PolitiFact doesn't know the meaning of 'and'?

 Well, well, well.

I've had to focus on things other than PolitiFact Bias posts lately, but PolitiFact and its owner, the Poynter Institute have pulled me out of semi-retirement with an extraordinary clunker of a fact check.

Behold:

PolitiFact's fact check defies logic and establishes an early leader in the "Worst Fact Check of the Year" contest.

The "False" conclusion fails because it rests on a failure to understand the simple logic of "and." The conclusion would work for the logic of "or." But Hannity said "and" not "or."

If Bill says the square is green or red then the square confirms Bill's statement if it is red. Likewise the square confirms Bill's statement if it is green. Bill would be right either way.

But if Bill says the square is green and red then it's a different ballgame.

In the second case the square confirms Bill's statement if it is both green and red. So a square that is half green and half red could confirm Bill's statement. A square that is simply green would contradict Bill's statement. The same goes for a square that is red and not green.

This is extraordinarily basic logic and PolitiFact doesn't get it. 

 Observe how PolitiFact looks to prove Hannity false:

The claim ignored that both Trump and Reagan made similar vows to nominate women to the Supreme Court, then followed through on those promises. Other presidents in history have also considered race and religion as they have made their picks.

We rate Hannity’s claim False.

So, by analogy, PolitiFact says if Trump and Reagan both nominated green squares then both Trump and Reagan each nominated squares that were both green and red.

That's 2+2=5 territory.

Making this even more hilarious, PolitiFact's parent company, the esteemed Poynter Institute, chose to highlight this fact check at the main site. In the title, Poynter's headline writer substituted a comma for the "and," masking the error of logic for those who do not read the "fact check."

BizPacReview: PolitiFact's 2021 LOTY 'just a liberal talking point all dressed up for prom'

Sierra Marlee, in an article published at BizPacReview, fairly summed up PolitiFact's ho-hum "Lie of the Year" for 2021.

PolitiFact, a fact-checking site that purports to be an unbiased source of information, has chosen its 2021 “Lie of the Year” and it’s a doozy.

The organization picked the one topic that could be found on every Democratic talking points sheet from January until December: The Capitol Hill riot. Specifically, they decided to select all of the claims and statements “downplaying the realities and significance of the Capitol insurrection.”

That opening description ended up under the title "PolitiFact’s lie of the year is just a liberal talking point all dressed up for prom."

That sounds about right. 

Marlee lets tweets from PolitiFact and its critics tell most of the story. Apparently that's a new journalistic genre.

LIndsey Graham out of context

Here we go again. PolitiFact has had quite a run in 2021 when it comes to taking Republicans' claims out of context.

This latest one forced me to set aside other projects that have crow(d)ed out PolitiFact Bias posts.

Did Sen. Graham say the CBO says the "Build Back Better" Act would amount to $3 trillion in deficit spending. 

He did say that, but PolitiFact took it out of context.

PolitiFact explained to its readers that Graham was talking about a modified version of the "Build Back Better" Act (bold emphasis added):

Graham said the CBO predicted the Build Back Better Act would add $3 trillion to deficits over 10 years.

He’s referring to a bill that’s not the Build Back Better Act. At Graham’s request, the CBO looked at the impact of extending the temporary programs in the bill for a full 10 years. That is an assessment of a hypothetical situation, not the bill at hand. 

We rate this claim False.

What's the problem with PolitiFact's reasoning?

It was clear in context that Graham was talking about the CBO's scoring of permanent versions of the bill's temporary provisions. The Fox News interviewer, Chris Wallace, made that clear at the outset of the interview (bold for the portion PolitiFact may have relied on for its quotation of Graham):

WALLACE: You commissioned the Congressional Budget Office to project how much Build Back Better will cost over the 10 years, assuming that the programs that are in it, the spending programs that are in it, go on for 10 years and are not as in the case with child care just for one year.

GRAHAM: Right.

WALLACE: The CBO found, instead of adding $200 billion to the deficit, it will add $3 trillion to the deficit. But, Senator, the White House says that that's fake because if the programs are extended, they'll find ways to pay for them.

GRAHAM: Well, give me a plan to pay for them then. President Biden said the bill was fully -- fully paid for. Vice President Harris said it was paid for. Schumer, Pelosi, Secretary of Treasury Yellen. The CBO says it's not paid for. It's $3 trillion of deficit spending. It's not $1.75 trillion over 10 years, it's $4.9 trillion.

We doubt PolitiFact's headline version of Graham's statement qualifies as proper application of AP style for quotations. But the main point is that, in context, Graham would be understood to be talking about the added cost of making the temporary measures permanent. And PolitiFact affirms what Graham says about that CBO projection.

So how does Graham warrant a "False" rating if he wasn't trying to fool people into thinking the new CBO scoring was for the version of the bill with the temporary provisions?

PolitiFact's Twist on the Committee For a Responsible Budget

Also of note, PolitiFact's fact check takes the Committee For a Responsible Budget out of context, using a part of one of its articles to make Graham look out of line for citing the CBO's scoring of the bill with the temporary provisions made permanent:

Modified means the CBO scored a bill that’s different from the one on the table.

"These estimates do not reflect what is actually written in the Build Back Better Act nor its official cost for scorekeeping purposes," the deficit hawk group Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote. "Lawmakers may choose to allow some provisions to expire, to extend some as written, and to modify some."

That's exactly what the Committee said, but it was in the context of explaining the CBO's alternative scoring and comparing that scoring to the Committee's own alternative scoring of "Build Back Better" with its temporary provisions made permanent (highlights for the portion PolitiFact cherry picked):

Importantly, these estimates do not reflect what is actually written in the Build Back Better Act nor its official cost for scorekeeping purposes. Lawmakers may choose to allow some provisions to expire, to extend some as written, and to modify some. To offset the cost of extending these provisions as President Biden has committed, they would need to more than double current offsets in the bill. Extending programs without these offsets would substantially increase in the debt. $3 trillion of new debt would increase debt to over 116 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2031, up from 107.5 percent under current law.

The Build Back Better Act relies on a substantial amount of short-term policies and arbitrary sunsets to reduce its cost, raising the possibility of deficit-financed extensions in future years. A more robust and fiscally responsible package would not rely on these gimmicks to achieve deficit neutrality.

The second paragraph in particular aligns well with Sen. Graham's criticism of "Build Back Better."

PolitiFact hid that also from its readers, along with the fact that Graham was obviously talking about the CBO's scoring of temporary provisions made permanent.

Such fact-checking is no better than lying.

MetaFact Group: PolitiFact “fact-checks” accurate reporting about study showing vaccines provide less immunity than prior infections

A relative newcomer to the fact-checking the fact-checkers club, MetaFact Group, today published an on-target item showing yet another example of a misleading PolitiFact technique.

It's PolitiFact's method of putting words, or at least an implied argument, into the mouth of another.

PolitiFact has rated as “half true” a headline by the Gateway Pundit that accurately summarizes the findings of a study by Maccabi Healthcare and Tel Aviv University, showing those vaccinated against COVID-19 were 13 times more likely to still be infected than those not vaccinated (but recovered from covid--Ed.). The study states “SARS-CoV-2-naïve vaccinees had a 13.06-fold (95% CI, 8.08 to 21.11) increased risk for breakthrough infection with the Delta variant compared to those previously infected.”

PolitiFact said the headline was misleading because the study had not yet passed peer review and the headline also supposedly implied that it was a good idea not to receive the vaccine (bold emphasis added):

The headline accurately reflects some of the study’s findings but ignores the study’s limitations, including that only one vaccine was tested, and that other studies have found that COVID-19 poses much greater danger to people who have not been vaccinated.

Without that context, the headline leaves the impression that it’s safer to get COVID-19 and hope to recover than to try to avoid it by getting vaccinated. That’s not true.

This is the same PolitiFact that recently told us that fossil fuel power plants kill millions of birds annually without informing its readers that the estimate was based almost entirely on predictions of how many birds climate change might kill in the future. The research paper averaged predicted future bird deaths out over a 40-year period. Because science. See more details at Bryan's Zebra Fact Check site.

It's okay for PolitiFact fact checkers to skimp on context. But it's not okay for you, me, or Gateway Pundit.

MetaFact Group also made a critical point about the legitimacy of the Gateway Pundit article:

(K)nowing that natural immunity maybe [sic] superior to vaccine-based immunity is a relevant point of discussion for a university considering whether it can mandate its students, faculty and staff take the COVID-19 vaccines.

Read the article at Meta Fact Group and bookmark the site.

Search engine update!

Occasionally we get curious about how search engines are treating the PolitiFact Bias site. We have a number of SEO advantages, perhaps the strongest being the lack of advertising.

One of our advantage was using the (still free!) Google Blogger platform. Once upon a time, using that platform gained an SEO advantage from the Google search engine. But times change, and Google's algorithms also change.

Results are mine. Thanks to algorithms, your results may vary:

DuckDuckGo: No. 1, if we don't count the sponsored link. Otherwise No. 2.

Bing: No. 1.

Google: Our Twitter account is No. 4, thanks to Jeff's fine work.

Our Facebook page ends up at the bottom of the second page of hits.

This website comes in as the fourth hit on Google's third page of results.

We count this as a result of Google's successful effort to elevate "reliable" websites and downgrade dubious ones in its search results.

Even when the dubious ones are right and the "reliable" ones are wrong.

PolitiFact creates smear of Dan Patrick by evaluating invented claim

PolitiFact took something Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) said and completely transformed it into something PolitiFact could give a "False" rating.

It's another clear illustration of the fact-checking methodology PFB co-founder Jeff borrowed for use on the PolitiFact Bias Facebook page years ago.

It's from HopeNChangeCartoons.com.

PolitiFact cheats by giving Patrick's statement a wild interpretation and then declares him a liar.

Let's break it down, starting with PolitiFact's headline/graphic/deck presentation.

If we were to interpret Patrick hyper-literally, he starts right off with a falsehood. Democrats do not blame Republicans on low vaccination rates. Rather, they blame Republicans for low vaccinations rates (leading to growth of the covid-19 pandemic).

Hopefully, it's plain that using such an interpretation counts as pedantic. It's plain from the context what Patrick was trying to say.

Patrick follows with "Well, the biggest group in most states are African Americans who have not been vaccinated." The context does less to clarify Patrick's meaning, but the meaning has to fit with his point: He aims to undercut the Democratic Party's narrative that unvaccinated Republicans drive the covid-19 resurgence. Patrick's last line in the quotation supports that interpretation ("90% of them vote for Democrats").

Either of two meanings would fit the context of Patrick's point as we have described it. Patrick could be talking about the raw numbers of unvaccinated African Americans--plainly a stretch given that Blacks make up less than 14% of the population--or he could mean that in most states Blacks are the demographic with the lowest vaccination rate.

Either interpretation might serve Patrick's purpose, and PolitiFact reported he later clarified that he was talking about low vaccination rates, not sheer numbers of unvaccinated Blacks.

But that's not how PolitiFact plays media fact checkers.

Here's the big cheat (bold emphasis added):

Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, asked last week to defend the Texas response to surging coronavirus cases, blamed Democrats for the present COVID-19 wave, specifically African Americans, who he said are reliable Democratic voters.

Where is PolitiFact's proof that Patrick blamed Democrats, particularly Black Democrats, for the recent COVID-19 wave?

Here's PolitiFact's second mention of Patrick's alleged point:

Regardless of whether or not he was referring to vaccination rates, he did not seek to change his main point, that Black populations are playing a major role in fueling the present COVID-19 surge. But there’s no evidence to support that. 

PolitiFact should have noted that "there's no evidence to support that" Patrick's main point was "that Black populations are playing a major role in fueling the present COVID-19 surge."

Alas.

Oddly, by the time PolitiFact reached its concluding section Patrick's point had changed to something else: Democrats are responsible for vaccine hesitancy!

Behold:

In an attempt to blame vaccine hesitancy on Democrats, Patrick said on Fox News that the biggest group of unvaccinated people in most states is African Americans.

There's likewise no evidence Patrick was blaming vaccine hesitancy on Democrats, though he did say Democrats were not doing enough to get Blacks vaccinated.

Second paragraph of PolitiFact's conclusion:

His on-air statement is wrong. Black people aren’t the largest group of unvaccinated people in any state. But his revised statement, that vaccination rates among the Black population lag behind that of other racial groups, is correct. 

With two plausible ways to interpret Patrick's statement, PolitiFact chose the one it could rate false and apparently gave no consideration to the one it said was true when levying its "False" rating.

We fully grant that the interpretation PolitiFact chose was the more literal of the two. But the same condition that holds when we interpret "on" as "for" when Patrick started speaking holds for Patrick's second sentence. The Fox News host asked Patrick for a quick response. Quick responses may understandably require charitable interpretation.

PolitiFact prefers not to do that for Patrick's second sentence. And that, plus the point PolitiFact chose for Patrick, resulted in the "False" rating.

PolitiFact cheated to make Patrick a liar.

PolitiFact supplies misleading missing context

This week the fact checkers at PolitiFact fixed a supposed problem with missing context by supplying completely misleading context.

Gohmert wasn't talking about solar panel farms. He was talking about facilities that concentrate reflected sunlight. Nor did Gohmert suggest avian deaths would bring the nation down. But those blunders represent the least of our worries.

The big problem in the fact check comes from its attempt to set the record straight. PolitiFact claimed Gohmert left out the fact that fossil fuel plants cause far more deaths than solar energy plants like the one Gohmert mentioned: "Solar farms kill thousands of birds, but not as many as fossil fuel plants."

"Is that true?" we wondered.

It may be true, we suppose. But the reasoning PolitiFact provided was illegitimate.

"It is wrong to single out solar and wind (power) as having bird mortality issues," said David Jenkins, president of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship. "The estimated number of birds killed by fossil fuel power plants through collisions, electrocution and poisoning actually dwarfs those attributed to solar and wind."

A 2016 study found that solar power plants cause 37,800 to 138,600 annual avian deaths in the U.S., compared with 14.5 million attributed to fossil fuel power plants. Another study attributed 365 million to 988 million avian deaths to collisions with buildings and windows.

The big problem (there are many small problems in the fact check) starts between the two paragraphs above. The Jenkins quotation sets up the reader to expect that avian deaths caused by fossil fuel plants will represent deaths from "collisions, electrocution and poisoning."

But the second paragraph betrays that expectation. The 14.5 million estimate in the second paragraph comes almost entirely from the predicted effects of climate change.

We must be kidding, right?

We're not kidding.

PolitiFact's link leads to A preliminary assessment of avian mortality at utility-scale solar energy facilities in the United States, hosted at Science Direct. That paper estimates bird deaths at facilities like the Ivanpah solar facility Gohmert mentioned, including those under construction. The paper says it includes collisions with facility structures along with birds killed while trying to fly through the concentrated sunlight (formatting tweaked to help simulate the appearance of the original):

There are currently 2 known types of direct solar energy-related bird mortality [9], [12], [13]:

1. Collision-related mortality – mortality resulting from the direct contact of the bird with a solar project structure(s). This type of mortality has been documented at solar projects of all technology types.

2. Solar flux-related mortality – mortality resulting from the burning/singeing effects of exposure to concentrated sunlight. Mortality may result in several ways: (a) direct mortality; (b) singeing of flight feathers that cause loss of flight ability, leading to impact with other objects; or (c) impairment of flight capability to reduce the ability to forage or avoid predators, resulting in starvation or predation of the individual [12]. Solar flux-related mortality has been observed only at facilities employing power tower technologies.

As for the estimate for fossil fuel energy generation, the authors derived that based on research from an earlier paper:

We ... used the mortalities calculated by Sovacool [25] as an estimate of avian mortalities associated with fossil fuel power plants across the United States.

The Sovacool paper did not limit itself to the avian death categories PolitiFact mentioned. PolitiFact readers would naturally conclude that in a typical year such as 2019 (after the study was published), fossil fuel power generation resulted in approximately 14 million dead birds from collisions, electrocutions and poisoning.

That's false.

In fact, the study got nearly that entire number by estimating future effects on bird populations in the United States from climate change.

So this PolitiFact fact check will be in the running for worst fact check of the year.

Sovacool:

Adding the avian deaths from coal mining, plant operation, acid rain, mercury, and climate change together results in a total of 5.18 fatalities per GWh (see Table 3).

Table 3:

 

Table 3 makes abundantly clear that Sovacool draws the great bulk of estimated avian deaths from fossil fuel electricity generation on the future effects of climate change.

Footnote No. 6 on the previous page makes that conclusion inescapable (bold emphasis added):

While there are more than 9800 species and an estimated global population of 100 billion to one trillion individual wild birds in the world, only 5.6 billion birds live in United States during the summer (Hughes et al., 1997; Elliott, 2003; Hassan et al., 2005). Taking the mean in climate change induced avian deaths expected by Thomas et al. (26%), one gets 1.5 billion birds spread across 41 years for the United States, or an average of 36.6 million dead birds per year. Attributing 39% of these deaths to power plants (responsible for 39% of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions), one gets 14.3 million birds for 2.87 million GWh per year, or 4.98 deaths per GWh.

Note that the number in Sovacool's footnote closely matches the estimate from paper PolitiFact cited (14.5 million annually).

So PolitiFact is peddling an apples-to-oranges comparison between two types of bird deaths at solar energy power plants and future predicted climate change effects from fossil fuel energy plants. And doesn't tell you that's what it's doing.

It's hypocrisy of the highest order.

There are more layers to this BS narrative on bird deaths from fossil fuels, but suffice it to say that PolitiFact's claim that fossil fuel generation causes far more bird deaths than solar is far more misleading than Gohmert's claim about Ivanpah.

PolitiFact's shell game with claim selection

There they go again.

We've pointed out the bias inherent in PolitiFact's choices about what parts of a claim to rate. And they're at it again at PolitiFact, this time at PolitiFact Wisconsin:

PolitiFact Wisconsin based its "Pants on Fire" judgment solely on the source of the money.

• Cost: about $50k (true)
• Source of funds: tax dollars (false)
• Rock considered a symbol of racism by some (true)
  

So guess where PolitiFact puts its story focus? Take it away, PF:

For this fact-check, we’ll be focusing on her claim that Wisconsin taxpayers were on the hook for the rock removal.

So PolitiFact didn't consider the amount spent on the rock removal or the reason it was moved.

Totally legit? No. It's one of the easy avenues for bias to enter fact-checking, which some people hilariously believe is strictly the telling of facts.

We've brought up in the past the "Mostly True" rating Barack Obama received during the Democratic presidential primaries when he claimed his uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz.

Here's that set of claims, for comparison:

• Uncle among Allied troops liberating concentration camp (true/truish)
• Auschwitz: (false--Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz)

In Obama's case, PolitiFact downplayed a claim it could have chosen to make the focus of its fact check. Instead, it prioritized everything else in the claim to justify the "Mostly True" rating.

To avoid that manifestation of bias, a fact checker needs to employ the same standards consistently. Picking and choosing story focus counts as yet another subjective aspect of fact check ratings.

It's a scam. And it's a lie to call it unbiased.

Yet that's what PolitiFact does.

Obama could have received a "Pants on Fire" rating with a story focus on whether his uncle liberated Auschwitz.

Campos-Duffy could have received a "Mostly True" with a story focus taking her whole claim into account and giving her credit for the true elements.

And we want these people partnering with Facebook to help decide what get throttled down?

Updated seconds after publication to tag the PolitiFact writer Laura Schulte.