The issue:
The fact checkers:
Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Greg Joyce: editor
Analysis:
Even when PolitiFact botches its "Truth-O-Meter" rating, its stories often provide valuable information to help inform readers.
Unfortunately, this item fails to seize a golden opportunity to do just that. Writer/researcher Louis Jacobson gets lost on a superficial check of the wooden literal meaning of the claims about gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum coming from rival candidate Alex Sink ("Approved by Alex Sink, Democrat, for governor") and the Florida Democratic Party.
Jacobson has all the information he ought to need in order to pin down the argument underlying the ad. That is, that McCollum's votes for pay raises supposedly make him of a kind with the Washington politicians who have fired the ire of so many voters. The ad is saying McCollum is, in short, a big spending politician and takes care of himself first. Jacobson resists putting a toe in those waters in favor of sticking with the aforementioned literal claim. So let's follow him on his rather brief fact-checking journey:
Today we look at an anti-McCollum response ad aired by the Florida Democratic Party. The ad begins with footage of McCollum telling reporters, "I'm proud of my record of having been a congressman."It's almost surprising that Jacobson quotes the last line, for all the attention he gives it.
A voice-over continues, "Really? Well, Bill McCollum, you cost the rest of us billions. He voted four times to raise his own pay. $51,000. Our tax money pays his congressional pension. Over $75,000 dollars a year. The national debt skyrocketed. $4.7 trillion. McCollum voted for debt-limit increases five times. Bill McCollum. Just another Washington politician Florida can't afford."
(blue highlights added)
Jacobson deals with the pay raise issue in four short paragraphs. Here are the first two:
In a footnote to the advertisement, the Florida Democratic Party provided bill numbers and dates showing the votes that enabled congressional salaries to increase. We checked the four votes -- in 1989, 1997, 1999 and 2000 -- with roll call records and confirmed that McCollum did vote yes in all four cases.I highlighted in blue a portion of the first paragraph because Jacobson misrepresented the facts. But before the explanation, note that Jacobson does something important with respect to the 1989 vote--a vote that did, in fact, enable congressional salaries to increase. Jacobson noted that the bill was not just about raising congressional salaries. And without explaining much more than that about the 1989 bill, Jacobson assisted Alex Sink and the Florida Democratic Party in providing a misleading picture of Bill McCollum. Gotta love that fact-checking stuff.
In the case of the 1989 bill -- which combined landmark ethics reforms with a pay raise of more than 30 percent over two years -- McCollum praised the bill when it was introduced, saying that it's "not about a pay raise -- it's about good government. ... It's about changing the ethical climate of Congress.
(blue highlights added)"
As Jacobson's second paragraph mentioned, quoting McCollum, the 1989 bill was an ethics reform bill. Low congressional salaries were thought to make members of congress more susceptible to the temptations of bribery and undue influence, so the bill instituted a major pay raise culminating in a 25 percent increase in Jan. 1991 while setting a number of restrictions on member income outside of the federal salary.
The bill had one other feature that was critical to the issue of congressional salaries. The law called for an automatic pay raise according to a percentage dictated by a formula based on the income of "general service" employees of the federal government. The pay raise was automatic, that is, unless a bill passed preventing or reducing the pay adjustment.
With automatic annualized pay raises, then, that rat Bill McCollum must have been even greedier than the Democrats painted him, voting himself raises above and beyond the automatic annual raise.
Actually, no.
Apart from the 1989 bill, the three votes where McCollum supposedly voted to raise his pay were votes to "order the previous question." The arcane rules of the House forestall taking up a subsequent issue once such an order passes, including a vote to prohibit the annual pay adjustment. In fairness to the Florida Democratic Party and PolitiFact, it is possible to see that type of vote as a vote for a pay raise, despite the fact that no vote at all is needed to obtain the raise. The pay raise is automatic if not turned down, after all. But it's hard to see this PolitiFact story as a legitimate fact check when it fails to even mention these relevant details.
Perhaps Jacobson was worried about confusing readers with the facts, such as the fact that McCollum voted with the winning side on four occasions to refuse the pay raise and on one other occasion voted to reduce it (the last bill was vetoed by President Clinton). So McCollum voted to refuse pay raises as many times as he voted to accept them. Did the Florida Democratic Party forget to mention that? We expect that type of omission from a political opponent. What's PolitiFact's excuse?
Two paragraphs to go:
As for the amount of the salary increase, the ad actually understates it. Before the 1989 vote, congressional salaries were $89,500. On Jan. 1, 2001 -- two days before McCollum's final term officially ended -- congressional salaries went up to $145,100. That's a difference of $55,600, a bit higher than the $51,000 stated in the ad.The Democrats were probably too aboveboard to count a pay raise that McCollum never received to any significant degree against him, so leave that to PolitiFact. Anybody up for pro-rating the received amount of a $3800 adjustment on annual salary? I suppose we could count the 2001 raise against McCollum based on any expectation he had of winning his 2000 senatorial campaign, since the ethics reform measure from 1989 ended up making House and Senate pay equal while setting for each body the same criteria for annual adjustments. Though if we're doing that we might as well blame McCollum for raises he sought for a long and illustrious career in the Senate and project them well into the future. We might achieve a number approaching $250,000.
The McCollum campaign points out that on several of these votes, a majority of Florida's Democratic Congressional delegation voted the same way McCollum did, and we think that's fair context to add. But looking specifically at the Democratic ad's charge, this part of the claim is accurate.
Sink and PolitiFact double-bill McCollum. His votes in 1997, 1999 and 2000 simply cleared the way for the annual adjustment he voted for in 1989, and even the adjustments that took place without a vote, such as in 1990, get counted against McCollum in tabulating the total pay raises he received. That means that even if no votes on pay adjustment had been taken in 1997, 1999 and 2000 the total raise would have been exactly the same. And Sink could still have blamed the entire $51,000 in raises on McCollum's one vote in 1989.
Jacobson went on to verify that McCollum receives a federal pension in excess of $75,000. That seems pretty tame compared to the income Sink has received since retiring in her 50s. It seems like a weak case to argue from the pension amount that McCollum is a typical Washington politician that Florida can ill afford.
That conclusion was also supposed to follow from McCollum's voting record on salary increases. But given the entire set of facts about the pay raises, McCollum looks pretty good for a Washington politician, and maybe even pretty good compared to a Florida banking executive. There really isn't much to look at, here.
But one would never know this based on the information provided by our glorious PolitiFact. Jacobson and Joyce averted their eyes from the underlying argument.
Jacobson and PolitiFact skipped a golden opportunity to inform readers about congressional pay and placed undue focus on a literal statement that is technically only partly true. PolitiFact ended up treating that literal statement as if it was perfectly true. That's not fact checking.
Update:
Readers may be forgiven for taking my initial analysis with a grain of salt. How do I know all this stuff that PolitiFact supposedly forgot to mention?
The answer is quite simple: I chose a much better resource from which to get my information. PolitiFact used a CRS report with only bare bones information included. I used a CRS report that did a fairly thorough job on the history of congressional raises since the 1970s.
Look at the report PolitiFact used and compare it to the CRS report I used and there really is no comparison. PolitiFact did only enough digging to give the appearance of confirming the misleading ad.
My apologies to all for belatedly revealing the source of my information.
My apologies to all for belatedly revealing the source of my information.
The grades:
Louis Jacobson: F
Greg Joyce: F
Jacobson gets his "F" for reporting while blind.
Joyce earns his "F" for trusting the reporter too much. The reporter missed the story, and the editor has to share that blame. An editor ought to know that bills are rarely one-issue affairs. Any amount of digging on that detail would have produced the story, minus an agenda to hide the story.
Afters:
Am I the only one who thought the push-back from the McCollum campaign seemed awfully weak? The campaign had an opportunity for a robust defense of McCollum's voting record. What appeared in print was feeble. Who cares if Democrats voted the same way? They were Washington politicians, too, which was the point of the ad in the first place. If PolitiFact reported the response fairly then the McCollum campaign needs to learn to deal with attack ads more effectively.
Correction 10/31/2012: Fixed spelling of "PolitiFact" from my earlier update
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