Grading PolitiFact: Fidel Castro's endorsement?

PolitiFact, the fact-checking enterprise launched by the Poynter-associated Congressional Quarterly and The St. Petersburg Times, continues to amaze me.

Robert Farley is at it again at PolitiFact, taking the Republican Party of Florida to task for a recent mailing.

The piece starts by juxtaposing the claim and the PolitiFact counterclaim:

"Fidel Castro endorses Obama."

vs.

Castro not stumping for Obama

The key to this entry? The meaning of "endorses" compared to the meaning of "stumping." Keep that in mind.

Farley goes on to describe an e-mail circulated by the Republican Party of Florida, which features the well-known photo of the recuperating Castro holding a newspaper--except the newspaper has been replaced via photoshop with one of the Obama iconographic posters done in the style of past socialists.

A link in the e-mail sends you to an article that states that Castro gave Obama “a qualified endorsement,” calling him “the most advanced candidate” in a commentary published in a Communist newspaper on May 26, 2008.

The absurdity of this claim is belied by the very headline of Castro’s article: “The empire’s hypocritical politics.”

The claim that Castro gave Obama "a qualified endorsement" is absurd?

And we realize the word “endorse” can have a formal meaning, as well as a generic one. A New York Times blog originally ran a story about Castro’s commentary under a headline that read “Castro’s stinging endorsement.” The story now carries the headline “Castro Weighs In on Obama.” An update notes: “The headline was altered to avoid the misinterpretation that Mr. Castro’s remarks represented a formal endorsement.” But we don’t think Castros’s commentary even amounts to a generic “endorsement.”

Woman: Who does he think he is?
Arthur: I am your king.
Woman: Well I didn't vote for you.

Sorry to break it to Farley and PolitiFact, but you don't get to decide what words mean. Common usage decides the meaning of words, and dictionaries tend to reflect that tendency over time.

4. To give approval of or support to, especially by public statement; sanction: endorse a political candidate. See Synonyms at approve.
(thefreedictionary.com)

And then there's this one:

to give approval to; support; sanction [to endorse a candidate]
--Webster's New World College Dictionary (Fourth Edition)

And Farley omits the fact that the Times blog he cited continues to say the following:

Fidel Castro stepped aside as president of Cuba in February and has not been seen much since undergoing surgery in July 2006, but he is still very much a presence in the island nation he has turned over to his brother Raúl.

He also is full of opinions, and on Monday he gave Senator Barack Obama an endorsement of sorts, calling him “the most progressive candidate to the U.S. presidency” while also berating him for his plan to continue the trade embargo against Cuba. “Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries an enormous favor,” Mr. Castro said. “I have therefore no reservations about criticizing him.”

(bold emphasis added)

Farley places emphasis on Castro's criticism's of Obama and on balance ignores Castro's praise of Obama . The text of the GOP ad was true, though as with the NYT blog potentially misleading if it was seen as a formal endorsement. Which brings us to the graphic material:

Katie Gordon, press secretary for the Republican Party of Florida, said the whole thing was a joke. The “cartoon” image, she said, was not meant to be taken literally.

“It was our way of finding a creative way to illustrate a larger point,” Gordon said. “The idea is that Sen. Barack Obama has expressed numerous times his willingness to sit down with the leaders of Communist regimes.” While Castro did not literally endorse Obama, she said, the point is that Castro stated that “of the people running for president, he (Obama) is the one he’d prefer to work with.”

Farley opines that the altered photo is not a "cartoon." No, it's not. Not in the "Mickey Mouse" or "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" sense. It is a literal representation of Obama, not a drawing. In every other relevant sense, however, it is a cartoon ("a drawing, as in a newspaper, caricaturing or symbolizing, often satirically, some event, situation, or person of topical interest"--NWCDFE).

Given Farley's partial quotations of Gordon, I have taken the appropriate step of attempting to contact Katie Gordon to see if Farley's presentation does justice to her words, including the last sentence where he seems to suggest that Gordon was paraphrasing Castro.

Back to Farley:

First of all, it was not a “cartoon” image. It was a doctored photograph. And a pretty good one. A trained eye, or someone who closely follows Cuban politics, would probably recognize the image as implausible. But it’s too realistic-looking to be passed off as a cartoon spoof.

C'mon, Farley. The image was all over the news when Castro was ill. I was quite familiar with the image, and I don't follow Cuban politics closely. Nor do I have a trained eye for spotting altered photos. I was simply familiar with a photo that was all over the news when Castro had dropped out of sight for a time. Perhaps only Farley's trained eye--assuming he does not follow Cuban politics closely--allowed him to spot the specious nature of the pic. Though I would have thought the text embedded in the photo might have been a tip-off even to the non-expert ("I love this guy!"):

clipped from www.politifact.com

One typically doesn't add text directly to a photograph if one is looking to pass it off as genuine. I've noted with amusement some sources calling the text a "caption." There's plenty of caption in the normally understood sense apart from the embedded text.

I fault Farley for not mentioning the near-iconographic nature of the Castro photo. It was international news, not something only aficionados of Cuban politics would have recognized.

On to PolitiFact's proclamation from On High:

The RPOF makes our call on this one easy. Even its press secretary acknowledged the claim that Castro endorsed Obama is not accurate. She said it wasn’t meant to be taken seriously. We’re all for keeping a sense of humor in this long election season. But there are better ways to get people’s attention than to distort facts. And this comes off less like a joke and more like an intentional smear. We rate it Pants on Fire.

Well, big surprise there, just like the absence of surprise that this PolitiFact entry, as with so many others, commits the same sorts of sins that they condemn.

1) Katie Gordon did not acknowledge that the claim that Castro endorsed Obama was not accurate. She acknowledged that Obama had not been formally endorsed by Castro. There is a difference, as even PolitiFact admits ("And we realize the word 'endorse' can have a formal meaning, as well as a generic one"). Farley conflates the two and ends up with a fallacy of equivocation.

2) She said the photo was not meant to be taken seriously, not the idea of Castro offering a qualified endorsement of Barack Obama.

Farley twists the truth here about as adroitly as any of his PolitiFact targets.

I'm no longer going to rate PolitiFact according to their own lame scale. I've got something in the works I think is better. Suffice it to say that PolitiFact again failed in its mission to accurately inform voters. Grading the ad as "Pants on Fire" is a gross exaggeration, and this entry matches in kind the outrageous rating given to Barack Obama for an obvious use of hyperbole.