Grading PolitiFact: Flopping on Gingrich's Libya flip

The writing, editing and rating process for Flip-O-Meter items is the same as the process for Truth-O-Meter items.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

Let's allow PolitiFact to set the stage:

Seemingly contradictory comments by Gingrich about the wisdom of imposing a no-fly zone prompted a flurry of commentary on the Internet and on cable news shows. It got to the point where Gingrich felt he needed to address his apparent rhetorical contradiction in a Facebook post titled, "My position on Libya."

PolitiFact quotes two Gingrich responses to questions about the Libya situation.  As I often do during analysis, I'll use an expanded context and indicate the portions PolitiFact chose to quote by using yellow highlights.

The first statement occurred when Gingrich appeared on the Fox News Channel's On the Record w/Greta Van Susteren show on March 7, 2011:

VAN SUSTEREN: Which is not insignificant, and I'll get to that in a moment. But first let me ask you about Libya. It's in the news. The president has said that military options with NATO are not off the table. What would you do about Libya?

GINGRICH: Exercise a no-fly zone this evening, communicate to the Libyan military that Qaddafi was gone and that the sooner they switch sides, the more like they were to survive, provided help to the rebels to replace him. I mean, the idea that we're confused about a man who has been an anti-American dictator since 1969 just tells you how inept this administration is. They were very quick to jump on Mubarak, who was their ally for 30 years, and they were confused about getting rid of Qaddafi. This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with. 

VAN SUSTEREN: And why do you think -- you say you think it's ineptitude is why the pause or there's different political... 

GINGRICH: Look... 

VAN SUSTEREN: ... or different diplomacy? 

GINGRICH: I think the most generous comment would be ineptitude. It's also an ideological problem. The United States doesn't need anybody's permission. We don't need to have NATO, who frankly, won't bring much to the fight. We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening. And we don't have to send troops. All we have to do is suppress his air force, which we could do in minutes. And then we have to say publicly that he is gone, that the military should switch sides now, and we should help the rebels. And if that means getting them weapons or whatever it means, the fact that there's no more Libyan air power and the fact that the United States has publicly come out for decisively replacing him, I suspect the military will dump him.

PolitiFact appropriately used an ellipsis in joining Gingrich's two separate passages, unlike a recent case involving PolitiFact Ohio.  But I digress.  Susteren asks Gingrich what he would do ("What would you do about Libya?"), not what he would have done, and Gingrich answers that he would immediately institute a no-fly zone and work until Qaddafi is gone from power.

The second statement occurred  on the Today show on NBC with Matt Lauer from March 23 (transcript mine, based partly on closed caption version):

LAUER:

Over the weekend you said you wanted the president to answer four questions so you could understand why he committed military resources to Libya.  The first of those questions, what is Obama's standard for deciding to intervene. Over the last couple of days have you been able to answer your own question?

GINGRICH: 

No.  I mean, the standard he has fallen back to, of humanitarian intervention, could apply to Sudan, uh, to North Korea, to Zimbabwe, uh, to Syria this week, uh, to Yemen, to Bahrain.  I mean, this isn't a serious standard.  This is a public relations conversation.

LAUER: 

But on Thursday of last week, Mr. Gingrich, Moammar Gadhafi said publicly that his troops were headed to Benghazi and that he was going to, uh, basically go into closets and find people.  And, and, basically it sounded like he was promising some kind of real slaughter.  Should the president have stood by and done nothing during that moment? The UN asked for help.

GINGRICH: 

Well, first of all, the president of the United States doesn't report to the United Nations.  He works with the U.S. Congress.  I think the fact that this president has not, in a serious way, consulted Congress, is not looking at American interests. Uh, the Arab League wanted us to do something. The minute we did, (suddenly?) the Arab League began criticizing us doing it.  I, I think that two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is a lot.  I think that the problems we have in Pakistan, Egypt, uh, Yemen go, go around the region.  We, we could get engaged by this standard in all sorts of places.  Sudan has been killing--the Sudanese government has been killing people in Darfur for years and years and somehow all the major powers avoided thinking about it.  I'm just suggesting to you there's no standard here.  The president said on March 3 Gadhafi has to go. Well, they're now saying this is a humanitarian intervention, which is nonsense.  If this, if this is not designed to get rid of Gadhafi then this, this makes no sense at all.

LAUER: 

Well, let me ask you this.  The other two questions, or twoMoammar Gadhafi be the definition of success, and what should we be willing to do to accomplish it?

GINGRICH: 

Well. given this president who has said publicly Gadhafi should go, it seems to me, I, I--it's his decision.  That he's the one who said that.

LAUER: 

But are you in favor of that?  Do you think Moammar Gadhafi has to go as a result of this military intervention ?

GINGRICH:
I think that now -- let me draw a distinction.  I would not have intervened.  I think there were a lot of other ways to affect Gadhafi.  I think there are a lot of allies in the region we could have worked with.  I would not have used American and European forces.

(crosstalk)

 

LAUER:

Well you can't put that genie back in the bottle. We are there now.  Should that now be part of the mission?

GINGRICH: 

Having decided to go there, if Gadhafi does not leave power, it will be a defeat for the United States, it will lengthen our engagement, it will increase our costs. And notice, by the way, at least according to this morning's papers, the White House refuses to even tell Congress whether they're gonna ask for supplemental to pay for the war.  So, I'm just suggesting to you, they currently are in an argument with our allies over who runs the war.  They are currently not willing to tell Congress how it's going to cost or who's going to pay for it.  They can't agree internally on what their goals are.  Uh, this is about as badly run as any foreign operation we have seen in our lifetime.

LAUER: 

Let me take it one step further.  If you think that now success has to be determined by the removal of Gadhafi, how far should we be willing to go?  He stood on a balcony last night, apparently at his residence in Tripoli and said to his supporters below "I am here, I am here, I am here." Based on that information it would only take a matter of seconds for a cruise missile to join him there.  Should we kill Moammar Gadhafi ?

GINGRICH: 

I think when you are facing an enemy who is trying to kill your people you should take whatever steps are necessary to defeat him.  We had no compunction about trying to target Saddam Hussein.  Uh, I think the idea--we should be very clear to the, to the Libyans that Gadhafi is going to go.  We should, uh, obviously we're now in this.  That doesn't mean we should put in ground forces.  We should help equip the Libyan rebels.  It means that they ought to have coordinated air strikes.  They ought to do what is necessary to win.  I would let the military determine what is necessary to win, the CIA and others help engage in it, I'd try to get Arab allies in the fight as fast as possible.

Contradiction, juxtaposed with the statement to Van Susteren?  Flip-flop?  Many seemed to think so.

PolitiFact:

In the blogosphere, critics on both the left and the right charged that Gingrich had flip-flopped. The liberal blog ThinkProgress wrote that "there is no other reasonable explanation for Gingrich’s complete flip-flop" than "opportunism and news media publicity." At the conservative blog site Hot Air, the anonymous AllahPundit suggested that Gingrich’s comments amounted to a flip-flop and asked, "Is this anti-Obama pandering or just a big misunderstanding?"

That's two votes for calling it a flip-flop from opposite ends of the political spectrum.  But are they correct?

PolitiFact acknowledges that Gingrich eventually made a statement to clarify his remarks, saying that after President Obama said Gadhafi must go that the United States limited its viable options.  Failing to oust Gadhafi after declaring that he had to go would amount to a defeat in the eyes of the world.  Hot Air's Allahpundit found Gingrich's explanation lacking but did not provide much of an argument in support of his skepticism.

PolitiFact concurred with Allahpundit and tried to make the case:

Gingrich has not persuaded us that his comments were consistent. The best evidence supporting Gingrich’s explanation is that he did raise some of the themes from his Facebook post during the interview with Today. Gingrich reminded Lauer that "the president said on March 3rd Gadhafi has to go," and he raised the possibility that a  failure could be harmful to the United States’ standing. "Having decided to go there, if Gadhafi does not leave power it will be a defeat for the United States," Gingrich told Lauer. "It will lengthen our engagement, it will increase our costs."

However, if Gingrich’s position is that he was making two separate arguments -- a hypothetical one about what he would have done prior to Obama’s March 3 statement, and a practical one about what he would do once the U.S. had crossed the Rubicon of advocating Gadhafi’s ouster -- he didn’t do a very clear job of explaining himself. In neither interview did he frame the arguments in that fashion. So we think it’s reasonable for viewers to conclude that he’d flip-flopped on the issue of imposing a no-fly zone.

It's fair for PolitiFact to charge Gingrich with a failure to achieve crystalline clarity with his remarks.  On the other hand, to whatever extent Gingrich's remarks were ambiguous rather than logically self-contradictory he is reasonably entitled to that important principle of literary interpretation that PolitiFact often neglects to employ:  the principle of charitable interpretation.  If Gingrich explains himself plausibly then he earns the benefit of the doubt via that principle.  And then there's PolitiFact's own principle of the burden of proof.  If PolitiFact is to claim that Gingrich flip-flopped then it bears the responsibility for making the demonstration--and mere skepticism of Gingrich's claim will not support that burden.

How did PolitiFact do with respect to the evidence?

Not so good.  PolitiFact charged Gingrich with failing to frame his arguments in terms of scenarios before and after March 3.  But the context in both instances supports Gingrich to the point that he shouldn't need to be specific.  As noted above, Van Susteren asked Gingrich what he would do (as of March 7), not what he would have done if presented with the Libyan rebellion from scratch.  And during the interview with Lauer, the context likewise makes clear that Gingrich referred to differing scenarios contingent on the stated need to remove Gadhafi.  When Gingrich starts by saying "I think that now--" prior to saying he would not have intervened, he makes it sufficiently clear that his subsequent distinction ("I would not have intervened") creates the two scenarios PolitiFact fails to find obvious.  Lauer's followup, "you can't put that genie back in the bottle" brings Gingrich back to the explanation of what he would do now (as of  the date of the interview).

It really isn't that complicated.  Sure, mere anonymous conservative blogger Allahpundit had the same trouble, but PolitiFact is staffed by professional journalists.  No comparison, right?

PolitiFact's conclusion:

Gingrich has a point that Obama’s March 3 declaration about Gadhafi had consequences, and if Gingrich had provided that context of his thinking in both interviews, he could have made a reasonable argument that the two statements were consistent. However, Gingrich didn’t clarify his comments in that way until after he started taking heat for having flip-flopped. Because he didn’t, we give him a Full Flop.

The conclusion represents yet another example of PolitiFallacious reasoning, if we apply to PolitiFact the principles it would apply to others.  Gingrich bore his burden of proof by providing a logically consistent method of understanding his remarks.   PolitiFact, failing to find Gingrich's explanation clear in his original statements, concludes that the statements represent a 180 degree change in stance.  It is a form of the fallacy of the appeal to ignorance.  If PolitiFact's fails to detect evidence showing the statements are consistent then PolitiFact concludes that they are not consistent.

Argumentum ad Ignorantiam: (appeal to ignorance) the fallacy that a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proved false or that it is false simply because it has not been proved true. This error in reasoning is often expressed with influential rhetoric.

lander.philosophy.edu

The fallacy is compounded, of course, by the fact that PolitiFact did detect evidence in support of Gingrich's explanation.  It wasn't as much evidence as PolitiFact should have found, but it certainly ought to have discouraged PolitiFact from committing an informal fallacy.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

Conclusions based jointly on the failure to pay proper attention to context and commission of informal fallacies will not result in passing grades.


Afters:

Just to reinforce for the reader PolitiFact's failure according to its own standards:

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?  


Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.


Burden of proof -- People who make factual claims are accountable for their words and should be able to provide evidence to back them up. We will try to verify their statements, but we believe the burden of proof is on the person making the statement.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

PolitiFact is people who make factual claims, such as "Pants on Fire" and "Full Flop."  Any time the final "Truth-O-Meter" rating is based on the subject's failure to bear the burden of proof, PolitiFact is engaged in rank hypocrisy.


March 29, 2011:  Moved the word "clear" to a better spot in one of the sentences in the paragraph preceding the definition of "argumentum ad ignorantiam."   Sentences what makes sense is gooder than the others.