PolitiFact unpublishes 2020 fact check on coronavirus origin

Hat tip to NY Post editor Sohrab Ahmari,whose tweet alerted us to this story.

Though unpublishing stories counts as a bit of a taboo in journalism, PolitiFact appears to prefer the practice when it comes to minimizing some of its most sensational blunders.

The latest? In a Sept. 16, 2020 fact check, PolitiFact declared it a "Pants on Fire" conspiracy theory that the coronavirus might have resulted from humans tampering with it in the lab.

No, we're not making this up:

PolitiFact, placing full confidence in experts it cited, declared that human tampering could not account for the genetic code of the coronavirus (bold emphasis added):

The genetic structure of the novel coronavirus, which has been shared by thousands of scientists worldwide, rules out the possibility that it was manipulated in a lab. Public health authorities have repeatedly said the virus was not created in a lab. Scientists believe the coronavirus originated in bats before jumping to humans. Experts have publicly rebuked Yan’s paper, and it’s unclear whether it was peer reviewed.

The claim is inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!

Though PolitiFact repented of its fact check to the point of unpublishing it, the IFCN-verified fact checkers admitted no error and have not run a correction, clarification or update to appear on its comprehensive (cough) list of corrections and updates.

Here's the editor's note that greets web surfers when they succeed in stumbling across the archived fact check:

Editor’s note, May 17, 2021: When this fact-check was first published in September 2020, PolitiFact’s sources included researchers who asserted the SARS-CoV-2 virus could not have been manipulated. That assertion is now more widely disputed. For that reason, we are removing this fact-check from our database pending a more thorough review. Currently, we consider the claim to be unsupported by evidence and in dispute. The original fact-check in its entirety is preserved below for transparency and archival purposes. Read our May 2021 report for more on the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19.

The fact check occurred as part of PolitiFact's partnership with Facebook. That means Facebook likely used the fact check to help justify sanctioning (censoring) Facebook accounts that suggested the Wuhan coronavirus originated in a lab.

These are the wrong people (using the wrong methods) to trust with the power of censorship.

On the positive side, PolitiFact redirected the old URL to the (temporarily?) archived version of its fact check. That's better than receiving a 404 error, as has happened in the past with PolitiFact's unpublishing.

Kevin McCarthy out of context

PolitiFact: The supposedly unbiased fact checker that takes statements from politicians out of context all the time, but punishes politicians for taking statements out of context.

If it sounds hypocritical that's because it is.

PolitiFact put its out-of-context crosshairs on Republican congressman Kevin McCarthy on May 14, 2021. Supposedly McCarthy said no one questions Joe Biden's election as president.

McCarthy might as well have said "No one in the entire universe questions Biden's election," in PolitiFact's eyes.

PolitiFact puts what's supposed to pass for its reasoning in its concluding paragraphs:

McCarthy said, "I don't think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election." 

This runs contrary to the actions and statements of numerous members and leaders of his own party, including himself. McCarthy objected to certifying election results from two states that Biden won, claiming electoral process concerns. Those concerns haven’t been proven. McCarthy and other Republicans also supported a lawsuit that challenged the validity of Biden’s victory in some states. 

Some Republican lawmakers who have been questioned about Biden’s legitimate victory state the obvious — that Biden is president — while still suggesting that it happened unlawfully.

As usual, the context serves as the key to understanding what was said. PolitiFact pays lip service to the context with a full quote of McCarthy that will end up putting the lie to its reasoning:

Here's PolitiFact's (accurate) version of the expanded context of McCarthy's statement:

"I don't think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with. We’re sitting here with the president today. So from that point of view, I don’t think that’s a problem."

PolitiFact could have done better by quoting in full the question McCarthy was answering. Here's the Washington Post's account of that question:

“You’re about to elevate someone to a leadership position who is still questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election results,” NBC News’s Kristen Welker asked McCarthy, referring to Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who will probably replace Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as the third-ranking member of the Republican caucus in the House. “Does that not complicate your efforts to find common ground with the president?”

Was McCarthy answering that question by saying nobody at all questions Biden's election? Of course not. He was addressing the idea that questions about the election would hamper efforts to find common ground. First, he says nobody (in the leadership group, including Stefanik) currently questions Biden's election. He offers the opinion "that's over with," acknowledging that happened in the past.

When we put that information, along with one more sentence from McCarthy, in PolitiFact's concluding paragraph, PolitiFact's reasoning crashes and burns (bold emphasis added to our editorial suggestion):

McCarthy said, "I don't think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with." 

This runs contrary to the actions and statements of numerous members and leaders of his own party, including himself. McCarthy objected to certifying election results from two states that Biden won, claiming electoral process concerns. Those concerns haven’t been proven. McCarthy and other Republicans also supported a lawsuit that challenged the validity of Biden’s victory in some states. 

Some Republican lawmakers who have been questioned about Biden’s legitimate victory state the obvious — that Biden is president — while still suggesting that it happened unlawfully.

With the context added, nothing McCarthy said runs contrary to any of the evidence PolitiFact offered to contradict McCarthy's claim. Things Republicans like McCarthy and Stefanik did in January 2021 do not count as continued questioning of Biden's election.

And it becomes obvious that PolitiFact misled its readers by telling them "McCarthy’s May 12 claim that the legitimacy of Biden’s victory hasn’t been questioned is wrong."

That's not what McCarthy said. "Nobody is questioning" isn't the same thing as "hasn't been questioned."

Such fact checks from PolitiFact count as an embarrassment to fact-checking.

It's a very bad idea to give this brand of fact-checking power over social media censorship.

Tucker Carlson out of context

If  politicians take facts and presents them out of context, PolitiFact uses its "Truth-O-Meter" to punish them.

If PolitiFact takes politicians out of context and issues ratings based on its own bad behavior, that's just part of a day's work for the worst mainstream fact checker in the United States.

Speak of the devil:

We're showing the presentation PolitiFact used on its Facebook page. PolitiFact used the same wording in the deck section of its PolitiFact.com website.

Immediately one should notice that the claim that a COVID-19 vaccine might not work seems consistent with estimated efficacy rates in the 70 to 96 percent range as estimated the the vaccines' manufacturers. The CDC website comes right out and says "Some people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will still get sick because no vaccine is 100% effective."

PolitiFact gave Carlson's a "Pants on Fire" rating for saying vaccines might not work. Does the CDC get that rating, too?

Let's look to the concluding paragraphs of the fact check to see what PolitiFact said Carlson got wrong.

Carlson said, "Maybe (the COVID-19 vaccine) doesn't work, and they're simply not telling you that."

That claim is countered by clinical trials and real-world studies that show the available vaccines effectively protect against COVID-19 infections and severe symptoms.

PolitiFact makes it sound like vaccines are 100% effective, regardless of the statement from the CDC. Not only do the vaccines protect you from infection, they protect you from severe symptoms after you're infected, by PolitiFact's telling. Without fail? Or is it possible the vaccine might not work?

Maybe PolitiFact simply missed Carlson's point. Perhaps the fact checkers think Carlson believes the vaccines do not work at all even though earlier in the same program he affirmed that they work.

We have two more concluding paragraphs from PolitiFact: 

Carlson based his claim largely on the fact that the CDC still recommends that fully vaccinated people wear masks and keep their distance in public spaces. Carlson said he couldn’t think of a reason why the CDC would do that, but we found some pretty simple explanations. 

Experts said those precautions are advisable because most of the U.S. population remains unprotected and because scientists are still studying to what extent the vaccines stop transmission, among other things.

Carefully note in the last paragraph how PolitiFact justifies the continued use of masks and social distancing for vaccinated people. PolitiFact mentions unprotected people and the possibility of transmission from vaccinated persons. It's two clauses describing one reason, with the reader left to guess at the "other things."

PolitiFact is saying scientists think the vaccine may not work to prevent transmission of the virus from vaccinated people to unprotected people.

Will PolitiFact rate itself or the scientists whose views it touts "Pants on Fire"?

How can fact checkers fire so wide of the mark?

It was and is obvious Carlson was making a point about the rhetoric about the vaccine. Get it, it works, said the government, and we can get back to normal. Later, the government says it's nice you got the vaccine but you can't get back to normal.

Carlson has a legitimate point, and PolitiFact's own reasoning proves it ("scientists are still studying"). Why are the scientists still studying it? Because it might not work to prevent transmission.

Fact checkers should not fail to figure out such basic stuff.

PolitiFact provided a link to Facebook for watching the relevant segment of Carlson's show. Their link didn't work for us, but we found the video independently and found the link matches what PolitiFact posted (huh? yeah). We're providing the same link in hopes that it works better for our readers.

It worked in pre-publication testing, but we shall see.

Newsbusters and fact checks not published

We at PolitiFact Bias have long noted that fact checkers have a bias against fact-checking things that seem true, or at least publishing fact checks that confirm somebody said something true.

How does that affect an entity's "Truth-O-Meter" report card? Well, depending on how many favorable ratings were spiked, it skews the report card unfavorably. It's a form of selection bias.

And that brings us to NewsBusters (hat tip to Tim Graham).

In brief, Newsbusters published a chart to Facebook. PolitiFact initiated an investigation of the information in the chart, asking NewsBusters to show the specific source of the information. Newsbusters did that, apparently to PolitiFact's satisfaction, and PolitiFact never published any fact check about it.

How often does that happen and to whom? Nobody outside of PolitiFact really knows.

It's just one more symptom of a corrupt fact-checking system. PolitiFact buttonholes Newsbusters with the threat of social media sanction hanging over the latter. If Newsbusters doesn't respond, PolitiFact may issue an unfavorable rating based on its "burden of proof" criterion.

Meanwhile, PolitiFact can preposterously report that real wages are increasing but failing to keep pace with inflation with no plausible threat of sanction to its work.

Former PolitiFact expert source Brian Riedl on PolitiFact

 The tweet:

When Politifact was founded in 2007, their leaders visited me in person to recruit me as one of their "go-to" fact-checking sources.

I eventually quit working with them when it became clear that my role was to provide conservative cover for partisan-left fact checks. (1/3) https://t.co/rSgDn3lngh

— Brian Riedl 🧀 (@Brian_Riedl) March 30, 2021

Click the link for the other two tweets in the thread.

Add Riedl's name to a fairly impressive list of similar experiences from people like Michael F. Cannon and Judith Curry.

Layers of Editors: How fast is PolitiFact's stupidity growing?

Uh-oh! PolitiFact's incompetence unfairly harmed a Democrat again! This time it was hapless Joe Biden who ended up with the short straw by PolitiFact's blinkered judgment.

PolitiFact explained that over the past 10 years the number of Hispanics increased by about 10 million, while the number of Asian Americans went up by 5.2 million.

Why is an increase, on average, of 520,000 per year a faster increase than about 1 million per year?

PolitiFact explains, sort of:

Biden said "the fastest-growing population in the United States is Hispanic." That’s incorrect: The fastest-growing group is Asian Americans, with Hispanics ranking second. Hispanics did record the largest numerical increase in population of any group between 2010 and 2019, but that’s a different measure than "fastest growing."

Instead of recognizing more than one measure of "fastest-growing," PolitiFact arbitrarily accepts one measure while rejecting the other.

But an increase of 1 million per year on average is a rate of growth, and arguably more useful than measuring rate of growth as a percentage of an existing population.

We pointed out on Twitter that PolitiFact's reasoning would suggest that a one foot tall tree that doubles in size is growing faster than a 50 foot tall tree that grows two feet during the same span of time.

Sure, the first tree may surpass the second tree in size if it continues to double in size year-by-year. But it will never happen unless the first tree starts to surpass the second tree in the number of inches of growth per year.

Never.

And the math works similarly for population growth. Unless Asian Americans start adding more population in absolute numbers than do Hispanics, the number of Hispanics will forever be greater than the number of Asian Americans. Forever. In fact, Asian Americans will not start closing the gap between the two populations until they start adding more people in raw numbers rather than merely in terms of percentage.

So who do these fact checkers think they are?


Update March 8, 2021: Added the link to the PolitiFact "fact check" in the second paragraph.

A big problem with PolitiFact's updated website

If it was a snake, it would have bit me.

When "Unwoke Narrative" used a Twitter thread to go off on PolitiFact for the "Mostly False" rating it gave to an Unwoke Narrative Instagram post, one of the issues was a charge PolitiFact used a misquotation.

We questioned Unwoke Narrative about that charge, noting that the supposed misquotation looked like a paraphrase or summary.

Unwoke Narrative made a great point in response. PolitiFact signals to readers that its quotations/summaries/paraphrases of the claims it is checking are quotations.

The deck material of PolitiFact fact checks gets formatted the way many blog templates show quotations. There's a solid vertical bar to the left of the quoted material. And a lone quotation mark in the margin.

Here's an example:

The image of Biden to the upper left occurs in the shape of a word balloon. Just below the Biden balloon and a little to the right we find the lone quotation mark. And to the right of that a vertical yellow line. That's three cues to the reader that what is not a quotation of Biden is a quotation of Biden.

For comparison, have a look at this example from a page designed to help bloggers blog more stylishly:

It's a similar scheme. It features the vertical line, albeit with a skinnier vertical line bracketing the quotation on the right margin. And there's the lone quotation mark just to the left of the quotation.

How did I overlook this for a year?

I thought of one way PolitiFact's format might not mislead people: Maybe it's a pull quote? If it was a pull quote, then PolitiFact could justify putting partial quotations inside a bigger quotation using the standard doubled quotation marks (" instead of ').

But these aren't pull quotes. They're summaries, paraphrases, quotations or sometimes combinations of those formatted as quotations.

We find it unimaginable that professional journalists could find this presentation acceptable. We imagine the experienced journalists at PolitiFact gave the design team too much free rein and then failed to see the problem when it came time to approve the revised format.

It's a deceptive practice and needs to go.

I still can't believe I didn't notice it without having it pointed out to me.

Editor who won't do corrections makes correction request (Updated)

Here and at Zebra Fact Check we have documented obvious errors pointed out to PolitiFact that PolitiFact simply declines to fix.

How delicious, then, when we heard that PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Angie Drobnic Holan requested corrections of the conservative publication the Federalist. And royally botched at least one of them.

The Federalist noted PolitiFact had done little to fact check Democratic Party politicians in the new Biden administration, and PolitiFact apparently objected.

The Federalist's Tristan Justice told the story on Feb. 20, 2021:

“Your report is wrong in multiple ways,” Holan wrote in a Friday email. “For one, we published three fact-checks on Feb. 16, so our last check on Biden was the day before your report was published. The link you use in the story shows that. Please issue a correction ASAP.”

Holan followed up two hours later, demanding an update.

The link embedded in the initial post to Biden’s fact-checks on the PolitiFact website, however, which remains unchanged, shows PolitiFact published three fact-checks after the story was published in The Federalist, of statements made on Feb. 16, including Biden’s remarks on vaccines. Contrary to Holan’s assertion, these fact-checks were published on Feb. 17 and 18, following the Federalist article.

The Federalist story included an image backing up Justice's description, which we independently verified. It looks like Holan probably mistook the date the claims were made as the publish date. When PolitiFact revamped its website about a year ago, it moved the claim date up to the top of the article and the publish date down and to the left to accompany the writer's byline.

Old way:

The old layout had the date of the claim in the box up top and the publish date next to the author's byline, down at the bottom of the header section.

New way:

With the new layout the claim date moved all the way up to the top, under the source of the claim. The publish date moved, along with the writer's byline, to the left margin. And shrank.

It looks like Holan believed the claim dates were the publish dates. It's not the kind of mistake an organization wants to see from its editor-in-chief.

We asked Holan for an explanation but received no reply.

It's worth pointing out that Holan claimed there were a number of errors in the Federalist article. We also asked her about those, after we asked Justice, the Federalist writer, about them. If Holan found legitimate problems with the Federalist story then Justice should not have buried the fact.

But as for Justice's allegation that Holan was mistaken with the first part of her correction request, the Internet Archive record from Feb. 17, 2021 shows no fact checks featuring Joe Biden published on Feb. 16, 2021.

Update March 5, 2021: A commenter has correctly noted that this post could benefit from added context. We inserted a short new paragraph in the three slot and added the link to the Federalist story that was always intended to be there. We appreciate comments that help us improve our work.