PolitiFact blew it again

The folks at PolitiFact can't even seem to check their mailbag without a breach of the principles of objective journalism.

PolitiFact's latest mailbag update features the following title:

"PolitiFact blew it again!"

PolitiFact's sift through its mailbag is true to type.  Publish a few praises, publish a few brickbats.

I recognized one of my posts to PolitiFact's FaceBook page among the brickbats:

"PolitiFact blew it again with the Social Security/Ponzi comparison. Many (most?) of Social Security's participants do not know how the program operates, and economists do not consider fraud a necessary component of Ponzi-style financing."

Hmmm.  I wrote "PolitiFact blew it again."  Did somebody else make the same criticism, that it appeared as the title with an exclamation point grafted on at the end?

As it happens, nobody expressed the idea that PolitiFact "blew it" with a similar phrase.  Therefore, PolitiFact's title breaks with the normal standards of print journalism by adding the exclamation point.  If a journalist hears a person say "PolitiFact blew it again" in a loud voice, it is contrary to the standards of objective writing to add an exclamation point.  Instead, the journalist has the option of factually describing how the speaker raised their voice.

The transgression is no less notable in quoting the written word.

Why would a journalist add an exclamation point contrary to the standards of objective writing?

Maybe it's not objective writing.

Ignorance is one excuse.  Maybe the writer and editor simply do not know that objective writing does not permit that type of gamesmanship.  Regardless of whether ignorance was involved, the result fails to qualify as objective.

Perhaps writer and editor are acutely aware that their work is not objective journalism?

If that were the case it would still not excuse the breach of style.  Even opinion journalists are expected to reproduce quotations without altering them other than to match AP style.

The unavoidable conclusion? The mailbag piece was not objective journalism.

Now the question:  Given the downside of altering the quotation, why was it done?

Most likely the exclamation point was added as a signal to the reader that a person who says that PolitiFact "blew it" is emotional about it--the sort of person who we might expect would yell "PolitiFact blew it again!" if provided the opportunity to express the idea audibly.  It can't hurt to make the criticisms look like they come from unhinged loons.

My statement that PolitiFact blew its story about Ponzi schemes was a matter-of-fact statement accompanied by verifiable supporting statements.  And I'd have no need to yell in making the point, assuming anything resembling an attentive audience.

There's at least one charitable interpretation that replaces sinister non-objective intent with minor incompetence.  Perhaps an early draft of the story contained the exact quotation used in the title but the second quotation was cut during the editing process and the team simply didn't get around to altering the title to match the quotation they used.

For what it's worth, here's the quotation complete with context:

If a representative of PolitiFact had visited the provided link they might have had the opportunity to read something like this:

The strategies we investigate are perfect foresight versions of the "Ponzi schemes" discussed by Minsky (1982) and Kindleberger (1978), where individuals or companies pay out funds to some parties by borrowing funds from others.  Since the perfect foresight assumption rules out schemes based on imperfect information (e.g., swindles), or irrationality of lenders (e.g., fallacies of composition), we are asking under what circumstances these Ponzi games can continue indefinitely.  When, in other words, is it feasible for a government to incur debt and never pay back any principal or interest?  We call such a policy, where all principal repayments and interest are forever "rolled over," i.e., financed by issuing new debt, a "rational Ponzi game."

The quotation, from the International Economic Review journal, unequivocally illustrates the use of the term "Ponzi" to describe systems like Social Security without any necessary reference to fraud or inevitable collapse.

PolitiFact publishes the criticism, at least in part, but never addresses it.