PolitiFact designates a "Lie of the Year"

Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.
"Death panels."

(...)

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural "Lie of the Year."

Unfortunately, the PolitiFact editors persist in making no effort to distinguish editorial opinion and news analysis from objective reporting.  What could be less objective than designating a "Lie of the Year"?  Picking an official "Favorite Ice Cream of PolitiFact" might come close.

This effort by PolitiFact is rife with problems beyond the obvious failing of objectivity.





The project assumes the accuracy of the judgments.  No doubt that approach seems very reasonable to PolitiFact staffers.

I had not previously evaluated the PolitiFact treatment of Palin's "death panel" remark.  Now is the time, following the customary format:


The issue:

"Sarah Palin falsely claims Barack Obama runs a 'death panel.'"  Seriously?


The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact did a good job in this instance of initially presenting the subject's statement fairly, but I will quote directly from Palin's FaceBook page before delving into PolitiFact's reasoning.

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

PolitiFact:

We agree with Palin that such a system would be evil. But it's definitely not what President Barack Obama or any other Democrat has proposed.
We have read all 1,000-plus pages of the Democratic bill and examined versions in various committees. There is no panel in any version of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person's "level of productivity in society" to determine whether they are "worthy" of health care.

Drobnic, consciously or not, has engaged in gigantic misdirection.

Palin did not refer directly to the Democratic bill.  She talked about "a government health care system" and sees the Democratic bill as a huge step in that direction.  It is thus irrelevant that Drobnic fails to find certain features in the health care bill.  The feature that matters is government control in conjunction with the promise to control costs.

Palin cited economist Thomas Sowell, so it makes sense to see what he says:

Nothing is easier than for governments to impose price controls. They have been doing this, off an on, for thousands of years-- repeatedly resulting in (1) shortages, (2) quality deterioration and (3) black markets. Why would anyone want any of those things when it comes to medical care? 

Refusing to pay the costs is not the same as bringing down the cost. That is why price controls create these problems. When developing a new pharmaceutical drug costs roughly a billion dollars, you are either going to pay the billion dollars or cause people to stop spending a billion dollars to develop new drugs.

Palin makes a reasonable extrapolation from Sowell's comments.  She correctly identified the populations most at risk when the government dictates rationing of health care services.  Democrat Robert Reich confirmed the risks of government-run health care with respect to the elderly:

"And by the way, we're going to have to, if you're very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive. So we're going to let you die."

Reich, when he made the above statement, was playing the part of a presidential candidate telling the truth about health care, obviously from the perspective of the government involvement in running health care.

PolitiFact claims that no Democrat has made any proposal that would put the government in charge of deciding who gets care and who does not.  Yet Reich is a Democrat.  What is so difficult about putting two and two together?  The Democrats in charge have in mind something like what Robert Reich described, but they know they cannot communicate it honestly, as Reich was demonstrating when he spoke.

As a result, of course the legislation championed by Democrats will not come right out and say that the government gets life or death decisions placed in its lap.  That happens through sneaky legislative language and government initiatives that exploit that language.

Drobnic follows the misdirection for a number of paragraphs before finally passing judgment:

(Palin) said that the Democratic plan will ration care and "my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care." Palin's statement sounds more like a science fiction movie (Soylent Green, anyone?) than part of an actual bill before Congress. We rate her statement Pants on Fire!

Speaking of fiction, where did Palin say that the Democratic plan will ration health care?  Answer:  She didn't.  Drobnic made it up through the magic of failing to pay proper attention to the original context.  The story Drobnic spins is, as a result, an insult to truthfulness.

Palin did use exaggeration for effect, and that was probably obvious to virtually everyone.  Her underlying point has bipartisan support from Thomas Sowell and Robert Reich.

The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  F
Bill Adair:  F



More on the "Lie of the Year" competition

What purpose was served by having readers vote for the "Lie of the Year" when it was decided by the PolitiFact editors?

The editors of PolitiFact.com, the fact-checking Web site of the St. Petersburg Times, have chosen it as our inaugural "Lie of the Year."

PolitiFact readers overwhelmingly supported the decision. Nearly 5,000 voted in a national poll to name the biggest lie, and 61 percent chose "death panels" from a field of eight finalists.

Was it the desire for affirmation?  The readers might have chosen a different "lie."

Was it a form of curiosity?

Whatever the case, the poll provides a potential window into the political leanings of PolitiFact readers.  We live in a partisan age, so one would expect poll results to skew along partisan lines.  Most conservatives would probably favor picking a Democrat for the biggest lie of the year (I did not vote in this contest, for what that's worth).

The editors chose eight candidates for "Lie of the Year," with only three of the eight attractive to conservatives on a partisan basis.  That worked out as a potential advantage for conservatives, since conservative votes would tend to pool among those three choices, while liberals and progressives would divide their vote among the remaining five.

As it turned out, Palinophobia served to heavily weight one of those five.

Let's consider the results:

Close to 3,000 out of the 4,864 voters chose Palin's remark for "Lie of the Year."

• 61 percent for Palin
• 12.3 percent for Glenn Beck
• 8.7 percent for Orly Taitz
• 5.8 percent for Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.)
  
• 3.2 percent for Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.)

That rounds out the five choices that we might expect partisan liberals/progressives to favor.  A total of 91 percent of the votes went to this group of five (going simply by the number provided by PolitiFact, which may be inexact).

• 7.1 percent for President Obama
• 1.7 percent for Nita Lowery
• 0.5 percent for Vice President Joe Biden

There is a good chance, I think, that Republicans overwhelmingly chose Obama's statement as the biggest lie (7.1 percent out of an available 9 percent) while Democrats chose Sarah Palin (61 percent out of an available 91 percent).

The takeaway from the poll:  The vast majority of PolitiFact readers who respond to something like the "Lie of the Year" survey are liberals/progressives.

It occurs to me that the percentages are not far from the proportion of liberals in the mainstream press.  Though I hold considerable doubt that *any* PolitiFact staffer has a perceptible lean toward the right.