A note to PolitiFact Florida

During the 2012 election, Democrat incumbent senator Bill Nelson faced off against former Rep. Connie Mack, the Republican challenger.

Nelson accused Mack of protecting oil giant Chevron from a lawsuit.  Nelson ran an ad that said ""In Congress, Mack is protecting Chevron oil from a multibillion dollar lawsuit over pollution of rivers and rain forests."

That was a powerful message.  Mack wants to protect big businesses who would pollute pristine lands with impunity?

PolitiFact only gave Nelson a "Half True" rating, however:

Nelson’s TV ad hits Mack for "protecting Chevron oil from a multibillion dollar lawsuit over pollution of rivers and rain forests."

Mack’s act of protection is a yet-to-be-heard congressional resolution listing the Chevron case as one of many reasons to withhold trade preferences with Ecuador. Resolutions are symbolic gestures, so it would take a law for Congress to take real action on Ecuadorian trade practices.

The Chevron case is also particularly complicated. Chevron says it did not get a fair trial in Ecuador and should not be held responsible anyway.

Still, the resolution seems designed to exert political pressure on the country in Chevron’s favor.

We rate Nelson’s claim Half True.

Let's summarize the summary.

• Mack's resolution would have no effect, by itself, on U.S. policy ("symbolic gesture")
• The Chevron case was one grievance among many mentioned in the resolution
• Chevron says it did not get a fair trial
• The resolution "seems" intended to exert political pressure (see the first bullet above)

So PolitiFact Florida reasons that crafting a toothless resolution "seems" intended to exert political pressure on Ecuador.  And how surprising is it that Chevron thinks it didn't get a fair trial.  Crocodile tears, right?

But let's back up a bit. In fairness to PolitiFact Florida, the article does point out that experts were sympathetic to Chevron's claim about the unfair trial:

Other experts empathized with Chevron’s argument that it did not get a fair trial in Ecuador, and that it overlooks that Petroecuador has been in control of drilling operations for the past 20 years.

Those experts just couldn't find their voices in PolitiFact Florida's summary.  And that's not a big surprise, given that PolitiFact Florida made two experts hostile to Chevron the stars of its analysis:

We found a couple of experts who agree [with Nelson], including Judith Kimerling, a City University of New York-Queens College environmental policy professor who authored the 1991 book Amazon Crude, which is widely credited with inspiring the lawsuit. She represents a group of Huaorani people from Ecuador in a lawsuit against the Amazon Defense Front and plaintiff’s lawyers over how the award would be distributed.

Relying on an expert with a direct interest in the case.  What could be better?  Maybe use a quotation from the other biased expert, Lori Wallach, as the kicker quote?

"[Mack]’s shilling for Chevron but has not yet delivered on actually cutting off Ecuador’s trade preferences," she said.

Wallach heads up Public Citizen's "Global Trade Watch."  She judged the Chevron case in a 2012 memorandum:

Ecuador is still struggling to gain compensation from Chevron for decades of contamination of a Rhode Island-sized swath of the Amazon.

 Okay, so?  So what if PolitiFact shows partiality to Chevron's critics in its story?

We're posting this today because Chevron just got a big win: 

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked U.S. courts from being used to collect a $9 billion Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron for rainforest damage, saying lawyers poisoned an honorable quest with their illegal and wrongful conduct.

Read ABC News' story about the case in full.  Then review PolitiFact Florida's fact check of Sen. Nelson's ad.  PolitiFact bias.

Meet the New Boss Same as the Old Boss ...

We've wondered since PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair moved on to the realm of academia in 2013 how things would shake out at PolitiFact.

An interview of new editor Angie Drognic Holan published on Feb. 27 gives us a hint that some things won't be changing.  Here's an item of special note to us here at PolitiFact Bias (bold emphasis added):

"We try to fact-check approximately the same number of Democrats and Republicans but we don’t keep hard-and-fast count, and one thing that we don’t do is try to balance the ratings. We don’t think about if we get a false on one side, we want to go and get a false on the other side. We do not do that."

We've pointed out before that trying to rate about the same number of statements by party serves to skew the sample of statements PolitiFact rates.

Suppose PolitiFact's editorial ears perk up over 10 suspicious-sounding Republican statements but only four for Democrats.  Trying to keep the numbers approximately even creates pressure to change the editorial criteria in order to move the numbers closer together.

What does this mean in practical terms?  It's unwise to collect PolitiFact data and use it as though it's a scientific sample.  It's not a scientific sample.

And we can't complete our post on the Holan interview without noting how she blatantly/wisely dodged one of the questions:

4. You are working with partners across the country, how does everybody draw consistent conclusions? Can this be entirely objective?

No, it's not entirely objective, and PolitiFact doesn't draw consistent conclusions.  Read the article to see how Holan skirts the question.  Adair used to do the same thing.

Oh, and another thing ...

We don't know when this interview took place, but Holan's citing 10 PolitiFact state affiliates and one international one even though the loss of PolitiFact Ohio apparently brings the number of state affiliates down to nine, and PolitiFact has taken down its link to PolitiFact Australia, which has gone on hiatus.  Perhaps somebody should have fact-checked her claims.

Nothing To See Here: Harry Reid's "All of them are untrue"

Via Townhall.com's Guy Benson, we have Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid declaring that all Obamacare horror stories are untrue:



We don't want PolitiFact looking at this in the name of "false equivalency," do we?

Nothing to see here. Move along.

PolitiFact's PolitiMath, and President Obama

We try to keep tabs on the way PolitiFact does math.  In particular, we're interested in how the degree of error affects PolitiFact's trademarked "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.  We're especially on the lookout for cases where the degree of error appears to determine the rating.  These cases contribute to our "PolitiMath" theorems.

This week PolitiFact gave us a terrific example of PolitiMath.

Obama said, "We’ve got close to 7 million Americans who have access to health care for the first time because of Medicaid expansion."

...The actual number is estimated to be between one-seventh and two-fifths of what Obama said it was. We rate the claim False.

Obama's 7 million figure exaggerated the high-end accepted estimate of 1.8 million by 288 percent. PolitiFact calls that "False." Not ridiculously false ("Pants on Fire"), but simply false.

File that one away for future, and past, reference.


Update Feb. 26, 2014: Eliminated some extraneous html coding that ended up visible in the text, and also altered the quotation of PolitiFact to make clear it draws from two different paragraphs.

Ho hum: PolitiFact flubs another gender wage gap disparity rating

It's been a blast for us here at PolitiFact Bias covering PolitiFact's inconsistency on the gender wage disparity.

June 22, 2012:  At my old blog "Sublime Bloviations" I tag PolitiFact National for going soft on President Obama.  PolitiFact gave the president a "Mostly False" rating for saying women receive 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.  It's a flat misuse of the statistic.

May 8, 2013:  We look at all of the PolitiFact gender wage gap stories available through that time, finding them inconsistent with each other, to say the least.

Jan 30, 2014:  We updated the gender wage gap series after President Obama implied the existence of a 23-cent gender wage gap in his State of the Union speech.  Incredibly, PolitiFact rated Obama's dissembling "Mostly True."

Now PolitiFact Oregon adds probably the most spectacular flub so far:

Image capture from PolitiFact.com, Feb. 20, 2014

PolitiFact Oregon simply neglects to factor into its fact checking whether Brad Avakian's statistics measure differences in pay for doing the same job.  It's a hugely embarrassing oversight, and it's highly likely PolitiFact Oregon will have to issue a correction.

Whether or not PolitiFact Oregon corrects the mistake, it's an astonishing error to find in material that claims to check facts.  And runs its findings past a team of editors before telling the world what's true and what's not.

We think it's pretty clear that PolitiFact's National's preposterously favorable rating of Obama's version of the claim in his 2014 State of the Union speech contributed to this error by PolitiFact Oregon:

For starters, the commissioner loses points for cherry-picking the 79-cent figure. Other means of measuring pay gaps between men and women put it considerably less.

The same can be said of the "for doing the same job" piece. As PolitiFact has found previously, the existence of a pay gap doesn’t necessarily mean that all of the gap is caused by individual employer-level discrimination, as Avakian’s claim implies. Some of the gap is at least partially explained by the predominance of women in lower-paying fields, rather than women necessarily being paid less for the same job than men are.

The PolitiFact Oregon story has but one of PolitiFact's past gender wage gap ratings listed among its sources:  PolitiFact National's rating of Obama's State of the Union speech.

Nothing To See Here: Norman Ornstein and the magic of compound interest

I just ran across a post at Power Line Blog about Norman Ornstein's endorsement of giving government cash to babies.

Power Line's John Hinderaker wrote about the astonishingly errant math Ornstein used while endorsing the Kidsave program.  Here's how Ornstein describes it in his article at National Journal:

The first iteration of KidSave, in simple terms, was this: Each year, for every one of the 4 million newborns in America, the federal government would put $1,000 in a designated savings account. The payment would be financed by using 1 percent of annual payroll-tax revenues. Then, for the first five years of a child's life, the $500 child tax credit would be added to that account, with a subsidy for poor people who pay no income. The accounts would be administered the same way as the federal employees' Thrift Savings Plan, with three options—low-, medium-, and high-risk—using broad-based stock and bond funds. Under the initial KidSave proposal, the funds could not be withdrawn until age 65, when, through the miracle of compound interest, they would represent a hefty nest egg. At 5 percent annual growth, an individual would have almost $700,000.

Is it a typo?  The total should be closer to $70,000, as a host of people have pointed out.  If it's a typo, the National Journal continues to stand behind it through a lack of correction three (going on four) days after publication.

This is a job for PolitiFact!  Or this is a job for PunditFact!

Or is it?

"The Heart of PolitiFact"

We find it fundamentally dishonest the way PolitiFact treats its trademark "Truth-O-Meter" as though it's some sort of machine that objectively measures the truth content of political statements.

The opposite's true.

Have a look at PolitiFact's "About PolitiFact" page (bold emphasis added):

The heart of PolitiFact is the Truth-O-Meter, which we use to rate factual claims.

The Truth-O-Meter is based on the concept that – especially in politics - truth is not black and white.

PolitiFact writers and editors spend considerable time researching and deliberating on our rulings ...

We then decide which of our six rulings should apply.

There's no machinery, only the machinations of biased reporters and editors.  The "Truth-O-Meter" is just the vehicle for the label they put on their decision.  The eventual rulings are even worse than the "coin flip" described by John Kroll, mentioned in our previous post.  The "Truth-O-Meter" is akin to the "Wheel of Fortune," given the level of subjectivity inherent in the system.

The heart of PolitiFact?