Guest post: PolitiFact and the Washington Redskins

At debatepolitics.com we ran across a criticism of PolitiFact by Grim17.  We obtained permission from JLG, the author, to reproduce the post here (edited for style).

Also see our afterword.

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Politifact recently decided to evaluate and rule on the following story/claim:

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office "received zero complaints" about the Washington Redskins name.

It is the one and only story that PolitiFact has fact checked that evaluates the validity of the "zero complaints" claim and just so there are no misunderstandings, let me make some things clear:

1. Evaluating that claim is legitimate and completely valid.
2. This issue is a political one and their ruling has political implications for those on both sides of the Redskins issue.
3. This review also has the potential to negatively affect the credibility of certain conservative media organizations.

PolitiFact ruled that the claim was "False", but I have concluded that their evaluation displays a clear liberal bias on their part, and does so in several different ways.


Perception

Here is the headline from PolitiFact's front page:

As you see they rate the "received zero complaints" claim as false, and use their subheading to further substantiate that rating by saying "Except for the complaint that started this case" (take note of the subheading, as it will come into play in the future).

People arriving at the PolitiFact website who haven't yet read the actual article, or who choose not to read it, are sent a very clear, cut-and-dry message through that headline. It tells them that both the story and the claim are false and the patent office did in fact receive public complaints about the Redskins name, prior to making their ruling.


Political implications

That headline and subsequent ruling bode well for those on the political left who believe the name is offensive and should be changed, and harms the reputation and credibility of the Washington Times, since they are the ones who broke the story. It also harms the reputation and credibility of the media outlets and conservative pundits who chose to run with the story.


Methodology - Sources used to evaluate the claim

The original story which made headlines on July 1st was titled "Patent office didn’t receive a single public complaint before stripping Redskins trademark" and was published by the conservative-leaning newspaper the Washington Times. You would think that if PolitiFact wanted to fact check the story and the "zero complaints" claim, they would use the original article that was written by the Washington Times to do so... but that isn't what they did.

PolitiFact decided they would fact check the claim by evaluating the opinions written about the story on the Internet by various conservative bloggers, rather than using the actual article written by the newspaper that broke the story in the first place. The reason they chose to evaluate the claim in this way will become clear shortly. 

PolitiFact's ruling and the flaws behind it:

Conservative blog posts smell a scandal in the cancellation of the Washington Redskins trademark, pointing out that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office "received zero complaints" about it before an administrative law court ruled in June.

The case was opened because someone complained -- so that assertion is wrong on its face. But even that aside, the post is misleading in suggesting that public comments are part of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office process when they are not.

When people have a problem with patents and trademarks and want them removed, they file formal complaints, prove their standing in the case, pay a fee, and provide evidence to support their case.In other words, they do exactly what the five plaintiffs in this case did here.

We rate the claim False.

So PolitiFact rules the claim that the patent office "received zero complaints" as "False" based on two reasons. That the five Native Americans who filed the legal challenge qualify as a "complaint" and because they claim an opinion posted on the Conservative Tribune blog misled readers by suggesting that public comments are part of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office process.

The first reason is flawed because it's public knowledge that five Native Americans filed a formal complaint challenging the renewal of the trademark, which led to the USPTO review in the first place. Plus the blog even linked to the original story, making that perfectly clear. So it's obvious that both the blog and the Washington Times were saying "zero complaints other than the formal complaint that started all of this" because they assumed their readers were fully knowledgeable of the controversy, including the USPTO ruling and the factors that led to it.  This is a case of PolitiFact choosing to omit logic and common sense.

The second reason isn't flawed, it's just flat out incorrect, as well as being totally irrelevant to the validity of the quote. Nowhere in the post made by the Conservative Tribune blog, in the post they quoted from the Weasel Zippers blog, or in the original story from the Washington Times, was it ever implied in any way that "public comments are part of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office process". That is a completely false claim by PolitiFact.  But even if bought into their assertion, it would still have nothing to do with whether the "zero complaints" claim was true or not. Their headline and subheading on their front page simply says that the claim that the patent office "received zero complaints" about the Washington Redskins name, is false, and any implications based on that claim are totally irrelevant.


Conclusions:

1. PolitiFact rating that story/claim as "false", is itself false. One of their two conclusion requires a parsing of words that defies logic, is devoid of common sense and ignores the content of the original story, while the other conclusion is a falsehood that is not supported by any of the 3 sources they used to render their ruling.

2. Claiming that "The case was opened because someone complained -- so that assertion is wrong on its face" would not have been possible if they evaluated the original story, because it explained how the five Native Americans were responsible for the trademark being reviewed. It would have made their conclusion an absolute joke. Evaluating the claim through an opinion on a conservative blog however, allowed them to use a technicality to parse words and make that claim, because the blog never mentioned the 5 Native Americans... they only linked to the original story that did mention them.

3. It's obvious that PolitiFact was aware that saying "The case was opened because someone complained -- so that assertion is wrong on its face" was extremely weak, which is why they tried to strengthen it by falsely claiming that the blog article was misleading, when it wasn't.

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After reading the PolitiFact article and the 3 stories they used to make their ruling, it's obvious that their ruling was bogus. They took a story that looked bad for the political left that should have been ruled "Mostly true" or "True", and deemed it "False". On their front page, they falsely led their readers into believing that people had in fact complained about the Redskins name, and that the entire story that Washington Times published was a lie, bringing into question the credibility of other conservative media outlets, conservative bloggers and conservative pundits who ran with the story. The "liberal biased" icing on the cake is the fact that PolitiFact chose to evaluate the story through the opinions published by conservative bloggers, rather than just evaluating the original story itself, because that was the only way they could avoid having to rule that the claim and the story were in fact true.

Liberal bias CONFIRMED
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(end of post by JLG)

Afterword

Another member of the debate.politics community, "Hatuey," challenged Grim17's post, noting that complaints were lodged against the name "Redskins" at a public hearing held by the USPTO.  While that information does have bearing on whether the "zero complaints" claim is literally true, it has no bearing on the quality of PolitiFact's fact check.  PolitiFact does not list the public hearing on its source list, therefore Grim17's central criticism of PolitiFact's method stands. 


Edit 7-20-2014: Added link to PolitiFact/Redskins article to the word "False."- Jeff

Nothing To See Here: David Alameel edition (updated)

We picked up on a rating of a Texas Democrat, David Alameel, that looked a tad harsh at first blush.  PolitiFact Texas rated Alameel "False" for saying he had once lived in "La Colonia" since that claim produced the impression he lived in a colonia--a subdivision often lacking electricity or plumbing.  Alameel's "La Colonia" wasn't nearly that bad.  It just happened to share the name.

We figured where one correctly names a place he used to dwell, there's got to be some truth to it.  PolitiFact Texas didn't see it that way for some reason.

Hold the Presses

We were nearly ready to start on a short article recounting how PolitiFact had unfairly treated Alameel when we reviewed, for context, the speech Alameel was delivering when he uttered the statement PolitiFact examined.

We had to change the main focus of the story to "Nothing to See Here."  Alameel's speech is stuffed full of preposterous partisan claims.  Why did PolitiFact focus on the colonia issue when Alameel offered such a smorgasbord of superior fact-check opportunities?

There's nothing to do but simply recount some of the things Alameel claimed (chronological order, many of them consecutive).

Congressional pay raise update

Thanks to PolitiFact Georgia, we have another piece of evidence that PolitiFact prefers Democrats.

Partisan.

We pointed out in October 2012 that PolitiFact found it true that Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) had raised his own pay a number of times while in Congress.  In contrast, PolitiFact Ohio found it false that Rep. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) had raised his own pay a number of times while in Congress.  Their circumstances were similar.  The rulings contradict each other.

PolitiFact Georgia sees things mostly PolitiFact Ohio's way.  It's "Mostly False" that Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) raised his own pay.  Hey!  A Republican got the benefit of the doubt this time!  But it's not that simple.  Blame for the "Mostly False" claim goes to Kingston's Republican primary challenger, David Perdue.

So, on essentially the same claim, PolitiFact has put a "False" and a "Mostly False" on Republican report cards, and a "True" on the report card for the Florida Democratic Party (the latter claim was a compound claim where both halves were found true).

If Kingston wins the primary, it will be interesting to see if any Democrats pick up this line of attack.  First, will PolitiFact Georgia notice?  Second, what rating will result?

Nothing To See Here: Harry Reid and the five white justices

We have a great "Nothing To See Here" item from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  Reid blamed the Supreme Court's majority decision on the Hobby Lobby case on five white men.

Here's the Mediaite version:

Yesterday, Senator Harry Reid spoke out against the Hobby Lobby Supreme Court ruling and ruled against the “five white men” on the Supreme Court who ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby last week.

There's video available at Mediaite.

PolitiFact, of course, needs to consider whether it is fact or opinion that Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Alito and Thomas are white.  If it's just Reid's opinion then there's no fact to check.

Some might argue, of course, that Clarence Thomas is objectively black.  And Scalia and Alito are objectively Hispanic.  But at least it's apparent that all are men.  As a result, we can predict that if PolitiFact grades this claim Reid will receive a "Half True" rating or better.  "Mostly True" isn't out of the question, either, since Reid nailed it on the number of men forming the majority opinion:  five. 

Perhaps we shouldn't even rule out a "True" rating.

'The Tampa Bay Times endorsed Mitt Romney' (Updated)

This week a person argued on PolitiFact's Facebook page to the effect that PolitiFact isn't biased since the Tampa Bay Times endorsed Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election.

Of course the person had confused the Tampa Bay Times, which owns and runs PolitiFact, with the more conservative Tampa Tribune.  The Times endorsed Obama in 2012, just as it has endorsed Democratic candidates going back at least to 1948.

We don't think the editorial stance of the Times serves as a particularly good evidence of PolitiFact's liberal bias.  But it's worth burying once and for all the notion that the conservative editorial stance at the Times shows a lack of liberal bias at PolitiFact.

Without further ado, the documented evidence of the Times' support for Democratic presidential candidates going back to Truman:

The Tampa Bay Times (St. Petersburg Times) always endorses Democrats for president

2012:  Obama

Obama for president

2008:  Obama

The Times recommends: Obama for President

The Times doesn't make it easy to research its endorsements, so we have to rely on some secondary sources to round out our list.  Google's News Archive made the process perhaps easier than it's ever been.

PolitiFact's compound problem

Why PolitiFact's rating of Steve Doocy was unfair

After criticizing PunditFact's failure to own up to its mistakes in post this Wednesday past, we promised an example of how PolitiFact applies its rule for compound claims inconsistently.

What is a compound claim?

 

A compound claim is a claim that asserts more than one truth.  For example:

• The car is a red Chrysler

The statement makes two assertions of truth:  The car is red, and the car is a Chrysler.

In its statement of principles, PolitiFact says it divides compound claims into segments, grades the segments separately, then rates the overall accuracy:

We sometimes rate compound statements that contain two or more factual assertions. In these cases, we rate the overall accuracy after looking at the individual pieces.

As is normal with PolitiFact, these principles are more like guidelines.  We'll look at the Doocy rating and compare it to another recent PolitiFact rating, this one looking at a statement from liberal columnist Sally Kohn.

Doocy:
"NASA scientists fudged the numbers to make 1998 the hottest year to overstate the extent of global warming."

PolitiFact rated Doocy's claim "Pants on Fire."

Kohn:
"Hobby Lobby provided this (birth control) coverage before they decided to drop it to file suit."

No, wait.  The above quotation is the one PolitiFact said it was checking.  But the actual sentence went on a bit longer (bold emphasis added):

"Hobby Lobby provided this (birth control) coverage before they decided to drop it to file suit, which was politically motivated."

PolitiFact rated Kohn's claim "Mostly True."

With the amputated ending restored, it's easy to see the parallel between the two claims.  Both Doocy and Kohn make assertions of fact, followed by judgments of motivation.  Doocy's claim arguably reports the results of the numbers-fudging rather than asserting that the scientist were motivated to achieve a particular end, but that point isn't necessary to show PolitiFact's inconsistency.

Given the similarity between the two claims, why did PolitiFact treat Doocy's compound claim as a unitary claim and Kohn's as a two-part compound claim?

Slanted.

We suggest a two-part theory.  Treating Doocy's statement as a compound claim might result in a "Mostly False" or better rating for a claim skeptical of human-caused climate change.  Liberals wouldn't like that.  Treating Kohn's claim as a unitary claim, or even dealing with her evidence-free claim of a political motivation for the Hobby Lobby lawsuit, harms the narrative liberals prefer on that topic.

In short, PolitiFact acted inconsistently because of political bias.  That's the theory.  If anybody has a better one, feel free to leave a comment.

The failure to consistently apply its principles provides avenues for the biases of PolitiFact's staffers to suffuse its fact checks.  This is just one example among many.


Additional note on the Kohn fact check

I can't figure out why PolitiFact fact checked Kohn if it wasn't intended to implicitly support her charge that the Hobby Lobby suit was not based on a sincere religious objection.  PolitiFact said "We can’t determine if politics motivated the company."  Without that charge, who cares if Hobby Lobby covered morning-after pills before it decided to bring a suit against the administration?  Despite its disclaimer, PolitiFact goes out of its way to make a circumstantial case supporting Kohn's charge:

The Greens re-examined the company’s health insurance policy back in 2012, shortly before filing the lawsuit. A Wall Street Journal story says they looked into their plan after being approached by an attorney from the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty about possible legal action over the federal government’s contraceptives requirement.

That was when, according to the company’s complaint, they were surprised to learn their prescription drug policy included two drugs, Plan B and ella, which are emergency contraceptive pills that reduce the chance of pregnancy in the days after unprotected sex. The government does not consider morning-after pills as abortifacients because they are used to prevent eggs from being fertilized (not to induce abortions once a woman is pregnant). This is not, however, what the Green family believes, which is that life begins at conception and these drugs impede the survival of fertilized eggs.

We can't determine PolitiFact's motivation for doing this fact check, but ... you get the picture.

Additional additional note:

Somehow, PolitiFact neglected to include the following information from its implicit concurrence with Kohn's attack on the Hobby Lobby's owners, the Green family:

54.  Hobby Lobby's insurance policies have long explicitly excluded--consistent with their religious beliefs--contraceptive devices that might cause abortions and pregnancy-termination drugs like RU-486.

This is from a court document PolitiFact cited in its fact check of Kohn.  PolitiFact used the next item from the document, No. 55, out-of-context against Hobby Lobby.  That was Hobby Lobby's admission that it unwittingly covered two morning-after drugs that may cause abortion.  No. 54 just wouldn't have fit Kohn's narrative, would it?

Jeff Adds: (7-5-2014) It's worth noting that both the Doocy and Kohn ratings were edited by Aaron Sharockman, so the inconsistency cannot be explained by the different journalistic styles of two people.


Update 7/8/2014:

Here's another recent case of the same compound problem, this time featuring Hillary Clinton (bold emphasis added):

"It’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception," Clinton said.

No worries, Mrs. Clinton.  PolitiFact will just focus on the first part of the claim.  It's not really a fact checker's job to point out that Clinton's claim conflicts with Hobby Lobby's willingness to cover 16 kinds of contraception, right?  Nor should we consider Hobby Lobby's religious objection to paying for certain types of contraception.


Edit 7/5/2014: Added links to PolitiFact's Doocy and Kohn ratings - Jeff
Edit 7/5/2014:  Corrected some misspellings, including Mr. Doocy's name.

PolitiFact's Subjective-O-Meter

PolitiFact Florida provides us with yet another sterling example of subjective "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.  PolitiFact "uses" the "Truth-O-Meter" to find the truth in politics.  Translated, that means PolitiFact does its version of fact checking and then picks one of the available "Truth-O-Meter" ratings, ranging from "Pants on Fire" to "True."

PolitiFact Florida gave DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz a "Mostly True" rating for her June 30 claim that nearly 60 percent of women who use birth control use it for purposes other than contraception.  That's supposed to remind us of the awful effect on women from the Supreme Court's Hobby Lobby decision.

Wasserman Schultz's claim is false, as I show with an item at Zebra Fact Check.  But there's another aspect to this case that serves especially well to show the subjectivity of PolitiFact's trademarked "Truth-O-Meter."

PolitiFact rated "Half True" a very similar claim from Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).  We took note of that rating with an item of our own here at PolitiFact Bias.  And PolitiFact Florida noted the Boxer rating as well when it fact checked Wasserman Schultz:

Previously, we fact-checked a similar claim based on the same report. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., said on MSNBC in March that "it’s important to note that women take birth control, more than half of them, as a medication for other conditions, so it is an attack on women."

We rated that claim Half True because it required additional clarification about the type of birth control and the survey results. Wasserman Schultz's statement was somewhat more carefully worded.

In what way was Wasserman Schultz's claim more carefully worded?  PolitiFact Florida doesn't say.  But it's true that PolitiFact rated Boxer "Half True" owing to the need for clarification about the type of birth control and the survey results:

Boxer said more than half of women use birth control  "as a medication for other conditions." She was referring specifically to the pill. Guttmacher says 58 percent of women on the pill take it for noncontraceptive reasons. But that number drops to 14 percent if you look at women who take the pill only for noncontraceptive reasons.

Her claim is based in fact, but requires additional clarification about the type of birth control and the survey results. We rate it Half True.

Both of these fact checks by PolitiFact are ridiculously generous, but let's focus on the differences between the Boxer rating and the one for Wasserman Schultz.  The fact is, there's not much of a difference:

Wasserman Schultz said that "nearly 60 percent of women who use birth control do so for more than just family planning."

This claim gets support from a Guttmacher Institute report that found 58 percent of pill users citing at least one non-contraceptive reason. However, Wasserman Schultz’s comment glosses over two important caveats.

Both Boxer and Wasserman Schultz said "birth control" while referring to data on birth control pills.  That accounts for PolitiFact's "clarification about the type of birth control."

Subjective.

The clarification about "survey results" from the Boxer fact check appears to match the second caveat in the Wasserman Schultz fact check.  Both fact checks point out the number of women in the survey who used the pill only for non-contraceptive purposes.

The stated reasons for the ratings are effectively identical, yet the ratings are different.

So let's return to the lone difference PolitiFact identifies, however unclearly: "Wasserman Schultz's statement was somewhat more carefully worded."

We can identify one respect in which Wasserman Schultz was more accurate than Boxer.  Boxer's wording strongly suggested women were using birth control pills for clinical non-contraceptive reasons.  Wasserman Schultz did the same thing, but with greater subtlety.   It's not much of a difference when it comes to justifying a "Mostly True" rating as opposed to a "Half True" rating, especially when the statement is obviously literally false.

It's another case that helps confirm that the "Truth-O-Meter" is subjective.

The Doocy-Goddard update

On June 30 we posted about a PunditFact fact check that drew a response from Steven Goddard, the pseudonymous climate science blogger who runs "Real Science."  Goddard pointed out a number of problems with PunditFact's fact check.  We considered it unlikely PunditFact would revisit the issue.

We were only half right.

PunditFact did not change its original article, as we expected.  Instead, it added an article ("After the Fact") underneath the original article under the title "The man behind the science Fox quoted responds."  The article links to Goddard's response but does not quote from it at all.  Goddard lambasted the original fact check pretty thoroughly, but PunditFact just teased out one of the criticisms via paraphrase:

He noted that one of the experts we quoted in our initial piece has since revised his views of Heller’s research.

It's true Goddard (Heller) pointed out statement of reversal from Anthony Watt, the expert in question.  But that was the least of Goddard's criticisms.  It was the least of Goddard's criticisms because PunditFact quoted Watt on a different subject than the one it was fact checking.  Yet PunditFact gives its "After the Fact" update without addressing or even explicitly acknowledging Goddard's other criticisms.  There's no admission that PunditFact conflated two different issues in its fact check.

PolitiFact's response represents a pretense that there was nothing wrong with its original article.

Goddard made his central point the fact that the raw temperature data make the 1930s the hottest decade.  Fox's Steve Doocy turned that fact into a compound claim, attaching the adjustments to the data into a willful deception.  In terms of logic, there's some foundation for rating Doocy's entire compound statement as one claim--but that's not the usual practice we see from PolitiFact/PunditFact.  As PolitiFact says in its statement of principles:

Statements can be right and wrong – We sometimes rate compound statements that contain two or more factual assertions. In these cases, we rate the overall accuracy after looking at the individual pieces.

Or not. It depends on what PolitiFact feels like doing on any given day.

Consistent with PunditFact's principles, Doocy is more correct than not that the raw data need an adjustment to make 1998 hotter than peak temperatures from the 1930s.  And after that PunditFact might have considered what it would take to fact check whether the adjustments were done to intentionally overstate global warming.

PunditFact's response to Goddard lacks the needed correction. Nor does it do much to clarify the misleading aspects of the original fact check.


Addendum:

We've run across another PolitiFact story that helps illustrate how PolitiFact treated Doocy's claim unfairly compared to the alternative practice PolitiFact applies for compound statements.  Look for a story on that later this week. That post can be found here.


Edit 7/5/2014: Added links to PFB posts in first and last sentences and one link to original PolitiFact article- Jeff