Florida gains population, said  "Per capita, more Floridians move to California than Californian's moving to Florida." PolitiFact rated the claim "Mostly True."

What's the underlying point of Newsom's claim? Does it address California's population loss compared to Florida's population gain?

No. Newsom's claim instead distracts from the issue with a pretty much meaningless statistic. Experts PolitiFact cited in the fact check underscored that fact. Note this line from PolitiFact's summary:

Experts gave varying answers about whether the margin was statistically significant, but they agreed that the slim differences make this argument technical, and not necessarily meaningful.

So, PolitiFact effectively ignored Newsom's underlying point (distracting from Sean Hannity's question) and gave him nearly full credit for telling the truth about a meaningless statistic.

Haley and ship counts as a measure of military strength

Contrast PolitiFact's treatment of Newsom to its treatment of Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. Haley said China is building up its military, and illustrated her claim by noting China has the largest naval fleet in the world. PolitiFact said she was right with her numbers, but faulted her for her underlying point. "Half True!"

PolitiFact's summary recounts the objections of the experts it interviewed:

Numerically, she’s on target with both countries’ ship counts. But experts say that simply counting ships omits context about a country’s true military capabilities. 

Ship counts ignore overall ship size, specific warfighting capabilities, and overall geographic reach, all of which are metrics where the United States maintains an edge over China.

It's worth noting that Haley made no claim about China's navy possessing more power than the U.S. navy. So why are tonnage and military capability relevant in rating the claim she made?

They're not. But PolitiFact has its excuse for giving Haley a lowball rating compared to the favor they did Newsom. PolitiFact focuses on Haley's underlying point and gives a poor rating for a true claim. PolitiFact ignores Newsom's underlying point and gives him a favorable rating for a claim that might not even be true (check the fine print).

It's part of the baseless narrative PolitiFact weaves: Republicans lie more.

The truth? PolitiFact is biased, and proves it repeatedly with examples like these.

Selection Bias, Magnified

How PolitiFact uses inconsistent application of principles to help Democrats, starring Beto O'Rourke

PolitiFact Bias has repeatedly pointed out how PolitiFact's selection bias problem serves as a trap for its left-leaning journalists (that likely means somewhere between most and all of them). Left-leaning journalists are likely to fact check suspicious claims that look suspicious to left-leaning journalists.

But beyond that left-leaning journalists may suffer the temptation of looking at statements through a left-leaning lens. Fact-checking a Democrat may lead to confirmation bias favoring the Democrat's statement. The journalist may, perhaps unconsciously, emphasize evidence confirming claims coming from liberal sources. Or cutting the fact-finding process short after finding enough to supposedly confirm what the Democrat said.

When Democratic presidential hopeful Beto O'Rourke claimed to have received more votes than any Democrat in the history of Texas, PolitiFact Texas fact-checked the claim and found it "True."

Note that the fact check was written by long-time PolitiFact staffer Louis Jacobson. PolitiFact National employs Jacobson.

It is literally true that O'Rourke received the most votes for a Democrat ever received in the state of Texas. But literal truth is rarely the benchmark for fact checkers. In this case, we immediately noticed a problem with O'Rourke's claim that typically causes fact-checkers to find fault: As the number of voters in Texas grows, the number of raw votes received shrinks in significance. Measuring the percentage of the total vote (48.3 percent for O'Rourke) or the percentage of registered voters (about 25.6 percent) offers a more complete picture of a candidate's electoral strength in a given state.

For comparison, President Jimmy Carter won Texas in 1976 with 2,082,319 votes. Carter's percentage of the vote was 51.1 percent. His percentage of registered voters was 31.2 percent. It follows that Carter's performance in Texas was stronger than O'Rourke's even though Carter received about half as many votes as O'Rourke received.

We pointed out the problem to a PolitiFact Texas employee on Twitter. PolitiFact elected not to update the story to address O'Rourke's potentially misleading point about his electoral strength.

But it's justified resisting the efforts of conservatives to "work the refs," right? Who would think of trying to put the number of votes in context like we did other than right wing zealots?

Try the BBC, for starters. BBC noted that Hillary Clinton received the most presidential votes in history, then promptly tempered that statement of fact with a caveat:

So the proportion of Clinton votes might be more illuminating than simply how many votes she earned.

Indeed. And even PolitiFact Texas devoted more than one paragraph to the context O'Rourke had left out. Yet PolitiFact had the left-leaning sense not to let that missing information interfere with the "True" rating it bestowed on O'Rourke.

Our ruling

O’Rourke said that in 2018 when he ran for senator, "young voter turnout in early voting was up 500%. We won more votes than any Democrat has in the history of the state of Texas."

His assertion about young voter turnout is backed up by an analysis of state election data by the firm TargetSmart. And he’s correct that no Democrat has ever won more raw votes in a Texas statewide election than he has, an accomplishment achieved through a combination of his own electoral success, a pro-Democratic environment in 2018, and Texas’ rapid population growth in recent years.

We rate his statement True.

PolitiFact does not count the missing information significant, even though it was apparently significant enough to mention in the story.

Partial review of PolitiFact's rating system:

MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

If O'Rourke's statement did not need clarification or additional information, such as the growing number of voters in Texas, then why did PolitiFact provide that clarifying information?

These gray area "coin flips" between ratings offer yet another avenue for left-leaning fact-checkers to express their bias.

PolitiFact has never revealed any mechanism in its methodology that would address this weakness.

Hans Bader: "The Strange Ignorance of PolitiFact"

Hans Bader, writing at Liberty Unyielding, points out a Jan. 19, 2017 fact-checking train wreck from PolitiFact Pennsylvania. PolitiFact Pennsylvania looked at a claim Sen. Bob Casey (D-Penn.) used to try to discredit President-elect Donald Trump's nominee for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos.

Bader's article initially emphasized PolitiFact Pennsylvania's apparent ignorance of the "reasonable doubt" standard in United States criminal cases:

In an error-filled January 19 “fact-check,” PolitiFact’s Anna Orso wrote about “the ‘clear and convincing’ standard used in criminal trials.”  The clear and convincing evidence standard is not used in criminal trials. Even my 9-year old daughter knows that the correct standard is “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

By the time we started looking at this one, PolitiFact Pennsylvania had started trying to spackle over its faults. The record (at the Internet Archive) makes clear that PolitiFact's changes to its text got ahead of its policy of announcing corrections or updates.

Eventually, PolitiFact continued its redefinition of the word "transparency" with this vague description of its corrections:

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized the standard of evidence used in criminal convictions.

Though PolitiFact Pennsylvania corrected the most obvious and embarrassing problem with its fact check, other problems Bader pointed out still remain, such as its questionable characterization of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education's civil rights stance as "controversial."

For our part, we question PolitiFact Pennsylvania for apparently uncritically accepting a key premise connected to the statement it claimed to fact check:

Specifically, Casey said the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education supports a bill that "would change the standard of evidence." He said the group is in favor of ditching the "preponderance of the evidence" standard most commonly used in Title IX investigations on college campuses and instead using the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard used in criminal cases.

PolitiFact claimed to simply fact check whether DeVos had contributed to FIRE. But without the implication that FIRE is some kind of far-outside-the-mainstream group, who cares?

We say that given PolitiFact Pennsylvania's explanation of Casey's attack on DeVos, a fact checker needs to investigate whether FIRE supported a bill that would change the standard of evidence.

PolitiFact Pennsylvania offers its readers no evidence at all regarding any such bill. If there is no bill as Casey described, then PolitiFact Pennsylvania's "Mostly True" rating serves to buoy a false charge against DeVos (and FIRE).

Ultimately, PolitiFact Pennsylvania fails to coherently explain the point of contention. The Obama administration tried to restrict schools from using the "clear and convincing" standard.

Thus, in order for a school’s grievance procedures to be consistent with Title IX standards, the school must use a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e., it is more likely than not that sexual harassment or violence occurred). The “clear and convincing” standard (i.e., it is highly probable or reasonably certain that the sexual harassment or violence occurred), currently used by some schools, is a higher standard of proof. Grievance procedures that use this higher standard are inconsistent with the standard of proof established for violations of the civil rights laws, and are thus not equitable under Title IX. Therefore, preponderance of the evidence is the appropriate standard for investigating allegations of sexual harassment or violence.

FIRE objected to that. But objecting to that move from the Obama administration does not mean FIRE advocated using the "beyond a reasonable doubt" (how PolitiFact's story reads now) standard. That also goes for the "clear and convincing" standard mentioned in the original version.

PolitiFact Pennsylvania simply skipped out on investigating the linchpin of Casey's argument.

There's more hole than story to this PolitiFact Pennsylvania fact check.

Be sure to read Bader's article for more.


Update Jan 21, 2017: Added link to the Department of Education's April 4, 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter
Update Jan 24, 2017: Added a proper ending to the second sentence in the third-to-last paragraph 
Update Feb. 2, 2017: Added "article" after "Bader's" in the second paragraph to make the sentence more sensible

PolitiFact Wisconsin: It's false until somebody fact-checks it

We've long registered our objections to PolitiFact's fallacious "burden of proof" criterion for political claims.

PolitiFact Wisconsin gives us a fantastic example of that flawed method with its fact check of Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson. Carson highlighted problems with advancement in the black community by saying there are more blacks involved with the criminal justice system than with higher education.

PolitiFact Wisconsin decided to evaluate claim and rated it "False." But of course there's a problem with the rating. PolitiFact Wisconsin found it had poor data with which to work:

(T)here is only one solid figure -- 75,000 black males ages 18 to 24 in prison. We’re not aware of any recent counts of the black males in that age group who were arrested, in jail, or on probation or parole at a particular time.

PolitiFact Wisconsin emphasized that relatively low solid figure in its summary paragraph:

Carson did not provide evidence that backs his claim. The latest federal figures we found show 75,000 black males in that age group who were in prison in 2013 and in the range of 690,000 to 779,000 who were in college. We are not aware of any recent figures for the number of black males ages 18 to 24 arrested, in jail, or on probation or parole at any particular time.

If figures do surface, we’ll re-evaluate this item, but we rate Carson’s claim False.

Perhaps it makes sense if the number of blacks ages 18 to 24 in college outnumber those involved with the criminal justice system 779,000 to 75,000. But that number comparison is rigged against Carson. PolitiFact Wisconsin acknowledges Carson's claim on unknown numbers of young blacks arrested, in jail, on probation or on parole.

And that's the Achilles' heel of PolitiFact Wisconsin's fact check. It collected enough information to enable rough estimates of those categories.

Was Carson's claim plausible?

We start our estimate by noting the percentage of blacks ages 18 to 24 in the federal prison population was fairly high: PolitiFact said the number of about 14 percent of the total black population.

We aim to create a conservative estimate, erring on the side of caution, so we'll assume that just 10 percent of blacks in the other categories fall in the 18 to 24 age range.

Arrests

PolitiFact Wisconsin noted that one individual might be arrested more than once. Still, the fact checkers gave the number 3 million for arrests of adult blacks in 2012. Ten percent of 3 million gives us a figure of 300,000, but to help account for multiple arrests we'll cut that number in half and use 150,000.

In Jail

PolitiFact Wisconsin gave a figure of 261,500 for jail inmates in mid-2013. Ten percent of that figure gives us about 26,000.

On Probation or Parole

PolitiFact Wisconsin said 4.75 million people of all races were on probation, parole or other supervision in 2013. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, PolitiFact's source, says blacks account for 30 percent of that number. That gives us 1.4 million, and 10 percent of 1.4 million comes to 140,000.

Totals

Combined with the 75,000 prison population PolitiFact Wisconsin used, our conservative estimate comes to 391,000--about half of PolitiFact Wisconsin's peak figure for black college enrollment. Based on our estimate, we think it's very unlikely Carson's claim exaggerates the truth by more than 100 percent, probably exaggerates it by substantially less than 100 percent and perhaps doesn't exaggerate at all.

For comparison, PolitiFact Georgia recently gave a "Mostly False" rating to a claim exaggerated by over 200 percent.

Do these numbers potentially support Carson's underlying point about the upward mobility of young black males? For some reason, PolitiFact Wisconsin did not deem that point worth considering.

Shall fact checkers rate claims "False" if they are difficult to settle? We think that's the wrong method. We also think fact checkers err by selectively ignoring politicians' underlying arguments. Either consider the underlying argument every time or never consider the underlying argument. Fairness demands it.