Grading PolitiFact: Paul Broun tweets on the Gummint

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.
--About PolitiFact

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor

Analysis:

Supposedly Paul Broun (R-Ga.) says government is a barrier to innovation and development.

Supposedly Broun says innovation would flower if government would get out of the way.

This is what Broun tweeted:

If the govt would get out of the way, we could have innovation and development

The first paraphrase of Broun ("government is a barrier to innovation and development") could pass as a universal rule.  Or it could pass as proverbial wisdom.  Or possibly as a recommendation applied to a specific set of circumstances.

The second paraphrase seems less like a universal rule and more like either proverbial wisdom or a recommendation applied to a specific set of circumstances.

How do we figure out which meaning matches Broun's intent?  The obvious first step, in keeping with PolitiFact's stated fact-checking policy, is to refer to the context.

Rep. Broun made a series of Twitter tweets during the president's State of the Union speech in January.

click to enlarge

The image above comes directly from Twitter.com, representing Broun's tweets.  Note that the tweets occur in reverse chronological order.  Knowing as we do that Broun was tweeting in response to President Obama's remarks, we can get an idea of the context of Broun's comments based on what was said by Obama at the time.  The tweet preceding the one in question contains an important keyword, "free enterprise," making it very likely that the 9:22 p.m. tweet was in response to the following portion of the president's address:

The first step in winning the future is encouraging American innovation. None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do -- what America does better than anyone else -- is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We’re the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It is how we make our living.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it's not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That's what planted the seeds for the Internet. That's what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs.

From here we can reasonably hypothesize that Broun's subsequent 9:23 p.m. tweet either followed from the same issue or from the president's immediately subsequent remarks.  And Broun's next tweet itself contains keywords ("innovation" and "growth") that may help us further narrow things down.  We find those terms represented conceptually in Obama's next two paragraphs:

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon.  The science wasn’t even there yet.  NASA didn’t exist.  But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment.  Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race.  And in a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal.  We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology -– (applause) -- an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

(yellow highlights added)

Obama's speech obviously acknowledged a primary role for free enterprise in producing innovation and growth.  But Obama placed most of his emphasis on the manner in which government may assist in terms of doing basic research.  Broun, taken charitably and reasonably, was pointing out how the government inhibits the admitted engine of innovation, basic research aside.

We find that PolitiFact apparently took Broun's statement as a universal rule.

Broun’s office didn’t get back to us to elaborate on the substance of his tweet, but it is based on the assumption that government stands in the way of innovation and development.

Is it based on that assumption?  And is the assumption a universal rule, a proverbial principle with exceptions, or a specific application?  PolitiFact leaves that unclear for a time before narrowing the focus a few paragraphs later:

(W)e wondered whether Broun was right that government, as a whole, is an impediment to innovation and development. So we looked at statistics and spoke to experts in the field.

Remarkable.  PolitiFact chose to fact check something very similar to the universal rule version of Broun's claim, in other words a version that Broun probably did not have in mind.  But instead of a universal rule, PolitiFact is checking whether the government is a help or impediment on balance--perhaps an even less realistic interpretation of Broun's statement.

The subsequent story is meaningless unless by some miracle PolitiFact gave Broun a reasonable interpretation.  Unfortunately the media professionals at PolitiFact elected to do the fact check without getting any explanation from Broun or his staff.  Not that the lack of an explanation excuses PolitiFact for jumping to conclusions.  It wasn't that hard to figure out without additional help from Broun.

In PolitiFact's third-to-last paragraph we finally see something that might qualify as an iota of doubt or a flicker of conscience:

Broun could hardly get into the details of his science policy preferences in a 140-character tweet, and it's possible he didn't mean that he wanted government to get out of scientific research entirely.

You think?  Let alone the fact that it's possible (that is, likely) that he didn't mean that he wanted government to get out of scientific research at all.  The point was that the engine of innovative progress as identified by President Obama is fitted with a governor (pun intended) in the form of government regulation in the form of the policies the president advocates when he isn't giving lip service to free markets.

PolitiFact's mistake would be understandable if the writer and editor neglected to examine the extended context of Broun's statement.  Though of course that would contradict PolitiFact's statement describing its standard methodology and is therefore impossible.  Or something like that.

PolitiFact:

But we still feel it’s fair to take his comment  to task. For starters, it was not an isolated comment -- the tweet we’re looking at here was just one of several he sent during the State of the Union that addressed the same theme, including "Entrepreneurship is great -- let's not kill it with taxes and regulations" and "Obama's policies kill free-enterprise."

Instead of allowing those comments to illuminate Broun's intent as I have described it above, PolitiFact uses comments from Broun about government restrictions on entrepreneurship as an excuse to suppose that Broun was necessarily including basic research.  That's pretty amazing, and given the failure of logic needed to reach PolitiFact's conclusion it is hard to ignore the hypothesis that political ideology left PolitiFact with a blind spot.  Obama drew the distinction between the private sector's knack for innovation and the government's role in stimulating it via basic research.  How much more obvious could it have been?

(P)ortraying business as good and government as bad has been a consistent Republican talking point. But to base a tweet on the assumption that the federal government is bad for innovation and development ignores that the federal government -- through its direct research spending, its tax credits and its indirect investments that support technological research -- plays a crucial role in pushing it forward, and one that is unlikely to be ever picked up by the private sector alone. So we rate the claim that the government is a barrier to innovation and development False.

Good grief.  There's no element of truth to it at all, then?

Barely True – The statement contains some element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

False – The statement is not accurate.

About PolitiFact

This "Truth-O-Meter" rating couldn't pass the sniff test from Betelgeuse.  PolitiFact had to tune out a quotation from one of its experts:

"Yes, the U.S. has the most dynamic and entrepreneurial economy in the world because it has less regulation and less top-down planning and micromanagement than other developed nations," said Margaret O'Mara, a historian at the University of Washington.

In its own story, PolitiFact embedded information that contradicts its conclusion.  That's inept in addition to giving fact checking a bad name.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F