Big Journalism: "PolitiFact Bases Entire Fact Check on Author's Intuition"

John Sexton of Big Journalism (and Verum Serum fame) joins Matthew Hoy in slamming PolitiFact's rating of a recent Crossroads GPS ad.

Sexton notes that the ad says one thing and PolitiFact claims the ad says something else:

The ad is clearly about the President's promise that you could keep your insurance, not some insurance. Instead of staying on that point, PolitiFact's introduces a novel new interpretation of the ad's meaning. Suddenly, it's not about the President's promise at all, rather " Its point seems to be simply that a lot of people will lose coverage." Really? Where does it say that?

Sexton draws attention to a recurrent problem at PolitiFact.  Statements that fail to accord with the views inside the left-skewed journalistic bubble often receive an uncharitable interpretation that the original speaker would scarcely recognize.  PolitiFact ends up appearing either unable or unwilling to understand the readily apparent meaning.

Sexton makes other good points as well, so visit Big Journalism and read it through start to finish.  Sexton gets Bill Adair on the record defending PolitiFact's journalistic malpractice, and that's always worth seeing even if it draws  from one of Adair's two favorite cliches:  People won't always agree with PolitiFact's ratings and PolitiFact gets criticized from conservatives and liberals (PolitiFact, therefore, is fair).

Hoystory: "Dishonest hacks"

Frequent PolitiFact critic Matthew Hoy weighed in about a Crossroads GPS rating about President Obama's claim that "If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan."

Hoy gets right to the issue with his trademark eloquence:

It was a lie. Anyone with half a brain knew it.
...

Since I don’t think that [PolitiFact editors] Angie Drobnic Holan and Bill Adair are slack-jawed drooling idiots, that makes their assessment of Obama’s promise evidence that they are dishonest, lying hacks.

Hoy then zeros in on the way PolitiFact interpreted, and assigned a new meaning, to Obama's specific words:

Politifraud:

Obama often said during his 2008 campaign for president that if people liked their health insurance, they wouldn’t have to change it under his proposal, and he continued to say it as president.“If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” he said at a 2009 town hall meeting.

Stop there for a moment and think about that quoted statement. When you as an English-speaking individual read those 14 words, do you think Obama’s saying this:

What Obama was talking about was the way his plan left in place the current health care system in the United States.

Seriously? So, according to Politifraud, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” = “We will not institute a single-payer system.”

Well, if you’re going to twist the plain meaning of Obama’s words into that, then I suppose Politifraud should make Humpty Dumpty its mascot.

In all fairness to PolitiFact, subsequent to Hoy's post, they backtracked explained that they weren't really checking Obama's claim at all. They issued this editors note clarification correction update:

We have adjusted the statement to clarify that we are fact-checking the Crossroads GPS claim that "millions could lose their health care coverage and be forced into a government pool." The ruling is unchanged.

This PolitiFact rating is only the latest in a long string of examples showcasing their defense of ObamaCare. (Not to mention their symbiotic defense of RomneyCare). Readers would be hard pressed to find unfavorable ratings of the law in PolitiFact's archives. It's enough to leave discerning observers with the impression that PolitiFact loves the ACA and is willing to protect it with the sophistry and semantic hair-splitting common among partisan actors.

Hoy's trenchant observations and wonderful way with words make it well worth heading over to his site and reading the whole thing.   Don't miss out on the rest.

Nutting doing: PolitiFact's inadequate excuse

Crossposted from Sublime Bloviations


This week many liberals jumped on the meme that President Obama has the lowest spending record of any recent president.

Fortunately for all of us, PolitiFact was there to help us find out the truth in politics.

Actually, PolitiFact completely flubbed the related fact check.  And that's not particularly unusual.  Instead, it was the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler and an Associated Press fact check that helped people find the truth in politics.

PolitiFact isn't backing down so far, however.  On Friday PolitiFact offered the following response to the initial wave of criticism (bold emphasis added):

(O)ur item was not actually a fact-check of Nutting's entire column. Instead, we rated two elements of the Facebook post together -- one statement drawn from Nutting’s column, and the quote from Romney.

We haven't seen anything that justifies changing our rating of the Facebook post. But people can have legitimate differences about how to assign the spending, so we wanted to pass along some of the comments.

PolitiFact also made the distinction on Twitter:

(Image captured by Jeff Dyberg;
 click image for enlarged view)

There's a big problem with the attempt to distinguish between checking Nutting's claims and those from the Facebook post:  The Facebook post argues implicitly solely on the basis of Nutting's work.  PolitiFact likewise based its eventual ruling squarely on its rating of the Nutting graphic.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added): 

The Facebook post says Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," because it's actually risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years."

Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars, and it was the second-slowest if you adjust for inflation. The math simultaneously backs up Nutting’s calculations and demolishes Romney’s contention.

Credit PolitiFact with accurately representing the logic of the implicit argument.  Without the fact check on Nutting's work there is no fact check of Romney's claim.  Making matters worse, PolitiFact emphasized the claim that Obama "has the lowest spending record" right next to its "Mostly True" Truth-O-Meter graphic.  The excuse that PolitiFact was fact checking the Facebook post completely fails to address that point.  Andrew Stiles is probably still laughing.

Criticisms of Nutting make clear that the accounting of bailout loans substantially skews the numbers in Obama's favor. Using the AP's estimates of 9.7 percent for 2009 (substantially attributable to Obama) and 7.8 percent in 2010, Obama's record while working with a cooperative Democrat-controlled Congress looks like it would challenge the high spending of any of his recent predecessors.  The leader from the Facebook graphic, President Reagan, tops out at 8.7 percent without any adjustment for inflation.  PolitiFact's fact check was utterly superficial and did not properly address the issue.

There is a silver lining.  The Obama administration has so aggressively seized on this issue that PolitiFact will certainly feel pressure to fact check different permutations of Nutting's claims.

I can't wait to see the contortions as PolitiFact tries to reconcile this rating with subsequent attempts.



*Many thanks to Mickey Kaus of the Daily Caller for linking this story.

The trouble with the disappearance of the original "Julia" fact check

Earlier this week, PolitiFact published a fact check of the Medicare portion of the Obama campaign's "Life of Julia" Web ad.

Hours later, PolitiFact scrubbed the fact check from its website.   A message appeared on PolitiFact's Facebook page saying that the article was "unpublished" so that PolitiFact could address reader criticisms.

PolitiFact took a big step backward this week with its transparency.  In past instances PolitiFact archived the flawed version of a story.  That was a good policy.

The new approach is puzzling.  It isn't hard at all to find guidelines for journalistic ethics strongly discouraging the removal of a whole online story.

What happened? 

Did PolitiFact institute a new policy?  Did a person handling Web content act without approval from up above?  The former appears more likely given the Facebook announcement.

PolitiFact's actions did mitigate some of the ethical black clouds.  The story was not permanently deleted.  The new version carries a "CORRECTION" notice in keeping with PolitiFact's statement of standards and it explains the differences between the old version of the story and the new version (just trust 'em!).

However, the new policy is not likely to assist PolitiFact in building an image of reliability.

As for the "Julia" fact check itself, a review will appear before long at Sublime Bloviations.

Power Line: "Barack Obama, Fiscal Conservative!"

The latest smackdown of PolitiFact's unbelievably inept attempt to present Obama as a budget miser comes from John Hinderaker over at Power Line.

Hinderacker first delves into the problems with Rex Nutting's flawed analysis that started this meme off in the first place:

It started with the ridiculous column by one Rex Nutting that I dismantled last night. Nutting claims that the “Obama spending binge never happened.” He says Obama has presided over the slowest growth in federal spending in modern history. Nutting achieves this counter-intuitive feat by simply omitting the first year of the Obama administration, FY 2009, when federal spending jumped $535 billion, a massive increase that has been sustained and built upon in the succeeding years. Nutting blithely attributes this FY 2009 spending to President Bush, even though 1) Obama was president for more than two-thirds of FY 2009; 2) the Democratic Congress never submitted a budget to President Bush for FY 2009, instead waiting until after Obama was inaugurated; 3) Obama signed the FY 2009 budget in March of that year; 4) Obama and the Democratic Congress spent more than $400 billion more in FY 2009 than Bush had requested in his budget proposal, which was submitted in early 2008; and 5) the stimulus bill, which ballooned FY 2009 spending, was, as we all know, enacted by the Democratic Congress and signed into law by President Obama. So for Nutting to use FY 2010 as the first year of the Obama administration for fiscal purposes was absurd.

Hinderaker goes on to list several of Obama's big spending, deficit-boosting credentials before getting to PolitiFact. Hinderaker has some choice words for PolitiFact's determination that Obama is St. Skinflint, but more importantly notes a discrepancy with a past fact check:

PolitiFact arrived at this conclusion by swallowing the claim that President Bush is somehow responsible for the spending that Obama and the Democrats did in 2009 after he left office. This is doubly amusing because it contradicts the approach PolitiFact took when the shoe was on the other foot. In January 2010, PolitiFact purported to evaluate David Axelrod’s claim that “The day the Bush administration took over from President Bill Clinton in 2001, America enjoyed a $236 billion budget surplus….” PolitiFact found that claim to be true by referring to the FY 2000 budget:

When we asked for his sources, the White House pointed us to several documents. The first was a 2002 report from the Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, that reported the 2000 federal budget ended with a $236 billion surplus. So Axelrod was right on that point.

So at that time, PolitiFact was clear: the Clinton administration’s responsibility ended in FY 2000, the year before President Bush took office. But, now that the partisan position is reversed, PolitiFact says the opposite. Obama isn’t responsible for anything until he had been in office for eight-plus months, even though, in that time, he had signed nine spending bills plus the stimulus.

PolitiFact's assertion that "Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president" is absurd. The sheer level of incompetence demanded for a rating like this makes it easy to believe that PolitiFact overlooked the problems deliberately. It's simply implausible that PolitiFact overlooked such obvious flaws accidentally.

It takes a special kind of hubris to call yourself non-partisan when dispensing this type of deceitful gimmickry.

Hinderaker's article goes into more detail pointing out the problems from Nutting and PolitiFact.  Do visit Power Line and read the whole thing.

Big Journalism: "Politifact: Obama Presided Over Slowest Federal Spending Growth of Any Recent President"

Big Journalism's John Nolte comes through with a story on PolitiFact's role in supporting Rex Nutting's misleading claims about President Obama's role in expanding federal spending.

Nolte makes some statements about PolitiFact's motivations that we no not necessarily agree with, but his post hits the central issue with a powerful broadside (assisted by Jim Pethokoukis):

Now to the facts, which I will turn over to the Enterprise Blog's indispensible Jim Pethokoukis. It should be noted that Pethokoukis is not taking on Politifact but rather the nonsense that Politifact laughably proclaimed as mostly true: [emphasis added]

Nutting arrives at that 1.4% number by assigning 2009—when spending surged nearly 20%—to George W. Bush: “The 2009 fiscal year, which Republicans count as part of Obama’s legacy, began four months before Obama moved into the White House. The major spending decisions in the 2009 fiscal year were made by George W. Bush and the previous Congress. Like a relief pitcher who comes into the game with the bases loaded, Obama came in with a budget in place that called for spending to increase by hundreds of billions of dollars in response to the worst economic and financial calamity in generations.”

Let me complete the metaphor for Nutting: “Then as those runners scored, Obama kept putting more on base.”

Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it. Only by establishing 2009 as the new baseline, something Republican budget hawks like Paul Ryan feared would happen, does Obama come off looking like a tightwad. Obama has turned a one-off surge in spending due to the Great Recession into his permanent New Normal through 2016 and beyond.

Nowhere, nowhere, nowhere, NOWHERE is this pertinent piece of context included anywhere in Politifact's 1300 word analysis.

Nolte's identification of the central problem agrees with the one I posted at Sublime Bloviations, for what it's worth.  A significant portion of the increased spending in 2009 was one-time spending, much of it in the form of loans, to stabilize the banking system.  Using that year as a baseline for later increases is misleading, period.  And Nolte's right that PolitiFact ignores that critical piece of context.

This bit of partisan and journalistic hackery, however, is a new low. Intentionally and dishonestly, Politifact only reports on the context that backs up the pro-Obama sleight-of-hand while the only context that matters is completely ignored. What we have here is nothing short of lying through a deliberate act of omission.

I find it hard to disagree, even though I try to give PolitiFact's journalists the benefit of the doubt as to their conscious motivations.

PolitiFact unpublishes "Julia" fact check (Updated)

Whoa, Nelly.

PolitiFact today took the unusual step of taking down a fact check of the Obama campaign's "Julia" Web ad.

This is about the only Web evidence left from the story after it was scrubbed from the PolitiFact website:

The link goes to one of PolitiFact's clever bad link pages for now.

PolitiFact's Facebook page had this to say:

Some readers have raised questions about our latest item on Medicare and Julia. We've unpublished it while we look at them.

Jeff and I put forth a few digs on the issue of journalistic ethics on the Facebook page.  Other than that we're pretty much holding our fire until we see where this goes.


Update May 23, 2012:  PolitiFact's Twitter feed contains a bit more information:

Would @MittRomney replace Medicare with "nothing but a voucher"? That's not what his plan says. False: http://ow.ly/b5hah

 This looks like a rating that some felt was too harsh on President Obama.  The explanation for unpublishing (if we even get one) may prove more entertaining than the new version of the story.

PolitiFact Virginia takes mere months to correct obvious misjudgment

It's "CORRECTION" time at PolitiFact? No, not quite.

It's "UPDATE" time at PolitiFact? Er, not exactly.

It's "Editor's Note" time! We love these!

Editors Note: On Dec. 26, 2011, PolitiFact Virginia rated as Mostly True a statement by Democrat Tim Kaine that Republican George Allen, during his term in the U.S. Senate from 2001-2007, helped turn the largest budget surplus in U.S. history into the largest deficit.

Our ruling was largely based on raw federal budget numbers dating back to the 1930s. The Allen campaign recently told us that our rating did not give enough credence to what two economists said in the original story: The best way to compare deficits through history is to express them as a percentage of the Gross Domestic Product at the time.

We took a new look at the fact-check and concluded the Allen campaign is right. So we are changing our rating to Half True because there is still validity to Kaine’s claim, but his numbers need context. 

PolitiFact Virginia published the above on May 15, nearly six months after giving Kaine his inflated grade.

Note that this ruling change does not come as a result of new information.  Everything was there in the story, and the PolitiFact Virginia team just failed to put the pieces together.  Note also that PolitiFact avoids calling this a correction in the editor's note.  Let's review the "Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter":

When we find we've made a mistake, we correct the mistake.

• In the case of a factual error, an editor's note will be added and labeled "CORRECTION" explaining how the article has been changed.
• In the case of clarifications or updates, an editor's note will be added and labeled "UPDATE" explaining how the article has been changed.
• If the mistake is significant, we will reconvene the three-editor panel. If there is a new ruling, we will rewrite the item and put the correction at the top indicating how it's been changed.

If PolitiFact Virginia had committed a factual error, then it would publish an editor's note labeled "CORRECTION."  The note does not contain that word, therefore by PolitiFact's principles it committed no factual error by calling Kaine's claim "Mostly True."

Neat!

It gets even more confusing with the next bullet point.  If there's no factual error but just a clarification or update then we should see the label "UPDATE" along with the explanation of the change.  We don't see that label either.

Apparently PolitiFact Virginia just skipped the first two bullet points and went right for the third.  Reconvene if the mistake is significant and rewrite the item with the (non-correction) correction at the top.  So we have a mistake significant enough to require a rewrite with no admission of a mistake in accordance with PolitiFact's principles.  A mistake is implied by the new ruling with the rewrite, of course.

Seriously, if PolitiFact follows its principles on the matter of corrections in such a haphazard way, what makes anyone think it applies its other principles consistently?

Incidentally, it is clear that Republican George Allen endured the harm from the mistake, while Democrat Tim Kaine reaped the benefit.