PolitiFact Avoids Snarky Commentary? 2

In its statement of principles PolitiFact says it avoids snarky commentary (bold emphasis added):

We don’t lay out our personal political views on social media. We do share news stories and other journalism (especially our colleagues’ work), but we take care not to be seen as endorsing or opposing a political figure or position. We avoid snarky commentary.

These restrictions apply to both full-time staffers, correspondents and interns. We avoid doing anything that compromises PolitiFact, or our ability to do our jobs.

 Yet PolitiFact tweeted the following on Sept. 13, 2018:

Hey @realDonaldTrump, if you need a refresher on the Maria death toll estimates in Puerto Rico, we have that for you. https://t.co/l7kTx9cHGr https://t.co/O8RLaO6aoe

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) September 13, 2018

We're having trouble getting that one past the definition of "snark":

: an attitude or expression of mocking irreverence and sarcasm

PolitiFact flubs GDP comparison between added debt and cumulative debt

Here at PolitiFact Bias we think big mistakes tell us something about PolitiFact's ideological bias.

If PolitiFact's big mistakes tend to harm Republicans and not Democrats, it's a pretty good sign that PolitiFact leans left. For that reason, much of what we do centers on documenting big mistakes.

Veteran PolitiFact fact checker Louis Jacobson gave us a whopper of a mistake this week in a Sept. 12, 2018 PunditFact fact check.

Before reading the fact check we had a pretty good idea this one was bogus. Note the caveat under the meter telling the reason why Scarborough's true numbers only get by with a "Mostly True" rating: The added debt was not purely the GOP's fault.

We easily found a parallel claim, this one from PolitiFact Virginia but with Trump as the speaker:

Trump's parallel claim was dragged down to "Half True" because there was plenty of blame to share for doubling the debt. In other words it was not purely Obama's fault.

A Meaningless Statistic?

Scarborough's statistic makes less sense than Trump's on closer examination. The point comes through clearly once we see how PolitiFact botched its analysis.

Scarborough said the GOP would create more debt in one year than was generated in America's first 200 years.

After quoting an expert who said percentage of GDP serves as a better measure than nominal dollars, PolitiFact proceeded to explain that testing Scarborough's claim using the percentage of GDP tells essentially the same story.  PolitiFact shared a chart based on data from the executive branch's Office of Management and Budget:

So far so good. The OMB is recognized as a solid source for such data. But then PolitiFact PolitiSplains (bold emphasis added):

The chart does show that, when looking at a percentage of GDP, Scarborough is correct in his comparison. Debt as a percentage of GDP in 2017 was far higher (almost 77 percent)  than it was in 1976 (about 27 percent).

Colossal Blunder Alert!

PolitiFact/PunditFact, intentionally or otherwise, pulled a bait and switch. Scarborough said the GOP would create more debt in one year than was generated in America's first 200 years. As PolitiFact recognized when comparing the nominal dollar figures, that comparison involves the cumulative deficit number for one year (which we call the debt) and comparing it to the non-cumulative deficit number for one year (which we call the deficit). It's a comparison of the debt in 1976, following PolitiFact's methodology for nominal dollars in the first part of the fact check, to the deficit for 2017.

But that's not what PolitiFact did when it tried to test Scarborough using percentage of GDP.

PolitiFact compared the debt in 1976 to the debt in 2017. That's the wrong comparison. PolitiFact needed to substitute the deficit in 2017 as a percentage of GDP for the debt in 2017 as a percentage of GDP. That substitution corresponds to Scarborough's argument.

The deficit in 2017 does not measure out to nearly 77 percent of GDP. Not even close.

The OMB reports the deficit for 2017 was 3.5 percent of GDP. That's less than 27 percent. It's also less than 77 percent.

Using the preferred measure for comparing deficit and debt numbers across time, Scarborough's claim fell flat. And PolitiFact failed to notice.

Testing Scarborough's number correctly as a percentage of GDP illustrates the worthlessless of his statistic. Instead of "Mostly True" PolitiFact could easily have issued a ruling more similar to the one it issued to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney when he correctly noted that our armed forces were shorter on ships and planes in 2012 than at times in the past.

Cheer up, PolitiFact. You'll be tarring the conservative Scarborough. So it's not a total loss.

False Stuff From Fact Checker (PolitiFact)

A funny thing happened when PolitiFact fact-checked a claim about a bias against conservative websites: PolitiFact did not fact check its topic.

No, we're not kidding. Instead of researching whether the claim was true, PolitiFact spent its time undermining the source of the claim. And PolitiFact even used a flatly false claim of its own toward that end (bold emphasis added):

The chart is not neutral evidence supporting Trump’s point, and it labels anything not overtly conservative as "left. In the "left" category are such rigorously mainstream outlets as the Associated Press and Reuters. The three big broadcast networks — ABC, NBC, CBS — are considered "left," as are the Washington Post and the New York Times. Other media outlets that produce a large amount of content every day, including CNN, NPR, Politico, USA Today, and CNBC, are labeled "left."

The statement we highlighted counts as hyperbole at best. On it's face, it simply counts as a false statement exposed as such by the accompanying graphic:

If PolitiFact's claim was true then any outlet not labeled "left" would overtly identify itself as conservative. We can disprove PolitiFact's claim easily by simply looking down the line at the middle. If a media outlet straddles the line between left and right then that organization is not classified as "left." And if such media organizations do not overtly identify as conservative then PolitiFact's claim is false.

Overtly conservative? Let's go down the line:

• C-SPAN
• Roll Call
• UPI
• Real Clear Politics
• Military Times
• Stars & Stripes
• CQ Roll Call
• Mediaite

And for good measure: The Economist, located on the right side of the chart. Is The Economist overtly conservative (See also Barron's, McClatchy)?

Did PolitiFact even bother to research its own claim? Where are the sources listed? Or did writer Louis Jacobson just happen to have that factoid rattling around in his cranium?

But it's not just Jacobson! The factoid gets two mentions in the fact check (the second one in the summary paragraph) and was okayed by editor Katie Sanders (recently promoted for obvious reasons to managing editor at PolitiFact) and at least two other editors from the PolitiFact "star chamber" that decides the "Truth-O-Meter" rating.

As we have asked before, how can a non-partisan and objective fact checker make such a mistake?

Inconceivable!

And how does a fact checker properly justify issuing a ruling without bothering to check on the fact of the matter?

PolitiFact Illinois: 'Duckwork's background check claim checks out" (Updated x2)

Huh.

On August 26, 2018 PolitiFact Illinois published a fact check of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) with the title "Duckwork's background check claim checks out."

We find it hard to believe a fact-checking organization could prove so careless it would badly misspell the last name of one of its senators in a headline.

And we find it even harder to believe the error could last until the next day (today) without receiving a correction.

We will update this item to track whether PolitiFact Illinois runs a correction notice when it fixes the problem.

Assuming it fixes the problem.

Update Aug. 27, 2018:

Apparently "Duckwork" is a fairly common misspelling of Sen. Duckworth's name. NPR (Illinois) made a similar mistake in January 2018 and fixed it on the sly. Don't journalists know better? Misspelling a name warrants a transparent correction.


Update Aug. 28, 2018:

Very early on Aug. 28, 2018, I tweeted a message pointing out this error and tagging the author, editor and PolitiFact Illinois.

@kiannahsepeda Headline reads "Duckwork." Isn't there somebody at @PolitiFactIL that can change the spelling to "Duckworth"?

And append the needed correction notice?@chasejohn https://t.co/VEnWoeZhAF

— Bryan W. White (@ZebraFactCheck) August 28, 2018

When I checked hours later PolitiFact had corrected the spelling of Duckworth's name but added no correction notice to the item.

It's important to note, we suppose, that PolitiFact's corrections policy does not obligate it to append a correction notice on the basis of a misspelled name. That policy, in fact, appears to promise that PolitiFact will fix all of its spelling errors without acknowledging error (italics added for emphasis):

Typos, grammatical errors, misspellings – We correct typos, grammatical errors, misspellings, transpositions and other small errors without a mark of correction or tag and as soon as they are brought to our attention.

That seems to us like an unusually low bar for running a correction. Compare the above with the aggressive use of corrections involving misspelled names by PolitiFact's parent organization, the Poynter Institute.

Here's  one example from that page:

‘Newspapers killed newspapers,’ says reporter who quit the business (March 20, 2013)
Correction: This post misspelled Bird’s last name in one instance.

Journalists traditionally seem to give special attention to misspellings involving names. Misspelling a person's name counts as a different degree of error than a minor typographical error:

In journalism schools across Canada this week, many a freshman student will learn one of the foremost lessons of the J-school classroom: Get someone’s name wrong and you get a failing grade.

In the decade I taught at Ryerson University’s journalism school my students understood that no matter how brilliant their reporting and writing, if they messed up a name, they got an automatic F on that assignment. That’s a common policy of most journalism schools.

Apparently the fact checkers at PolitiFact find such obsessive attention to detail quaint.Which we count as a strange attitude for people calling themselves "fact checkers."

PolitiFact's Fallacious "Burden of Proof" Bites a Democrat? Or Not

We're nonpartisan because we defend Democrats unfairly harmed by the faulty fact checkers at PolitiFact.

See how that works?

On with it, then:

Oops.

Okay, we made a faulty assumption. We thought when we saw PolitiFact's liberal audience complaining about the treatment of Nelson that it meant Nelson had received a "False" rating based on Nelson not offering evidence to support his claim.

But PolitiFact did not give Nelson a "Truth-O-Meter" rating at all. Instead of the "Truth-O-Meter" graphic for the claim (there is none), PolitiFact gave its readers the "Share The Facts" version:

Republicans (and perhaps Democrats) have received poor ratings in the past where evidence was lacking, which PolitiFact justifies according to its "burden of proof" criterion. But either the principle has changed or else PolitiFact made an(other) exception to aid Nelson.

If the principle has changed that's good. It's stupid and fallacious to apply a burden of proof standard in fact checking, at least where one determines a truth value based purely on the lack of evidence.

But's it's small consolation to the people PolitiFact unfairly harmed in the past with its application of this faulty principle.


Afters:

In April 2018 it looks like the "burden of proof" principle was still a principle.

As we have noted before, it often appears that PolitiFact's principles are more like guidelines than actual rules.

And to maintain our nonpartisan street cred, here's PolitiFact applying the silly burden of proof principle to a Democrat:

If "burden of proof" counts as one of PolitiFact's principles then PolitiFact can only claim itself as a principled fact checker if the Nelson exception features a principled reason justifying the exception.

If anyone can find anything like that in the non-rating rating of Nelson, please drop us a line.

PolitiFact Not Yet Tired of Using Statements Taken Out Of Context To Boost Fundraising

Remember back when PolitiFact took GOP pollster Neil Newhouse out of context to help coax readers into donating to PolitiFact?

Good times.

Either the technique works well or PolitiFact journalists just plain enjoy using it, for PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan's Aug. 21, 2018 appeal to would-be supporters pulls the same type of stunt on Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City and attorney for President Donald Trump.

Let's watch Holan the politician in action (bold emphasis added):

Just this past Sunday, Rudy Giuliani told journalist Chuck Todd that truth isn’t truth.

Todd asked Giuliani, now one of President Donald Trump’s top advisers on an investigation into Russia’s interference with the 2016 election, whether Trump would testify. Giuliani said he didn’t want the president to get caught perjuring himself — in other words, lying under oath.

"It’s somebody’s version of the truth, not the truth," Giuliani said of potential testimony.

Flustered, Todd replied, "Truth is truth."

"No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth," Giuliani said, going on to explain that Trump’s version of events are his own.

This is an extreme example, but Giuliani isn’t the only one to suggest that truth is whatever you make it. The ability to manufacture what appears to be the truth has reached new heights of sophistication.

Giuliani, contrary to Holan's presentation, was almost certainly not suggesting that truth is whatever you make it.

Rather, Giuliani was almost certainly making the same point about perjury traps that legal expert Andrew McCarthy pointed out in a Aug. 11, 2018 column for National Review (hat tip to Power Line Blog)

The theme the anti-Trump camp is pushing — again, a sweet-sounding political claim that defies real-world experience — is that an honest person has nothing to fear from a prosecutor. If you simply answer the questions truthfully, there is no possibility of a false-statements charge.

But see, for charging purposes, the witness who answers the questions does not get to decide whether they have been answered truthfully. That is up to the prosecutor who asks the questions. The honest person can make his best effort to provide truthful, accurate, and complete responses; but the interrogator’s evaluation, right or wrong, determines whether those responses warrant prosecution.

It's fair to criticize Giuliani for making the point less elegantly than McCarthy did. But it's inexcusable for a supposedly non-partisan fact checker to take a claim out of context to fuel an appeal for cash.

That's what we expect from partisan politicians, not non-partisan journalists.

Unless they're "non-partisan journalists" from The Bubble.





 
Worth Noting:

For the 2017 version of this Truth Hustle, Holan shared writing credits with PolitiFact's Executive Director Aaron Sharockman.

All About That Base(line)

When we do not publish for days at a time it does not mean that PolitiFact has cleaned up its act and learned to fly straight.

We simply lack the time to do a thorough job policing PolitiFact's mistakes.

What caught our attention this week? A fact check authored by one of PolitiFact's interns, Lucia Geng.

We were curious about this fact check thanks to PolitiFact's shifting standards on what counts as a budget cut. In this case the cut itself was straightforward: A lower budget one year compared to the preceding year. In that respect the fact check wasn't a problem.

But we found a different problem--also a common one for PolitiFact. At least when PolitiFact is fact-checking Democrats.

The fact check does not question the baseline.

The baseline is simply the level chosen for comparison. The Florida Democratic Party chose to compare the 2011 water management districts' collective budgets with the ones in 2012 and found that they were about $700 million lower. Our readers should note that the FDP started making this claim in 2018, not 2012.

It's just crazy for a fact checker to perform a fact check without looking at other potential baselines. Usually politicians and political groups choose a baseline for a reason. Comparing 2011 to 2012 appears to make sense superficially. The year 2011 represents Republican-turned-Independent Governor Charlie Crist. The year 2012 represents the current governor, also a Republican, Rick Scott.

But what if there's more to it? Any fact checker should look at data covering a longer time period to get an idea of what the claimed cut would actually mean.

We suspected that 2010 and before might show much lower budget numbers. To our surprise, the budget numbers were far higher, at least for the South Florida Water Management District whose budget dwarfs those of the other districts.

From 2010 to 2011, Gov. Crist cut the SFWMD budget by about $443 million. From 2009 to 2010 Gov. Crist cut the SFWMD budget by almost $1.5 billion. That's not a typo.

The message here is not that Gov. Crist was some kind of anti-environmental zealot. What we have here is a sign that the water management district budgets are volatile. They can change dramatically from one year to the next. The big question is why, and a secondary question is whether the reason should affect our understanding of the $700 million Gov. Scott cut from the combined water management district budgets between 2011 and 2012.

A fact checker who looked at the volatile changes in spending could then use that knowledge to ask officials at the water management districts questions that would help answer our two questions above. Geng listed email exchanges with officials from each of Florida's water management districts. But the fact check contains no quotations from those officials. It does not even refer to their responses via paraphrase or summary. We don't even know what questions Geng asked.

We did not contact the water management districts. But we looked for a clue regarding the budget volatility in the SFWMD's fiscal year 2011 projections for its future budgets. The agency expected capital expenditures to drop by more than half after 2011.

Rick Scott had not been elected governor at that time (October 2010).

This suggests that the water management districts had a budget cut baked into their long-term program planning, quite possibly strongly influenced by budgeting for the Everglades restoration project (including land purchases). If so, that counts as critical context omitted from the PolitiFact Florida fact check.

We flagged these problems for PolitiFact on Twitter and via email. As usual, the faux-transparent fact checkers responded with a stony silence and made no apparent effort to fix the deficiencies.

Aside from the hole in the story we felt the "Mostly True" rating was very forgiving of the Florida Democratic Party's blatant cherry-picking. And somehow PolitiFact even resisted using the term "cherry-picking" or any close synonym.



Afters:
The Florida Democratic Party, in the same tweet PolitiFact fact-checked, recycled the claim that Gov. Scott "banned the term 'Climate Change.'"

We suppose that's not the sort of thing that makes PolitiFact editors wonder "Is that true?"

Did an Independent Study Find PolitiFact Is Not Biased?

An email alert from August 10, 2018 led us to a blaring headline from the International Fact-Checking Network:

Is PolitiFact biased? This content analysis says no

Though "content analysis" could mean the researchers looked at pretty much anything having to do with PolitiFact's content, we suspected the article was talking about an inventory of PolitiFact's word choices, looking for words associated with a political point of view. For example, "anti-abortion" and "pro-life" signal political points of view. Using those and similar terms may tip off readers regarding the politics those who produce the news.

PolitiFact Bias has never used the presence of such terms to support our argument that PolitiFact is biased. In fact, I (Bryan) tweeted out a brief judgment of the study on Twitter back on July 16, 2018:

The audit held that it found no substantial evidence of biased language at PolitiFact. We are not surprised, for historically PolitiFact's bias does not manifest itself in the particular choices of words,

— Bryan W. White (@ZebraFactCheck) July 16, 2018

We have two major problems with the the IFCN article at Poynter.org (by Daniel Funke).

First, it implies that the word-use inventory somehow negates the evidence of bias that PolitiFact's critics use that do not include the types of word choices the study was was designed to detect:

It’s a critique that PolitiFact has long been accustomed to hearing.

“PolitiFact is engaging in a great deal of selection bias,” The Weekly Standard wrote in 2011. “'Fact Checkers' Overwhelmingly Target Right-Wing Pols and Pundits” reads an April 2017 headline from NewsBusters, a site whose goal is to expose and combat “liberal media bias.” There’s even an entire blog dedicated to showing the ways in which PolitiFact is biased.

The fact-checking project, which Poynter owns, has rebuffed those accusations, pointing to its transparent methodology and funding (as well as its membership in the International Fact-Checking Network) as proof that it doesn’t have a political persuasion. And now, PolitiFact has an academic study to back it up.

The second paragraph mentions selection bias (taking the Weekly Standard quotation out of context) and other types of bias noted by PolitiFact Bias ("an entire blog dedicated to showing the ways in which PolitiFact is biased"--close enough, we suppose, thanks for linking us).

The third paragraph says PolitiFact has "rebuffed those accusations." We think "ignores those accusations" describes the situation more accurately.

The third paragraph goes on to mention PolitiFact's "transparent methodology" (true if you ignore the ambiguity and inconsistency) and transparent funding (yes, funded by some left-wing sources but PolitiFact Bias does not use that as an evidence of PolitiFact's bias). before claiming that PolitiFact "has an academic study to back it up."

"It"=PolitiFact's rebuffing of accusations it is biased????

That does not follow logically. To support PolitiFact's denials of the bias of which it is accused, the study would have to offer evidence countering the specific accusations. It doesn't do that.

Second, Funke's article suggests that the study shows a lack of bias. We see that idea in the title of Funke's piece as well as in the material from the third paragraph.

But that's not how science works. Even for the paper's specific area of study, it does not show that PolitiFact has no bias. At best it could show the word choices it tested offer no significant indication of bias.

The difference is not small, and Funke's article even includes a quotation from one of the study's authors emphasizing the point:

But in a follow-up email to Poynter, Noah Smith, one of the report’s co-authors, added a caveat to the findings.

“This could be because there's really nothing to find, or because our tools aren't powerful enough to find what's there,” he said.

So the co-author says maybe the study's tools were not powerful enough to find the bias that exists. Yet Funke sticks with the title "Is PolitiFact biased? This content analysis says no."

Is it too much to ask for the title to agree with a co-author's description of the meaning of the study?

The content analysis did not say "no." It said (we summarize) "not in terms of these biased language indicators."

Funke's article paints a very misleading picture of the content and meaning of the study. The study refutes none of the major critiques of PolitiFact of which we are aware.


Afters

PolitiFact's methodology, funding and verified IFCN signatory status is supposed to assure us it has no political point of view?

We'd be more impressed if PolitiFact staffers revealed their votes in presidential elections and more than a tiny percentage voted Republican more than once in the past 25 years.

It's anybody's guess why fact checkers do not reveal their voting records, right?


Correction Aug. 11, 2018: Altered headline to read "an Independent Study" instead of "a Peer-Reviewed Study"