Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney's Obama ad and talking about the economy (Updated x2))

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.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

PolitiFact delivered on the above principle this time--after a fashion.


The issue

On occasion I'll provide an expanded clip of PolitiFact's visual presentation of the story to help emphasize the way our supposed fact checkers mislead the audience.

This is another of those times.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

PolitiFact sends the message that it is beyond merely false that Barack Obama said "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

This is an amazingly inept effort by PolitiFact.

You've been warned.

PolitiFact:

On the eve of a presidential trip to New Hampshire on Nov. 22, 2011, Mitt Romney’s campaign released an ad targeting President Barack Obama. In the ad, the Romney campaign used a quote that prompted an immediate counterattack from the Obama camp, which argued that it had been taken out of context.

Wait a minute.  The Obama camp complained about the quotation being taken out of context?  So Obama actually said what Romney claimed he said?   What about the headline and deck material making it look the opposite?  What about that "Pants on Fire" rating when PolitiFact's rating system until recently had a category for accurate statements that take things out of context ("Half True")?

What's going on here?  Jacobson had better come through with a spectacular explanation for this one.

PolitiFact:

The 60-second ad, called "Believe in America," is designed to contrast "candidate Obama from 2008 with President Obama of today," highlighting "his failures in between," according to the Romney campaign.

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."

The ad then has a clip of Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose."

PolitiFact fails to make clear that every one of Obama's words come from that same 2008 campaign speech. And the Romney ad prefaces the quotations with the year in which they were made:  2008.

Here's the ad:



The ad contains nothing to cue the viewer that Obama was speaking about the 2012 election in the last clip.  Paying attention to the context, the viewer is left to figure out what Obama was talking about in 2008.  Obviously Obama isn't talking about his own re-election prospects on Oct. 16, 2008--not in those words.  Obama hadn't been elected at that point. The election didn't take place until November of that year.

PolitiFact somehow fails to see it:

The clear implication is that Obama believes that his economic record is so bad that he will lose in 2012 unless he can steer the conversation away from the economy.

Why would Obama have any beliefs at all about his economic record as president way back in 2008?  This supposed "clear implication" occurs only if the viewer either ignores the context or has an unaccountably difficult time taking obvious clues from the context.  We're not in Sherlock Holmes territory, here.

But PolitiFact rolls with it:

But the Obama camp, among others, immediately charged that the clip was taken out of context. Was it?

Here’s what Obama said in the October 2008 speech, which came about two weeks before he defeated Sen. John McCain:

"Even as we face the most serious economic crisis of our time, even as you are worried about keeping your jobs or paying your bills or staying in your homes, my opponent's campaign announced earlier this month that they want to ‘turn the page’ on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead," Obama said in the speech. "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.’"

So the comment is drastically different than the way it's portrayed in the Romney ad. Obama was actually saying that his opponent’s campaign three years earlier had said, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." That context is not included in the Romney ad -- and leaving it out sends a profoundly different message.

1)  The claim from the Obama camp that the quotation was taken out of context deserves its own fact check. 

2)  PolitiFact is correct that Obama was referring to something said by the McCain campaign.

3)  PolitiFact is incorrect that omitting the context sends a profoundly different message.   I will illustrate.

Let's make it a 35 second ad instead of a 30 second ad, adding in the full quotation from Obama, and let PolitiFact explain it just like before:

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."

The ad then has a clip of Obama saying, "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.’"

What is the message of the ad with the context included?

No doubt someone could complain that in our augmented version Romney makes it look like McCain is saying that Obama can't get re-elected on his economic record.  But we can even make it a 45 second ad, including context sufficient to ensure that every viewer understands that McCain was talking about the economy in 2008 and the GOP prospects for the presidential election and it still doesn't change the point of the ad.

The point of the ad is that if it wasn't proper to run on the economy in 2008 then it's even worse to run on the economy in 2012, with many economic indicators far worse than they were in 2008.

And the fact that Obama mockingly brought up what the McCain campaign said pretty well confirms that Obama did not think the 2008 economy was good election material for the incumbent party.  Is Obama supposed to think otherwise in 2011-2012 with unemployment over 8 percent, the housing market still a shambles and an anemic growth rate?

That's the point of the ad.  It doesn't change with the context added.  And the fact that it doesn't change with the context added means that the quotation was not taken misleadingly out of context. 

PolitiFact, of course, fails to see it that way:

Our ruling

We certainly think it’s fair for Romney to attack Obama for his response to the economy. And the Romney camp can argue that Obama’s situation in 2011 is ironic considering the comments he made in 2008. But those points could have been made without distorting Obama’s words, which have been taken out of context in a ridiculously misleading way. We rate the Romney ad’s portrayal of Obama’s 2008 comments Pants on Fire.

Kudos to PolitiFact for at least admitting the real point of the ad is legitimate despite missing the real point.  Only viewers completely unable to appreciate the significance of Obama's remarks from 2008 could miss the real point of the ad.  The real point flies whether McCain said it of himself, whether McCain said it of Obama or whether Obama said it of himself.

In a situation like that no additional context is needed.  The Romney campaign was justified in omitting it.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

What can you say about a team that wrote a knee-jerk response to the Romney ad?  What can you say about a team that produced a presentation that makes it appear false that Obama said something that Obama did say?  What can you say about a team that corrupted the Truth-O-Meter's supposed grading system in favor of its subjective knee-jerk response?

They're journalists reporting badly.



Update:

ABC News serves up a handy reminder that PolitiFact isn't the only impossibly inept news source out there.  ABC ran the following under the headline "Mitt Romney ad misquotes President Obama":

Mitt Romney’s inaugural TV ad of the 2012 campaign aired today in New Hampshire just as President Obama traveled to the state, but the ad immediately came under fire from Democrats and fact-checkers for incorrectly quoting Obama.

The White House, the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s re-election campaign accused the Romney campaign today of unfairly twisting the president’s words.

We have people reporting the news who do not know what is and what is not a misquote.

It's stuff like this that makes it plain to so many, regardless of a want of an easy scientific proof, that the leftward tilt of media ideology results in left-tilted news reporting.


Update 2:

Jim Nolte at Big Journalism evaluated the Romney ad the same way I did, and he published first:

Watch Romney’s ad again. The point wasn’t “look at what Obama said!” The point was that the statement about talking about the economy is true when it comes to Obama.  You could add the full context and it might even hit Obama harder because of the obvious irony. Moreover, campaigns do this kind of thing all the time.

Word.

But don't expect PolitiFact to pay any attention to the criticism unless it is picked up and amplified by its primarily liberal fan base.