PolitiFact leaves misleading fact check of Gerard Robinson mostly intact

Updating a past Grading PolitiFact post, PolitiFact Florida made minor changes to its fact check of Florida's ex-education commissioner, Gerard Robinson.

The major errors inexplicably remain.

What changed

PolitiFact Florida altered its quotation of Robinson, adding a pair of ellipses.  The original version drew quotations from three separate paragraphs and, using no ellipses, stuck three of Robinson's sentences together to give the appearance of a single paragraph.

Here's how the new version reads (bold emphasis added):

Robinson penned a June 15 response, which included these comments: "The FCAT neither drives the curriculum nor narrows the educational experience of Florida students. ... These assessments average two to three per student per school year and account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year. ... It is worth noting that local school boards require students to take many more assessments than those required by the state."

The changes still do not, so far as I can tell, conform to AP style for quotations.  Statements from separate paragraphs should show as separate paragraphs.

More importantly, what are we missing?


What didn't change

I spoke to PolitiFact editor Aaron Sharockman by phone last week.  I pointed out to him that Robinson had an entire paragraph dedicated to answering the charge that students spend too much time preparing for the FCAT. 

Here's that paragraph (bold emphasis added):

Florida's Next Generation Sunshine State Standards are the foundation for what we expect our students to learn. Subjects covered by Florida standards include English language arts, math, science, social studies, physical and health education, world languages, and fine arts along with other content areas specific to colleges and careers. Contrary to the claim of the FSBA resolution, the FCAT neither drives the curriculum nor narrows the educational experience of Florida students. In fact, at the middle school level, student enrollment in courses such as dance, drama, and world languages has increased more than student enrollment in the subject areas assessed on the FCAT. At the high school level, enrollment in dance, world languages and the humanities has outpaced the growth in student enrollment.

Robinson obviously stresses the point that it is appropriate for students to spend a great deal of time preparing for the FCAT since the FCAT measures "what we expect our students to learn."

PolitiFact omitted Robinson's point from its story.  No quotation.  No paraphrase.  Nothing.

I spoke to Sharockman again today.  I said I received the impression that he agreed with me that Robinson had stressed that it was appropriate to spend a great deal of time preparing for the FCAT.  I asked whether I had received a false impression.  Sharockman said that he did not recall agreeing about Robinson's point and said he thought I had received a false impression.

How does one miss Robinson's point in the above paragraph and then omit it in a fact check story about that same subject?

How does one miss it even after a critical review?


Beyond incompetence?

The update notice provided with the story after the ellipses were added doesn't quite ring true:

Update: During the editing process, ellipses were inadvertently left out of Robinson's comments of June 15. The ellipses are now included.

I alerted the writer and editor by email about the problem with the quotation before 1 p.m. the day after the story published.  The story published on July 30 at 11:53 a.m.  By Friday, Aug. 3, the problem still stems from an inadvertent omission during the editing process?

Something's broken at PolitiFact.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Gerard Robinson and the FCAT (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

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

Readers should already find themselves wondering whether "FCAT tests" represents the time spent taking the test itself or the time spent preparing for the test.  PolitiFact uses ambiguous wording.  Yet why would we expect the test itself to take more than 1 percent of a year's instructional time?


The fact checkers:

Amy Sherman:  writer, researcher
Angie Drobnic Holan:  editor

Analysis:

Put bluntly, this item isn't fact checking.  It is a disservice to Gerard Robinson and PolitiFact's readers.

PolitiFact:

Reflecting a backlash against testing, more than a dozen individual school boards in the state, including Broward and Palm Beach, have passed a resolution against the FCAT. The Florida School Boards Association passed its own version of a resolution criticizing the FCAT in June.

Robinson penned a June 15 response, which included these comments: "The FCAT neither drives the curriculum nor narrows the educational experience of Florida students. These assessments average two to three per student per school year and account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year. It is worth noting that local school boards require students to take many more assessments than those required by the state."

If PolitiFact follows AP style for quotations, the above represents a breach of style guidelines.  Here's how the quotation would look according to AP style:

"The FCAT neither drives the curriculum nor narrows the educational experience of Florida students. 

. . . These assessments average two to three per student per school year and account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year.

. . . It is worth noting that local school boards require students to take many more assessments than those required by the state."

PolitiFact:

There are a few interesting claims in Robinson’s statement, but the one that caught our eye was that tiny figure: The FCAT accounts for "less than 1 percent of instructional time." Heck, we wonder if lunch or recess could add up to more than 1 percent. So we decided to research whether Robinson’s 1 percent claim was correct.

PolitiFact reports that Robinson's office backed up his claim with numbers showing that the amount of time spent taking the test amounts to .26 to .90 of the state-mandated minimum of 900 hours of instructional time.

So Robinson's claim was true?  PolitiFact doesn't see it that way:

But Robinson used the phrase "instructional time" in his claim, which could fairly be interpreted to mean classroom time spent preparing for the test.

Yes, Robinson used the phrase "instructional time" in his claim, but it isn't fair to interpret it to mean classroom time spent preparing for the test.

"Instructional time" has a particular meaning in education.  It means the time students spending doing learning activities under a teacher's direction. 

Robinson addressed three specific points with his press release.  The FCAT program is allegedly too expensive, dominates the curriculum and hinders student success.

Robinson addresses the first point by framing FCAT expense in terms of its percentage of state and local investment in the schools.  He deals with the second point in the next paragraph:

Florida's Next Generation Sunshine State Standards are the foundation for what we expect our students to learn. Subjects covered by Florida standards include English language arts, math, science, social studies, physical and health education, world languages, and fine arts along with other content areas specific to colleges and careers. Contrary to the claim of the FSBA resolution, the FCAT neither drives the curriculum nor narrows the educational experience of Florida students. In fact, at the middle school level, student enrollment in courses such as dance, drama, and world languages has increased more than student enrollment in the subject areas assessed on the FCAT. At the high school level, enrollment in dance, world languages and the humanities has outpaced the growth in student enrollment.

PolitiFact ignores this context and tries to make it look like Robinson is saying that the schools spend very little time trying to prepare students for the FCAT.  The above paragraph from Robinson unequivocally puts the lie to the journalists' frame.  He addressed the issue by saying that the test measures things that students ought to spend much of their time learning.

Obviously, then, Robinson was not trying to say that students spend less than 1 percent of their instructional time preparing for the FCAT.  That would argue against his preceding paragraph. 

PolitiFact just ignored the context.

In fact, Robinson's 1 percent figure is more accurate the more time students spend preparing for the FCAT, if one insists on suggesting that he used "instructional time" to refer to test preparation.  For review (bold emphasis added):  "These assessments average two to three per student per school year and account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year."  If students spend as little as half of their instructional time on the FCAT then the estimate for time spent on the assessments rises to a range between .52 and 1.8 percent--still in the neighborhood of 1 percent if we willfully ignore Robinson's clear explanation.

PolitiFact appears to conflate the "assessments" with the "instructional time" somehow.  As one is used as a percentage of the other, that path leads to a spectacularly failed fact check.

PolitiFact devotes considerable space to quotations complaining about the FCAT, but none of it addresses Robinson's claim.  We can skip on to the wondrous conclusion consisting of four short paragraphs plus a "False" rating.

One:

Robinson said that the FCAT tests "account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year." This was a prepared statement, based on research done by his staff, in response to FCAT critics who say that schools devote too much time to the tests.

Right, but Robinson addressed the critics' point in his preceding paragraph.

Two:

Readers could assume that by "instructional time" Robinson was including regular lesson time in the classroom preparing for the FCAT. He wasn’t. His office says that referred to the number of minutes taking the test out of the total minutes of instruction per year. But he didn’t provide that explanation in his statement.

Robinson may have assumed that those reading his statement have the ability to read.  PolitiFact doesn't explain why people would be seriously misled if they believed taking the FCAT test constituted less than 1 percent of the preparation time.  The smaller the percentage the greater the preparation time by proportion.

It is doubtful PolitiFact could make a coherent case that Robinson was minimizing the preparation time for the test, assuming it would even make the attempt.

Three:

In reality, there is no clear way to quantify how much time teachers spend preparing students for the test. Some teachers say they spend practically all their time on the FCAT.

If all of the teachers spend all of their time on the FCAT then Robinson's statement is perfectly accurate and students spend less than 1 percent of their instructional time taking the assessment.  There's nothing here to use against Robinson's accuracy or veracity.

Four:

Robinson’s goal was to deflect criticism that too much time is spent "teaching to the test." He is suggesting that the FCAT eats up only a smidgen of a school year. But for students, parents and teachers who spend months preparing for those tests, Robinson’s words are misleading.

PolitiFact completely missed Robinson's point by ignoring the context.  The fact check doesn't make a lick of sense.  Robinson's words are misleading if one ignores context, grammar, syntax and logic.


The grades:

Amy Sherman:  F
Angie Drobnic Holan:  F

This case perhaps makes up PolitiFact's penultimate train-wreck to date.  PolitiFact owes Robinson an apology and a front page correction notice.


Update Aug. 1, 2012:

 Gerard Robinson responds to PolitiFact Florida:

In this article, PolitiFact agreed that evidence provided to them by the Department of Education verified the accuracy of my statement when taken in this context.  However, PolitiFact claims my statement was made to deflect criticism that too much time is spent “teaching to the test.”  If this were true, I would agree with PolitiFact’s conclusion.  However, since PolitiFact misrepresents the context of my statement, I rate their finding as False.

Update 2, August 3, 2012:

A Band-Aid for the severed head:  PolitiFact modifies the quotation with the insertion of two ellipses--and no correction notice (at least as of now).

Robinson penned a June 15 response, which included these comments: "The FCAT neither drives the curriculum nor narrows the educational experience of Florida students. ... These assessments average two to three per student per school year and account for less than 1 percent of the instructional time provided during the year. ... It is worth noting that local school boards require students to take many more assessments than those required by the state."

The correction is not quite compliant with AP style by my reading, as the AP Stylebook's example shows a line of space between the sentences prior to the insertion of the ellipse when one pulls sentences from different paragraphs..

That's a minor point, of course.  The story remains incoherent.  The head is still severed and the body is bleeding out through the neck.

Grading PolitiFact: More unprecedented Obama

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

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Amy Sherman:  writer, researcher
Angie Drobnic Holan:  editor


Analysis:

One would think that persons paying close attention to the specific wording of a claim would accurately note the difference between "outspent" and "out-raised."

PolitiFact give an accurate enough account of the statement from President Obama and its context in a fundraising letter.

Then comes the odd turn:

We researched whether Obama’s team could be outraised by Romney and concluded that there are too many unknowns to determine if his prediction will come true. (Read our extended analysis of the issue.)

It's okay to research whether Mitt Romney would outraise Mr. Obama so long as one maintains the distinction between raising money and spending it.  Certainly it's far easier to outspend an opponent if one has raised more money.

The fact check proceeds to focus on fundraising and concludes that presidential challengers Ronald Reagan and Bob Dole outraised the incumbent in 1980 and 1996 respectively.

The issue of spending gets somehow misplaced along the way and we end up with the following conclusion (bold emphasis added):

Obama was wrong to suggest that there hadn’t been other presidents in modern history to be outraised in their re-elections. Looking at numbers alone, Carter and Clinton fall into that category. But what we are comparing is  primary races then with total fundraising for the general election now.

We think 1980 and 1996 certainly fall under "modern history," but the campaign finance picture has changed dramatically since then, and there are important caveats to those races. Those earlier races involved public financing -- this time Obama and Romney are forgoing those dollars.

PolitiFact rates the statement "Mostly False," defined as "The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression."

Yes, the fundraising letter ignores the critical fact that the modern era for incumbent presidents begins this year with Mr. Obama's campaign.  Both campaigns eschewed public financing for this election.  But what was the element of truth in the statement?  It was false that Mr. Obama would be the first incumbent outspent by his rival.

The fact check doesn't tell you what's true about the statement, if anything.

We are left to guess whether Mr. Obama receives credit for the underlying argument, minus the unprecedented second-place fundraising, that the Romney campaign will outspend the President's campaign.  And the fact check never gets around to checking on spending after looking at fundraising.

In the end, we get another example of PolitiFact applying its standards unequally.  PolitiFact checks the wrong fact--fundraising instead of spending--and after that ignores its own "burden of proof" standard that assumes a claim false if PolitiFact does not discover evidence to support the claim.

The grades:

Amy Sherman:  F
Angie Drobnic Holan:  F

The PolitiFact team checked the wrong fact, so readers will not find out from this story whether past incumbent presidents were outspent by their challengers.  The PolitiFact team gave Mr. Obama a "Mostly False" rating without explaining what aspect of the claim it found true.  That rating appears to contradict PolitiFact's statement of principles.

PolitiFlub: Who gambles the most?

Argh.  Perhaps Media Matters is better than PolitiFact after all.

The latest improbable flub from PolitiFact involves the question of gambling demographics.

PolitiFact examines a statement supposedly from John Stemberger.  Here's the headline blurb:

The largest number of gamblers are "from the poorest segments of the population."  

John Stemberger on Thursday, October 20th, 2011 in a website

However, it turns out that the portion in quotes was in turn quoted by Stemberger from another source (bold emphasis added):

The blog post from Oct. 20, 2011, uses partial quotes from Wayne Grudem, a theology professor at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona and author of the book Politics According to the Bible:

"My own judgment is that large commercial gambling outlets such as casinos and state-sponsored lotteries bring much more harm to a society than the benefits they generate (such as tax revenue)… First, it is socially harmful (and fiscally regressive) because the largest numbers of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population. Second, (it) leads to an addiction to gambling … and this addiction destroys marriages, families … and increases societal breakdown. Third, studies have shown that where gambling businesses are established, crime rates increase."

Every bit of the information PolitiFact is checking, as a matter of fact, comes from quotations of Grudem.

But there's more.

PolitiFact is good enough to link to the page in Grudem's book from which the material ultimately came.  But PolitiFact does not provide what may be a key part of the context of Grudem's claim, and ignores that potential key element in its reasoning.

Grudem:

(S)erious objections can be brought against gambling, or at least commercial gambling as a business.  A number of studies have shown that gambling brings negative effects in a society, and these must be seriously considered.  First, it is socially harmful because the largest number of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population, who make unwise decisions and trap themselves deeper and deeper in debt. Second, the existence of gambling businesses leads to an addiction to gambling on the part of a certain percentage of the population, and this addiction destroys marriages, families, and any hope for career advancement ...

Note that Grudem is sourcing his objections to an unnamed "number of studies."  So, if we keep each of the successive statements in context, the fact check ought to be about whether those studies say what Grudem claims they say (compare Jon Stewart).

Yet the fallout lands on John Stemberger without even apparently considering the studies to which Grudem alludes.  Though it's worth noting that Grudem apparently does not cite the studies specifically, fact checkers thereby obtain no excuse for ignoring the original context of the claim.

As bad as the failing makes PolitiFact appear, it gets even worse.

Note the wording of the claim from Grudem:  "the largest number of gamblers comes from the poorest segments of the population."  Though Grudem refers to segments plural, PolitiFact proceeds to interpret it in the singular.  That interpretation leads to what may represent a straw man version of Grudem's argument.

Note the response elicited from one of PolitiFact's expert sources:

"In my opinion this is a poorly worded and misleading statement," said David Just, an economics professor at Cornell, who has studied poverty and lotteries. "By no means does this group constitute the majority of those playing the lottery. Those in poverty are just 16 percent of the U.S. population."

It's possible that Grudem had a poverty-level demographic in mind.  But is an assumption warranted?

PolitiFact simply fails to handle the material objectively.  Stemberger did not make the statement attributed to him other than by quoting his source.  Grudem deserves the fact check if anyone, and PolitiFact takes his statement out of context and applies to it something less than the charitable interpretation.


Afters:

I'm still shaking my head over the opening paragraph:

In the ongoing war about gambling in Florida, some critics have turned to the Bible to state their case.

Some critics may have turned to the Bible to make their case, but it doesn't have much to do with this fact check, which concerns a criticism of the lottery based on economics and harm to society.

The paragraph doesn't belong in this story.  Good grief.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Alan Hays, proof of citizenship and voting

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

If anything about an anecdote can strongly suggest an ideological bias, it is the complete ease with which PolitiFact can ignore its supposed principles.


The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Amy Sherman:  writer, researcher
Aaron Sharockman:  editor


Analysis:

Words matter.  Here are the words Alan Hays used during the committee meeting, via the PolitiFact story (bold emphasis added):

"Before we design a district anywhere in the state of Florida for Hispanic voters, we need to ascertain that they are citizens of the United States. We all know there are many Hispanic speaking people in Florida that are not legal, and I just don't think that it's right that we try to draw a district that encompasses people that really have no business voting anyhow. If we know registered voters are people who have proven their citizenship then that's a completely different story, but I'm not aware of any proof of citizenship necessary before you register to vote."

Hays says he isn't aware of any proof of citizenship necessary in Florida, before one can register to vote.

Watch the PolitiFact twist:

Hays said you don't need to prove that you're a citizen in order to cast a ballot.

Words matter?

If words matter then we should expect PolitiFact to note the difference between saying one does not know of a requirement and saying that no requirement exists.  If PolitiFact subjected its own claim to the "Truth-O-Meter"--and the thing actually worked like it's supposed to--I don't see how it could rate higher than "Mostly False."

It seems that words matter at PolitiFact's discretion.  That is, according to subjective criteria.

Fact checking a dubious paraphrase rather than the subject's actual words already constitutes justification for failing grades, but even apart from this blunder the fact check takes an astonishingly errant course.

Is it necessary to prove citizenship in order to register to vote in Florida?

PolitiFact takes up the question by initially examining the motor voter registration system, perhaps reasoning that the emphasis is appropriate given the popularity of that mode of registration:

Floridians can register to vote a variety of ways -- but the most common registration method is at driver's license offices. In 2010, more than 270,000 people registered to vote at driver's license offices. The second-most common method was what the state division of elections calls the "other" category, which includes registering in person at supervisors of elections offices.

Motor voter registration apparently does require proof of citizenship:

In Florida when drivers apply for a driver's license, they must provide proof that they are in the country legally. U.S. citizens could show a passport or a proper birth certificate to verify their citizenship. Immigrants who are not U.S. citizens would have to provide the proper visa.

But for non-citizens who wish to vote, the motor voter identification requirements represent no real barrier:

But what if someone walks into a supervisor of elections office and asks to register to vote?

In those cases, people registering to vote must sign an oath on a registration application attesting that they are qualified to vote and that all the information on the application is true. (Usually at driver's licenses offices applicants who want to apply to register to vote don't have to sign that particular form since the office already has their signature as part of the driver's license application process.)

The application includes a question: Are you a citizen of the United States? If you answer no, the form says "you cannot register to vote."

We asked state Division of Elections spokesman Chris Cate if the state does anything to verify citizenship.

"The answer is no," he said. "The law doesn't require someone to provide proof of citizenship when they register. If they swear, attest and sign under oath that their information is accurate and that they are a citizen we will accept their voter registration."

Voter registration through an elections office, then, basically utilizes the honor system.  If you say you're a citizen then you can register to vote regardless of whether you couldn't provide proof of citizenship when you received your driver's license.

Game over?  It may look like it, but the story continues with a description of the torments waiting in Hell (felony charges, anyway) for non-citizens who lie on their registration form.

It isn't relevant.  Whether or not the state metes out punishments to those it isn't even seeking who have improperly registered, they're allowed to register without proving citizenship.

Then there's this puzzling statement from PolitiFact:

Individual supervisors of elections do have the ability to determine if an applicant is an U.S. citizen, Cate said, though it would be difficult for a supervisor to ascertain citizenship.

Huh?  I'd like to see that unpacked.  Supervisors of elections have the authority to verify citizenship but verifying citizenship is difficult?  That's my best guess at translating the meaning.  And it isn't very reassuring in that form.

But PolitiFact still isn't finished.

It turns out that election experts Ion Sancho (FEC filings here) and Emogene Stegall say there's no problem with non-citizens voting:

Sancho said the idea that illegal residents are voting is "laughable it's so wrong."

"We are not seeing any problem with illegal citizens voting in the U.S. anywhere, not just in Tallahassee or Florida. It's a canard that illegal individuals are registering and voting. ... Voting requires putting your name and address on an official document and that is not something undocumented individuals tend to do."

The local elections supervisor in Hays' own district, Lake County, sees it the same way.

"We've never had a problem with illegal voting in Lake County, no way,'' said Emogene W. Stegall, who has served in the county's election's office for 40 years.

PolitiFact interviews "impartial experts."  Or Democrats.  Apparently either will do.

Opinions from Sancho and Stegall are not necessarily wrong simply because they are liberals.  Simply observe that their opinions are accompanied by the very thinnest of evidences, the best of it being Sancho's claim that undocumented individuals tend not to put names and addresses on official documents.

Seriously, what's the harm in putting a name and address on voter registration if elections supervisors do not attempt to verify citizenship?  Do these two have any data in support of their expert opinions?

What does the Truth-O-Meter conclude?

Our ruling

Sen. Hays said that Florida doesn't require "any proof of citizenship necessary before you register to vote." There is a kernel of truth here: According to the state Division of Elections, state law doesn't require new voter applicants to prove their citizenship in some physical sense. They simply must sign a sworn statement attesting that they meet the voting requirements -- including being a citizen.

Again setting aside the, ah, liberal interpretation of Hays' statement, why is there simply a "kernel of truth" to the proposition that it isn't necessary to prove citizenship in order to register to vote in Florida?  PolitiFact subsequently mentions caveats, so let's look there for our answer:

First, willfully lying on a voter registration form about your citizenship status can lead to a felony conviction.

Failing to bring your vehicle to a complete stop at a stop sign can lead to a traffic citation.  Enforcement is really the key, isn't it?  The state admits that it has no active enforcement mechanism attached to the voter registration system other than the easily circumvented identification requirements associated with the motor voter program.

Second, the most common way to register to vote in Florida is during the process of obtaining a driver's license -- in 2010, 57 percent of those who registered to vote in Florida chose that method. And during that process, people are asked to verify their citizenship.

Is this a joke?

If registration through the driver's license program isn't a necessary requirement to register to vote then the identify checks associated with that program are not required in order to register to vote.  It's basic logic.  And it is already admitted that one can go straight from the driver's license office to the supervisor of elections and register on the honor system.

Lastly, we have to consider the experiences of two actual supervisor of elections, who said there is no widespread problem of illegal immigrants registering to vote.

We have no evidence that either of the helpful liberal supervisors of elections base their claims on empirical data.

For those reasons, we rate this claim Mostly False.

 Those were rationalizations, not reasons.

The fact check attributed a claim to Hays that Hays did not make and then used a ridiculous set of excuses to obscure the truth of the made-up claim.

I'm sputtering trying to think of condemnatory language equal to the task of lambasting PolitiFact over this fact check.


The grades

Amy Sherman:  F
Aaron Sharockman:  F

Both members of the team could have earned failing grades simply for making up the claim attributed to Hays.  But this duo when beyond the pale by ignoring clear evidence that the claim they graded "Mostly False" was essentially true.

We have yet another instance of a PolitiFact team earning the label "journalists reporting badly."

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): The Word Police accuse Marjorie Dannenfelser

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

The issue:

(image clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Amy Sherman:  writer, researcher
John Bartosek:  editor


Analysis:

PolitiFact tips off its complaint against Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion/pro-life Susan B. Anthony List, in the deck material reproduced above.  The quotation marks setting off "profit" as a word clue us in that PolitiFact's fact check hinges on the word.

Paul Bedard used Dannenfelser as a source for a May 26 blog for U.S. News & World Report:

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, said: “The truly ‘anti-woman’ organization here is Planned Parenthood and the party that continues to defend its taxpayer funding when it has raked in more than $300 million in profits over the past four years. Fifty-four percent of Americans don’t want to be coerced into contributing to an organization they don’t believe in just by paying their taxes—nor should they be.”

Somehow PolitiFact Florida got wind of this exciting development:

For this Truth-O-Meter, we wanted to check Dannenfelser's claim that Planned Parenthood "raked in more than $300 million in profits over the past four years." We'll focus on two parts: Is the dollar figure right, and is 'profit' the right word?

Off we go on the dollar figure fact check, hopefully bearing in mind the fact that the underlying message is the most important thing when fact checking a numbers claim:

We contacted SBA List spokeswoman Mallory Quigley, who referred us to "excess of revenue over expenses" listed in Planned Parenthood's annual reports. Here is what those reports show:

2005-06: $55.8 million
2006-07: $114.8 million
2007-08: $85 million
2008-09: $63.4 million

Total: $319 million.

While the total comes out over $300 million, in apparent justification of Dannenfelser's claim, the numbers fail to account for a investment loss of $78.1 million in the last of the four reports.

PolitiFact frets over Planned Parenthood's inconsistency in accounting:

In the reports from other years, the financial data does not refer to investment losses or gains, and Sye said those amounts were simply included in the totals for those years. The extraordinary losses when the markets plunged for almost all investors, presented differently in the 2008-09 report, makes it awkward to combine the four years since Planned Parenthood didn't detail its investment losses or gains previously. Subtracting the $78 million would leave the group with about $240 million in revenue over expenses in the four-year period. But how much more or less is unknown since we were unable to obtain the actual investment income for the other years.

 I say pish posh.

The value of investments ought to reflect in the total net assets reported.  The alternate accounting was probably a theatrical strategy intended to influence donors to donate.  Subtract the $78 million from the supposed operating surplus and the remainder matches the newly reported net assets for the year ending in June 2009.  Simply taking the net assets at the start of the string of reports and subtracting that figure from the net asset value at the end ought to provide a useful figure reflecting Planned Parenthood's yearly net income.

Unfortunately, the resulting figure was about $210 million--suspiciously lower than the figure PolitiFact ended up using ($240 million).  About $11 million of the missing amount was reported as "other changes in net assets" and the rest went suspiciously missing between the end of the second report and the start of the third.  That might prove interesting to a journalist.  Or maybe not.  PolitiFact showed no signs of noticing.

As to the raw numbers, if we use Planned Parenthood's dubious reports we can determine that Dannenfelser inflated Planned Parenthood's increased asset value by 43 percent.  PolitiFact's figures would result in a somewhat lower inflation amount of 30 percent.

We should note that PolitiFact has in the past granted Barbara Boxer a "Half True" rating for a claim resting on a figure that was off by 355 percent.  On the other hand, Michele Bachmann received a "False" rating for a figure that was off from 42 to 76 percent.  So it's anybody's guess what ruling is thus far implied by Dannenfelser's imprecision.

PolitiFact:

In the second part of our fact-checking, does the "excess revenue over expenses" constitute a "profit"?

We sent Dannenfelser's claim to experts in nonprofit management and heard back from four. Three disagreed with using the term "profit" to describe excess revenues over expenses: Christopher Stone, faculty director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University; Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, professor of public management at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and at the Harvard Business School; and Beth Gazley, assistant professor at Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Sound the pedantry alert for this trio of experts.

Pedant No. 1:  Explain yourself, please.

"Bottom line: a nonprofit’s surplus should not be confused with profit," Stone wrote in an e-mail. "Profits are generated by businesses to reward investors. Businesses also use profits to provide additional compensation (bonuses tied to profits) for employees who help generate the profits for investors. Because nonprofits may not use their surpluses for either of these purposes, these surpluses should not be confused with profits. All surpluses must be devoted to the charitable purposes of the organization."

To be fair, PolitiFact may have simply applied Stone's answer in a pedantic fashion.  At face value Stone is exactly right that a nonprofit's surplus cash should not be confused with the profits a business distributes to its ownership group.  But it's hardly clear that Dannefelser's claim commits that type of confusion.  Rather, Dannenfelser simply employs a different (widely accepted) definition of "profit" than the one Stone uses:

3 : net income usually for a given period of time

Merriam-Webster

Pedant No. 2:  Explain yourself, please:

And Gazley wrote: "But more to the point, the 'taxpayer'-funded portions of the Planned Parenthood affiliates’ budgets are either program grants or reimbursements for services eligible for Medicaid. So the government-funded parts of the (Planned Parenthood) budget would NOT be generating a 'profit' – they would be used in full each year. This means any excess of revenues over expenses (AKA 'profit') would have come from other sources – private donations, endowment income, etc. So Ms. Dannenfelser’s argument that the taxpayers are somehow subsidizing this 'profit' is misleading."

Hilarious.  Of course the taxpayers subsidize the profit, just like allowing oil companies to drill for oil on federal lands for free would subsidize oil company profits even though "any excess of revenues over expenses (AKA 'profit') would have to come from other sources."  Gazely's statement is far more misleading than Dannenfelser's.  Even the best accounting tricks can't hide the obvious in this case.

PolitiFact spares us the explanation from Herman B. "Dutch" Leonard, but we do get the explanation from the lone expert out of step with the other three:

Terri Renner, longtime CPA and lecturer at Indiana University's school of Public and Environmental Affairs, argued that "the excess of revenues over expenses is the accounting definition of profit."

Renner's argument is unassailable, given that she is correct in identifying the operative definition of "profit."

But the Word Police from PolitiFact take their cues from the pedants:

We said we'd examine both the dollar figure and the word "profits." We think the "more than $300 million" description is off base because of the $78 million in losses, but neither Planned Parenthood nor the SBA List is saying definitively what the investment gains or losses were for the four-year period. Still, there is some element of truth in that it's at least scores of millions of dollars.


In the second part of our ruling, we looked at whether "excess revenue over expenses" for a nonprofit is the same as "profit." Most of the experts we consulted say no. And the one who would call it profit agrees that it's not treated the same way as profit for a corporation. Companies distribute their profits to shareholders and owners, while nonprofits put their excess revenues back into the organization's work. We think the real sting in this claim comes from the word "profits," so we weighed that more heavily than the vague dollar figures in our ruling. We rate this claim Barely True.

Respecting the numbers claim, remember that PolitiFact's numbers indicate a 30 percent error by Dannenfelser aside from the uncertainty created by Planned Parenthood's inability/unwillingness to divulge more precise figures.

The ruling on the use of "profit" is pure pedantry.  Dannefelser's use of the term fits perfectly with a standard usage and creates no apparent barrier to understanding the statement in accord with the context in which it was offered:  Planned Parenthood operates substantially in the black and therefore does not require over $350 million per year in government money.


The grades:

Amy Sherman:  F
John Bartosek:  F

Journalists simply can't lend themselves out to pedantic experts or indulge in pedantry themselves by using the comments of experts as an ad hoc justification.  The trusting reader is rendered less intelligent by this fact check and therefore the special tag "Journalists Reporting Badly" applies.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): Dan Fanelli's ObamaCare ad

The ad:

(Still not sure why the videos fail to appear on the main page--click the title above or "Read more" below to see it)

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Amy Sherman: writer, researcher
Sergio Bustos:  editor

These two work for the Miami Herald, for what that's worth.

Analysis: