The "PolitiFact heuristic"

A thoughtful college student wrote a pretty good blog post about the usefulness of PolitiFact ratings.

Peter William Hurford overall does a handy job of pointing out the limited conclusions we can legitimately draw from "Truth-O-Meter" ratings, but ends up offering PolitiFact a bit too much credit.

The problem stems from an early assumption:

Enter PolitiFact. PolitiFact is a website located at politifact.com that aims to “fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups”. Run by the St. Petersburg Times, an independent newspaper, PolitiFact elaborates on their history and promises “that no one is behind the scenes telling us what to write for someone else’s benefit. We are an independent, nonpartisan news organization. We are not beholden to any government, political party or corporate interest. We are proud to be able to say that we are independent journalists. And for that, we thank Nelson Poynter.”

Thus we probably have enough information to establish PolitiFact as reasonably trustworthy, and a sufficiently reliable source of information that we can draw upon it to approximate knowledge about the trustworthiness of candidates in a heuristic.

PolitiFact reliable?

Credit Hurford with using the language of caution ("probably" "sufficiently reliable"), but his premise about PolitiFact's reliability is a judgment call resting on little more than a presumption of PolitiFact's competence and fairness.

An abundance of anecdotal evidence shows PolitiFact failing journalistic standards as well as its own standards while strongly suggesting that PolitiFact exhibits the leftward ideological tilt we might expect from the typical aggregation of journalists.  Cases like one I wrote about hours ago, where two very similar fact checks essentially gave a pass to the lone Democratic Party entity involved would doubtless give a reasonable person like Hurford pause if he was aware of their existence.

I should emphasize again that Hurford's reasoning is mostly solid.  He does a good job of pointing out the types of conclusions the findings at PolitiFact would fail to reasonably support.  But at the bottom line, the "PolitiFact heuristic" is probably less useful than Hurford's earlier example of heuristic reasoning:  trusting elite opinions.

And an informed voter may well be more likely than the writers and editors at PolitiFact at identifying statements that discredit a candidate.