PolitiFact picks surprise winner for its 2011 "Lie of the Year" award

The claim that Republicans voted to end Medicare receives PolitiFact's Lie of the Year for 2011.

I'm calling it a surprise, given my effort to handicap the selection back in early December.

I reasoned that PolitiFact would have some impulse to choose a "lie" from the Democrats to help preserve the impression of nonpartisanship, and I discounted statements likely to harm President Obama in the coming election.

Unfortunately, I did a poor job of distinguishing between the result of a poll for readers and PolitiFact's selection for Lie of the Year.  PolitiFact doesn't publish the ordering of its 10 finalists.  It simply announces the winner.

I chose Debbie Wasserman Schultz as the likely winner for Democrats, and I chose the eventual winner to vie with Schultz's statement.  And there was an interesting wrinkle in PolitiFact's reasoning:

As we were concluding our reporting for our Lie of the Year story last week, Ryan announced that he was altering his plan and would retain an option for people to stay in traditional Medicare if they want.

His announcement of a bipartisan effort with Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., changes the dynamic in the polarized debate and could increase the likelihood that Congress adopts his approach.
Matt Miller, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, wrote that Ryan "has plausibly inoculated his party against a full-frontal Mediscare campaign. Or at least he gives Republicans a credible rebuttal to neutralize it."

But Ryan's latest tactic doesn't affect our decision on Lie of the Year. The statements made about his original plan were clearly inaccurate, they were repeated by many Democrats and they perpetuated a 60-year tactic in using false claims to scare seniors.

Ryan's "latest tactic" (intriguing choice of words, that) decreases the chance that PolitiFact's selection will affect the coming election.  That aspect of the outcome matches the thinking I used in handicapping the selection.

PolitiFact surprises, however, by choosing an item that many on the political left continue to regard as a perfectly true claim.  And that claim, like the two LOTY winners that preceded it, does have a little more truth to it than PolitiFact's  rating might suggest.  PolitiFact, after all, has never revealed an objective criterion for ruling a statement "Pants on Fire."

The decision is likely to decrease public trust in PolitiFact's findings, particularly for PolitiFact's most devoted fans.

As for the reader vote, there was only one surprise:  that the statement PolitiFact editors chose as their winner finished as high as it did.  I was correct that only one statement from a Democrat finished in the top five.


Dec. 22, 2011:  Corrected link in final paragraph.  Hat tip to Jeff Dyberg for catching the broken link.