Patterico's Pontifications: "Handicapping PolitiFact's 2011 Lie of the Year"

Karl, blogging at Patterico's Pontifications, published some comments about PolitiFact's upcoming "Lie of the Year" award.  Though Karl's post isn't exactly an evidence of PolitiFact's left-leaning bias, his opinion of PolitiFact is neatly phrased:

I think this year’s merely “False” claims have to be discounted.  Interestingly, of the five ”Pants On Fire” claims, three are by Democrats.  Only one of those is from Pres. Obama; the remaining two are from the DCCC and “Facebook posts.”  The DCCC claim that House Republicans voted to “end Medicare” ought to be Lie of the Year, as it had the most impact on the national discourse.  But PolitiFact is about helping the center-left, not hurting it, which leaves the two GOP “Pants On Fire” entries.

If Karl's prediction pans out then it does serve as another circumstantial evidence showing PolitiFact's liberal bias.

Karl was a bit more daring with his predictions than I was in a similarly titled post at Sublime Bloviations.  The main differences are that Karl picks a lone likely winner where I picked two, and I gave some space to considering the possibility that PolitiFact would choose a claim from the left in order to push back against the public perception that their operation is biased to the left.  Perhaps announcing the finalists helps inoculate PolitiFact on that count.  Simply having five statements from liberals to choose from among the finalists has liberals and progressives crying foul.


Jeff adds: I'll stick with the comments I left (both on Sublime Bloviations and on Karl's Patterico piece) that the award will go to Obama for his statement that he "didn't raise taxes once." Granting the Lie of the Year to a right-leaning statement a third year in a row might raise too many eyebrows when PolitiFact is already accused of a liberal bias. The statement itself isn't offensive to PolitiFact's liberal readers who already complain that Obama hasn't raised taxes enough. Picking this statement also serves the dual purpose of providing cover for their bias in the upcoming election cycle. One can imagine the arguments we'd hear for the next 11 months: "PolitiFact goes after both sides! They even picked Obama for the Lie of the Year!"

The final 10 statements they selected are also a bit curious. Whatever one may think of Bachmann's vaccine remark, or even Wasserman's Jim Crow claim, it's a stretch to consider them even in the running for comments that "played the biggest role in the national discourse." What kind of debate transpired in the PolitiFact editors meeting that granted a top ten spot to Jon Kyl's obscure and barely repeated abortion claim in the year of Anthony Weiner, Fast and Furious, and Solyndra?

WaPo Fact Checker: "Revisiting Romney’s ‘deceitful, dishonest’ ad about Obama"

Back in late October, PolitiFact was publicly wringing its hands over a story it published that was out of step with fact checks of the same material by Annenberg Fact Check and the Washington Post's "The Fact Checker" column by Glenn Kessler.

It's hand-wringing time again as Kessler writes about a Mitt Romney ad that PolitiFact found outrageous ("Pants on Fire") while Kessler and the Annenberg folks found the ad more middle-of-the-road misleading:

(T)here are three reasons why we have trouble being outraged.


 First, the ad makes clear that Obama is speaking in 2008.
(...)
 Second, Obama’s statement was actually a misleading quote itself.
(...)
 Finally, the Romney campaign made it very clear that it had truncated the quote.

Two out of three of Kessler's points appeared in our own analysis of Romney's claim in our review of the PolitiFact fact check.

Though Kessler doesn't mention our central point about the ad, that its point doesn't change significantly regardless of whether the context was included or not, Kessler does note PolitiFact's out-of-step fact check response:

(Fact Checkers can disagree: PolitiFact labeled it “Pants on Fire.” But Factcheck.org reached a conclusion similar to ours, saying the health-care line actually posed a “more serious problem.”)

Kessler treats PolitiFact very kindly.  The fact is that PolitiFact failed to make any mention of Kessler's three points.  In baseball terms, they whiffed on all three.

And Annenberg Fact Check?  The quotation issue was a sideshow so far as they were concerned:

What the Obama campaign chose to take issue with was how the then-candidate’s words were edited in a section where he is heard to say, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Obama was actually quoting his Republican opponent. The full quote is: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

Is that “deceitful and dishonest,” as Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt quickly claimed? Or “blatantly dishonest,” as the liberal group ThinkProgress described it? It is possible that a viewer might be misled into thinking that Obama said this about his own campaign in 2011, since the quote comes 23 seconds after a graphic cites Obama’s comments as being uttered in 2008. But we’ll leave that for our readers to determine.

PolitiFact is, uh, bolder than that.  That's why PolitiFact is closer to Media Matters than the other major fact check services.  They have the chutzpah to let their subjective judgments determine the position of the misnamed "Truth-O-Meter" and serve it up to their readers as though it is objective journalism.



Jeff adds: When I first read the original PolitiFact piece I was reminded of a rating they gave former congressman Alan Grayson (D-FL). Grayson ran an ad that referred to his opponent, Daniel Webster, as "Taliban Dan." In the ad, Grayson edited a video of Webster to distort Webster's words into the opposite of what he said. Check out PolitiFact's summary in that ruling (bold emphasis added):

The Grayson ad clearly suggests that Webster thinks wives should submit to their husbands, and the repeated refrain of "Submit to me," is an effort to scare off potential female voters. But the lines in the video are clearly taken out of context thanks to some heavy-handed editing. The actual point of Webster's 2009 speech was that husbands should love their wives.

We rate Grayson's claim False.

Now read PolitiFact's treatment of Romney's ad (emphasis added):

We certainly think it’s fair for Romney to attack Obama for his response to the economy. And the Romney camp can argue that Obama’s situation in 2011 is ironic considering the comments he made in 2008. But those points could have been made without distorting Obama’s words, which have been taken out of context in a ridiculously misleading way. We rate the Romney ad’s portrayal of Obama’s 2008 comments Pants on Fire.

As Bryan noted, including the context wouldn't have changed the point of Romney's ad. Yet in Grayson's ad he not only took Webster out of context, he distorted (removed) Webster's words in order to make it appear Webster said something contrary to what he actually said (to say nothing of associating his opponent with a terrorist group). What exactly is more ridiculous about Romney's editing than Grayson's? What standard is PolitiFact using to make these determinations?

Until PolitiFact comes up with a way to objectively quantify a statements ridiculousness the ratings will continue to be plagued by the editors' personal biases.

Edit 12/11/11 : Added link to the original WaPo article-Jeff

Anchor Rising: "Do They Even Read What They Write?"

"Anchor Rising" contributor Patrick Laverty gives us yet another anecdote illustrative of PolitiFact's bias, thanks to PolitiFact Rhode Island:

This one was just too easy. First Politifact accuses Terry Gorman of RIILE of issuing a "Mostly False" statement, and then they actually explain how their own ruling is wrong!

RIILE is Rhode Islanders for Immigration Law Enforcement, and the issue is the decision by the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education to provide in-state tuition rates to at least some illegal immigrants.

Laverty makes a condensed but essentially accurate case in finding PolitiFact "pants on fire" for its ruling on Gorman.  The federal law, Laverty points out, allows a state legislature to provide secondary education benefits so long as the method complies with the rest of the federal statute.  But the federal law does not make that same exception for the Rhode Island Board of Governors for Higher Education.

PolitiFact makes an effort to legitimize the Rhode Island policy by playing up a key court decision in California:

In their decision, the California judges concluded that the basis upon which California granted the in-state tuition exemption -- which includes having attended a California high school for at least three years and obtaining a high school diploma or GED from California -- constituted criteria other than residency. Therefore, the judges wrote, "it does not violate section 1623."

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on appeal.

The California court did not, however, rule on whether granting in-state tuition for undocumented students amounted to a "benefit" as defined in the federal law. That remains an open question.

There are two things of note in this portion of PolitiFact's analysis.

The first is the journalist offering a piece of legal analysis without directly sourcing it to an expert.  Journalists reporting in the objective style rarely set themselves forward as a definitive source of information.

Second, does it remain an open question?

On the face of it, the question doesn't seem so open.  The court's decision was the result of an appeal, and the lower court had ruled against the California law, finding it unconstitutional.  That court, it seems safe to say, operated on the premise that granting in-state tuition for undocumented students was a benefit under the applicable federal law.

It seems counterintuitive for the higher court to leave that issue unaddressed if it objected to that facet of the lower court's ruling.

One wonders why PolitiFact presented it as an open question, though it's clear enough in the context of the story that it serves as one of the keys to the unfavorable ruling Gorman received.

Pete Sepp: "I don't know who the experts you consulted are or whatever policy agendas they may have"

Pete Sepp, vice president for communications and policy for the National Taxpayers Union, usually interacts with PolitiFact as an expert source.  This month, however, the NTU ran an ad that received the PolitiFact treatment, and Sepp ended up as NTU's spokesperson in defending it.  The ad called the federal government's proposed rebate program for drug purchases a "tax."

Sepp did not publish a public rebuttal to PolitiFact.  Rather, we find his arguments hosted by PolitiFact's Texas affiliate.   PolitiFact combined the bodies of three email messages from Sepp on a single reference page.

Sepp's initial email (bold emphasis added):

Based on our experience, calling this rebate plan anything less than a tax fails to capture all of its effects:

1) With a few exceptions that the Secretary of HHS would be able to approve (an uncertain proposition), drug manufacturers would be required to rebate 23 percent of the average manufacturer price (more if the drug price rose quicker than inflation) for a brand-name pharmaceutical that was distributed to lower-income Part D beneficiaries. Otherwise, the company could not participate in providing drugs to Medicaid, Medicare, or other government beneficiaries. Considering there are already genuine rebates (i.e., negotiated discounts) under several such programs, this latest demand from the government for being able to sell to a huge segment of the entire consumer drug market in the U.S. seems more like a mandatory extraction than a voluntary refund.

2) The money collected from these "rebates" don't wind up in the actual consumers' pockets or the various Part D plans; instead they go to a fund that will defray certain government Medicare program costs. A "rebate" as is commonly understood is something that the consumer of product receives after purchase. This "rebate" is nothing of the kind, and represents deceptive terminology.

3) The "rebate" is based on a percentage of price per unit, a lot like the way some excise taxes on products such as some tobacco items work.

4) This "rebate" will in essence squeeze the price bubble somewhere else. Either other Part D beneficiaries get stuck with higher premiums, people in private, non-Medicare plans pay higher prices for their drugs, or drug development and access gets scaled back, or even voluntary discounts start to dry up.

For a good summary of how this could happen, as well as some previous CBO work on this topic. I'd suggest the following link at American Action Forum, which former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin serves at:

http://americanactionforum.org/topic/cost-shifting-debt-reduction-american-seniors

Sepp from his first followup:

I didn't see a feature yet on your site so I thought I'd send you a couple other good links to commentaries that discuss the rebate scheme: 

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/obama-plan-force-rebates-medicare-drug-benefit-drive-costs-thousands-seniors-article-1.976435#ixzz1dhbBGZwe 

http://www.galen.org/component,8/action,show_content/id,13/blog_id,1608/category_id,7/type,33/ 

Yes, there are several groups like ours (AEI, Galen Institute, American Action Forum) who share concern that this proposal amounts to a tax.

And from Sepp's second followup, registering his apparent incredulity at PolitiFact's ruling:

1) "There's nothing in the proposal that calls this a tax and experts we visited say rebates like the one in Medicaid never have been called taxes." I don't know who the experts you consulted are or whatever policy agendas they may have, but here are people in the health policy field who agree with the ad's contention that the rebate proposal is best described as a tax.

Sepp gave four examples then moved to his second point:

2) In another email you had asked, "There's nothing in the proposal that calls this a tax." My answer: well, of course not! Supporters call this a rebate so they can raise revenues for the federal government without branding their scheme a tax and having to answer a lot of inconvenient questions about it. Just because they don't want to call it a tax doesn't mean it won't function like one (see above). That's exactly the point of our ad, and our mission for the past 42 years -- exposing attempts by the political class to cover up a proposal that walks, talks, and hurts like a tax by calling it something else.

Contrast Sepp's argument with PolitiFact's conclusion:

We see how the Obama proposal could be judged a nearly mandatory give-back in that drug companies that decline to give rebates would do so at risk to their bottom lines. It also makes sense that drug companies wouldn’t swallow the costs of the rebates; they’re not free.

Then again, contrary to the ad's statement, there’s no evidence low-income Medicare beneficiaries would pay a 23 percent "tax." And all told, Obama's urged rebate remains that--money paid in return for a purchase or action/opportunity. One would have to connect more dots to make it a tax. We rate the group’s statement False.

What dots require connecting, other than having the term "tax" appear in the text of the bill to describe the rebate?  Good luck finding it in the story.  I couldn't.  It's hard to know when one has met a secret standard, and other than the absurd standard of requiring the bill to describe the rebate as a "tax" it's hard to see what would serve.

One additional brickbat for PolitiFact:  Where is the full context of the ad?  If there's some reason for not giving readers a copy of the ad to look at then the readers deserve to know what it is.

Bewz Newz 'n' Vewz: "Total Clusterfact: Sorting out Solyndra"

PFB associate Jeff Dyberg has posted a magum opus questioning how PolitiFact Florida could reach its finding of "Mostly False" that President Obama's administration extended half a billion in loans to its friends at Solyndra.

No, really:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

A snippet of Jeff's take from his blog Bewz Newz 'n' Vewz:

PolitiFact reviews an Americans for Prosperity ad and helpfully specifies what they're going to sort out the truth of:

We decided to fact-check the ad, focusing on whether the president gave "half a billion in taxpayer money to help his friends at Solyndra, a business the White House knew was on the path to bankruptcy." 

They can't screw this one up, can they? Multiple media reports have shown beyond dispute that Obama donors are closely tied to Solyndra, and also that the White House was aware of Solyndra's problems prior to the loan. So just how bad did PolitiFact flub this rating?

Jeff provides plenty of evidence showing the PolitiFact bloodhounds all over the trail without picking up the scent.   Apparently, it's plenty of correlation without any hint of causation.

It's recommended reading.

Hope 'n' change at PolitiFact

Crossposted from Sublime Bloviations


 I keep hoping that criticism will influence positive change at PolitiFact, the fact checking arm of the St. Petersburg Times (soon changing its name to the Tampa Bay Times).

Well, a positive change occurred at PolitiFact recently.

Unfortunately, it was of the "one step forward, two steps back" variety.

For some time I've carped about PolitiFact's inconsistent standards, and in particular its publishing of two different standards for its "Half True" position on the "Truth-O-Meter."

The recent change probably stemmed from a message I sent to an editor at the paper's city desk (sent Nov. 9):

PolitiFact has created a problem for itself through inconsistency.  During the site's earlier years a page called "About PolitiFact" gave information about how the "Flip-O-Meter" and the "Truth-O-Meter" supposedly operate.  The page includes a description of each of the "Truth-O-Meter" rating categories.

More recently, editor Bill Adair posted an item called "Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter."  The problem?  The definition for "Half True" is different than the one PolitiFact posted for well over a year prior.  Compounding the problem, PolitiFact has kept both versions online through now.

1)  The statement is accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.
2)  The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

I'll be interested to see the eventual remedy.  Which items over PolitiFact's history went by which definition? Was a change made in Feb. 2011 or before without any announcement?  How can PolitiFact legitimately offer report cards and "Truth Index" ratings if the grading system isn't consistent?  Those are questions I'd imagine readers would have if they realized PolitiFact is using two different definitions for the same rating.  I don't expect you to answer them for my sake (not that I would mind if you did). 

Good luck to all sorting this one out.

The eventual remedy is apparently to simply change the longstanding definition at "About PolitiFact" to match the newer one at "Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter" without any fanfare--indeed, without any apparent notice whatsoever.  I detect no admission of error at all and no acknowledgment that PolitiFact changed its standard.

The move seems consistent with the desire of the mainstream press to avoid doing things that "undermine the ability of readers, viewers or listeners to believe what they print or broadcast."

Sadly, I'm not at all surprised.

On the positive side, the definitions are now consistent with one another.

On the negative side, PolitiFact either created a past illusion where Truth-O-Meter ratings used the old system or else created a fresh illusion that past ratings follow the new system.  And went about it in about the least transparent way possible.


Update:

Good luck to PolitiFact retroactively changing the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of places on the Web that republished the original definition of "Half True."

(Clipped from PolitiFact.com; click image for enlarged view)

Contact PolitiFact Wisconsin.  They didn't get the memo yet.  And PolitiFact Texas has the same problem.


It's not the crime, it's the coverup.


Update 2:


It's also worth remembering PolitiFact's agonizing decision to change "Barely True" to "Mostly False."

"It is a change we don't make lightly," wrote Bill Adair.

How do you like that?  A change in the wording of a rating gets a reader survey prior to the change and an article announcing the change.  A change in the definition of a rating--a much more substantial change--gets the swept-under-the-rug treatment.



11/22/11-Added PFB link in update 2-Jeff

Media Trackers' PolitiFact series

Recently the media watchdogs Media Trackers published a five part series on PolitiFact.

Intro: Media Trackers Announces Series on PolitiFact
Part 1: PolitiFact and the Political Parties
Part 2: PolitiFact and Third-Party Organizations
Part 3: PolitiFact and Talk Radio
Part 4: PolitiFact and Governor Scott Walker
Part 5: Conclusion on PolitiFact 

We were unimpressed with the start of the series, but by the conclusion Media Trackers reached solid ground.


Part 1

Concern over the direction of the series started early:

On the whole, PolitiFact can’t be called completely biased towards conservatives or liberals. By Media Trackers count, PolitiFact has devoted nearly equal ink to conservative/Republican statements as to liberal/Democrat.

Comparing the number of stories devoted to each party tells nothing of ideological slant.  PolitiFact, if it was so inclined, could set a quota of 50 Republican stories and 50 Democrat stories and then proceed to write every single one of them with a liberal bias.

The remainder of Part 1 built a comparison between PolitiFact Wisconsin's treatment of state Republican Party statements with those of its Democratic Party counterpart.  The number of statements involved was very small (11 combined), but suggested that PolitiFact's editorial focus fixed more on the Democratic Party and doled out harsher ratings.

Part 2

The second installment focused on the treatment of what Media Trackers calls "third party" organizations.  That is, political action groups not directly associated with the political parties.

Media Trackers noted a trend opposite that from part one, albeit the two mini-studies share the problem of small sample size.  The conclusion of the second part found Media Trackers on top of a live spoor:

(D)oes PolitiFact lead readers to believe that conservative third-party organizations are less likely to tell the truth? How come the organization that spent the most on negative advertising in the recall elections had just one statement reviewed? Why more scrutiny to Pro-Life groups than Pro-Choice? Why were One Wisconsin Now’s statements reviewed four times more than the MacIver Institute? And what about statements on critical stories such as the denial by Citizen Action of Wisconsin of a connection to Wisconsin Jobs Now!? Why did PolitiFact choose not to tackle that statement?

No one expects PolitiFact to be the “be all end all” of watchdog journalism. But when they set themselves up as the judge and jury for all political statements in the state, one has to question how they select stories and why certain groups receive far and away more scrutiny than others.

In other words, the selection bias problem at PolitiFact is pretty obvious.

Part 3

Part three looked at PolitiFact Wisconsin's treatment of local radio personalities and established Media Trackers' modern day record for small sample size.  Conservative Charlie Sykes received two ratings while fellow conservative Mark Belling received one.  All three ratings were of the "Pants on Fire" variety.  Again, it smells like selection bias.

Part 4

The fourth installment examined PolitiFact's treatment of Republican governor Scott Walker.

Media Trackers forgave PolitiFact for rating a high number of Walker's statements because of his position of power.  Time will reveal the reliability of that measure.

The Media Trackers analysis noted that PolitiFact appeared to go a bit hard on Walker:

It seems that PolitiFact’s burden for truth is a bit higher for Governor Walker than it is for others. Given the “lightening rod” status of Walker, it certainly seems a bit disingenuous to call the Governor’s claim that Wisconsin is “broke” a false claim because he could just layoff workers and raise taxes to fix the deficit. And to say that Walker did not campaign on the reforms found in the Budget Repair Bill is also disingenuous given that the Governor spoke on a number of the reforms he sought, even though he did not spell out the eventual changes to collective bargaining.

The anecdotes can add up.

Part 5

Media Trackers seized on the common thread in its conclusion:

As Media Trackers has shown with this series, PolitiFact arbitrarily applies its scrutiny. Statements from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin have been evaluated seven times to the Republican’s two. Conservative Club For Growth have been examined seven times (three during the recall elections) while We Are Wisconsin was examined just once. Pro-Life groups have been scrutinized twice and never a Pro-Choice group.

Each of these political groups and officials are putting out an equal number of statements on a myriad of issues every day. If PolitiFact intends to claim the mantle of watchdog journalism by “calling balls and strikes” in the name of “public service,” PolitiFact needs more transparency about how they select their stories and a review of why certain groups and individuals receive more scrutiny than others.

Sample sizes aside, Media Trackers settles on a conclusion well supported by a huge mass of anecdotal material collected by others.  The final installment also refers to Eric Ostermeier's study pointing out PolitiFact's selection bias problem (highlighted at PolitiFact Bias here).

Though the Media Trackers conclusion about PolitiFact isn't exactly groundbreaking, the outfit deserves credit for overcoming its initial stumble and doing an independent examination of its local version of PolitiFact with the conclusion supported on those data.



Jeff adds: It's worth mentioning that PolitiFact Wisconsin is by far the most frequent target of accusations of right-wing bias. We've never found anything that sufficiently corroborates those claims and Media Trackers seems to do a capable job of dispelling that myth.

Sublime Bloviations: "Grading PolitiFact: Alan Hays, proof of citizenship and voting"

Could the cure for world hunger be as simple as picking the low hanging fruit from PolitiFact? Sometimes it seems that way.

PFB editor Bryan White was quick to spot the latest gaffe from our facticious friends. Check out PolitiFact Florida's rating of state Senator Alan Hays (R-Umatilla):

Image from PolitiFact.com

Now check out what Hays actually said:

"...I'm not aware of any proof of citizenship necessary before you register to vote."

Bryan notes:

If words matter then we should expect PolitiFact to note the difference between saying one does not know of a requirement and saying that no requirement exists.

If PolitiFact was just your average bucket of hackery, there wouldn't be much more to say other than they distorted Hays' quote. But our site wasn't created because PolitiFact is average. They take distortion to new heights.

Bryan goes on to expose the flim-flammery of how they eventually found Hays Mostly False for something he didn't say (which seems to be a common theme for them). It's impressive to witness the amount of work it takes to get something so wrong.

And for those of you keeping track, it includes yet another example of PolitiFact citing non-partisan, objective Democrats as experts.

So make sure to head over to Sublime Bloviations, because this one is a must read.


Bryan adds:  Not only did PolitiFact rate Hays on a statement he did not make, the rating of what he didn't say is also wrong.  PolitiFact continues to amaze.