After PolitiFact's ironic suggestion that Mitt Romney had used a red herring with his argument about fading female participation in the work force under President Obama, I purposed to have a look at PolitiFact's past use of the term "red herring."
Apart from a number of uses of the term by expert sources, I found only one example. This one was again by writer Louis Jacobson.
The fact check concerned Senator Jon Kyl's assertion that the American Bar Association's rating was surprising considering Kagan's lack of courtroom experience.
Let's have a read of the relevant passage (bold emphasis added):
We didn't comb through her semester-by-semester course loads or pro-bono
assignments to track her practical legal work, but we think this line
of argument is a red herring anyway. The sentence sets up two
alternatives -- either "distinguished accomplishments in the field of
law or experience that is similar to in-court trial work." We see no
requirement that the "distinguished accomplishments" be directly related
to the in-court practice of law.
The fairly obvious way to check Kyl's claim would have involved looking at the way the ABA historically treated potential nominees with a lack of courtroom experience. Judging from the list of references, Jacobson did nothing of the kind. As a second choice, an investigator might solicit the opinions of legal experts. Jacobson did not take that course, either.
Instead, we get Jacobson's opinion of the ABA's criterion stacked against Kyl's. With Jacobson rather than Kyl writing the fact check, we find Jacobson preferring his interpretation of the criterion to Kyl's. Jacobson apparently determined that the validity of Kagan's ABA rating was not a central issue with respect to the the confirmation process for Kagan. Instead, it was a mere distraction.
Dare I point out that Jacobson again achieved unintended irony with his use of the term "red herring"?
Louis Jacobson: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor
Analysis:
I can't recall any examples where PolitiFact graded "true" an example of hyperbole. It may have happened. I may have even read the story. But I don't remember it if I did. On with the show that is PolitiFact's treatment of a statement by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.):
Here’s a portion of what Kyl said on the floor:
"Everybody goes to clinics, to hospitals, to doctors, and so on. Some people go to Planned Parenthood. But you don’t have to go to Planned Parenthood to get your cholesterol or your blood pressure checked. If you want an abortion, you go to Planned Parenthood, and that’s well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."
We got many requests to fact-check his statement.
Bonus points to my gentle readers if they recall my critique of PolitiFact's selection process for allowing readers to determine which statements receive a fact check. As I've said subsequently, PolitiFact's policies are a recipe for selection bias. Sen. Kyl made a series of factual claims, any of which might have served as subject matter for fact checkers. Yet the evidence suggests that the clamoring of readers directly led to this fact check. What is that evidence? Same day service! Kyl made his statement late Friday morning, a little after 11 a.m. PolitiFact published online just after 6 p.m. That's a very rapid turnaround by PolitiFact standards. Fact checks ordinarily take days.
Why the rush? We'll look for clues in the story.
PolitiFact:
Planned Parenthood says the statistics are dramatically different -- that 90 percent of its services are preventive in nature, compared with 3 percent that are abortion-related.
The story goes on to transmit, in brief, Planned Parenthood's account of its services followed by an assessment:
We should note a few caveats.
First, we think many people would acknowledge a difference between providing an abortion and, say, handing out a pack of condoms or conducting a blood test. The former is a significant surgical procedure, whereas the latter are quick and inexpensive services. So Planned Parenthood’s use of "services" as its yardstick likely decreases abortion’s prominence compared to what other measurements would show. Using dollars spent or hours devoted to patient care would likely put abortion above 3 percent in the calculations.
Second, it’s worth noting that Planned Parenthood self-reported these numbers, although the group says each affiliate’s numbers are independently audited. (There is no single, national audit.) So we have no choice but to accept their accuracy more or less on faith.
Still, even with those caveats, we do think that Kyl has vastly overstated the share of abortions.
That, ladies and gentlemen, pretty much finishes the fact checking. PolitiFact accepts the accuracy of Planned Parenthood's numbers "more or less on faith." And that faith is based, in part, on the government audit system. As I pointed out during a past review of PolitiFact, the government audit system is far from foolproof.
On the one hand we have an appalling degree of credulity exhibited by the fact check team. On the other hand, is there any way at all to reconcile Kyl's statement with a sober assessment of Planned Parenthood's numbers?
A potential explanation came down the pipe around 3 p.m. on Friday:
We checked with Kyl’s office but did not hear back. However, a few hours after the speech, CNN anchor T.J. Holmes told viewers that the network had received a statement from Kyl’s office saying that the senator’s remark "was not intended to be a factual statement but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, an organization that receives millions in taxpayer dollars, does subsidize abortions."
The explanation from Kyl's office is the definition of hyperbole. But PolitiFact ignores the interpretation of Kyl's statement as hyperbole, as the next paragraph shows:
The statistics from Planned Parenthood and the statement from Kyl's office make it clear that he erred by saying abortion counts for well over 90 percent of the group's services. We find his claim False.
Hyperbole is not an error. It is a deliberate figure of speech. In the best examples, the audience has little doubt that the speaker expects them to discount the literal numbers in favor of the underlying point. Kyl's statement was arguably a maladroit attempt at hyperbole, perhaps to the point of suggesting that the explanation was an ad hoc justification. But is the fact check fair if what might serve as an exculpatory explanation is taken instead as a confession of wrongdoing? And is PolitiFact's claim of allowing license for hyperbole plausible in light of a case like this one?
PolitiFact appears to have placed itself at the disposal of news activists as a media marionette. Consider the credulity required to overlook the following in Planned Parenthood's data (click image for enlarged view):
Note the "Reversible Contraception Clients, Women**" with the associated number of services, 2,327,662.
Follow the asterisks:
Third down in the column: "No method," with 10.5 percent of the reversible contraceptive services falling in that category. I think if I had an interview with a Planned Parenthood spokesperson it might occur to me to ask in what sense "No Method" of birth control reasonably represents a service provided by Planned Parenthood. And I'd be looking for an explanation of "Other/Unknown" (8.1 percent of reversible contraceptive services). Planned Parenthood doesn't know what service it has provided as much as 8.1 percent of the time?
These are not small numbers. "No method" accounts for about 2 percent of Planned Parenthood services compared to the 3 percent supposedly accounted for by abortion-related services. And "Other/Unknown" accounts for another 189,000 services.
It might occur to a journalist that the Planned Parenthood numbers show some fairly obvious evidence of padding even aside from the dubious practice of weighting all services evenly regardless of cost (find an unfriendly interpretation here).
This is the shoddiest sort of journalism. The attempt to check the facts was cursory at best. PolitiFact again belied its claim of allowing license for hyperbole, in this case apparently not even giving serious consideration to the possibility Kyl was employing hyperbole.
Is literally 90 percent plus of Planned Parenthood's business abortion? Certainly not, but the unfriendly estimates figure that it accounts for about a third of Planned Parenthood's revenue, a fact certainly under-emphasized by Planned Parenthood's numbers. As hyperbole, Kyl's point was fair but potentially misleading.
Why the rush? The best explanation for the urgency of this item seems to come from ideology. It was important to PolitiFact to publish prior to the final negotiations over the government shutdown.
The grades:
Louis Jacobson: F
Bill Adair: F
Afters:
Looks like a new feature for CSPAN video embeds--the ability to customize the beginning and end of the video. So I'm giving it a try for the Kyl clip:
I'd have like better precision in choosing the start and end times, though that may be achievable using the html code.
April 14, 2011: Replaced "PolitiFact's" with "Planned Parenthood's" in the next-to-last paragraph prior to the grades. PolitiFact, so far as I know, does not abort human embryos or fetuses at all. Hat tip to JD for catching the error for me. April 26, 2011: Excised a pair of grammatically criminal commas.
In my original post in the new "Piquing PolitiFact" series, I shared an e-mail message I sent to PolitiFact asking for a fact check of a statement by Sen. Pat Leahy (D, NY). I have now received a brief and somewhat amusing reply. It's show and tell time.
First, a reprint of the original message:
Dear Truth-O-Meter,
I recently read a press report that included an unusual statement from Sen. Patrick Leahy concerning an amendment offered by Sen. John Kyl. Kyl's amendment would have prevented certain funds from being used to bring Palestinian refugees to the United States, or at least so it appeared. But Leahy's interpretation seemed to view the amendment as far more expansive:
Frankly, it is unnecessary and for the United States, a Nation of immigrants, it goes against everything we stand for. We don’t resettle anybody from Gaza, nor do we resettle anybody from Gaza who is living in the U.N. refugee camps in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. The amendment is a solution looking for a problem. If a Palestinian from Gaza gets to a place like Italy, or somewhere in Europe, the amendment would prevent the State Department from even considering that person for resettlement to the United States. We would have to tell them 'Sorry, you can’t come in, because you are from a place that has terrorists.'
-- Bill Adair Washington Bureau Chief St. Petersburg Times and PolitiFact.com
They read their mail, at least--in a manner of speaking. The link provided by Adair leads back to the "press report" that I talked about in my original e-mail. Perhaps Adair thought that the statement is verified if it is merely quoted in a PolitiFact piece. Or, more likely, he skimmed my message to the point of thinking I was interested in the nature of the Kyl amendment rather than about Leahy's characterization of it.
I suppose it's too early to get my hopes up about seeing an evaluation of Leahy's remark at PolitiFact. But I have yet to entirely give up hope. I sent Adair a reply of my own:
Dear Mr. Adair,
Coincidentally, that is the media source I was talking about in my original e-mail. The story to which you referred me does not fact check the Leahy statement. It simply presents the statement as though it very well might be true.
But it seems worth fact checking to me. Do you not agree?
PolitiFact continues its shameless version of fact checking, this time with an illicit association of Senator Jon Kyl with a debunked e-mail.
Fact-checking the fact checkers The fact checkers:
Robert Farley: writer, researcher Bill Adair: editor
The issue:
The issue was supposedly the claim in a chain e-mail that $20 million in aid money earmarked for the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. But it quickly turned into a smear of Sen. Jon Kyl (R, AZ):
Claims in chain e-mails we are asked to check have so often proved to be ridiculously and maliciously false, we wonder who takes these things seriously anymore.
In this case, the answer seems to be be...a U.S. Senator.
Instead of objectively checking the facts, PolitiFact uses the opportunity to attack Kyl. And journalistic objectivity gets trounced in the process.
So--did Kyl believe the chain e-mail or not? Note that PolitiFact leaves itself considerable wiggle room: "the answer seems to be..." (emphasis added). "Seems" denotes subjective impression, and subjective impressions quite simply do not belong in objective reporting unless one is objectively reporting somebody else's subjective impressions. And even then the objectivity of the reporting is often thrown in doubt.
On what evidence was the impression based? Precious little. The first swipe at Kyl consists of noting that he offered a resolution barring any of the funds from being used to relocate Palestinians from Gaza to the United States.
(O)ur fellow fact-checkers over at Snopes.com ... first knocked down these false e-mail claims with an item posted on Feb. 17, 2009. Two days later, on Feb. 19, 2009, FactCheck.org debunked it as well. We note the dates, because two weeks later, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., the Senate Minority Whip, offered an amendment to the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009, a "prohibition on the use of funds in this bill for resettlement into the United States of Palestinians from Gaza."
Explained Kyl: "There has been a suggestion that perhaps that might be permitted, and we simply want to make it clear that will not be permitted with any funds in this bill."
Farley clearly means to imply that Kyl should have known better. But even though Snopes.com and FactCheck.org remain head, shoulders and virtually all other body parts above PolitiFact, can either one of them ensure that a vaguely worded presidential order which turns millions of dollars over to an arm of the chronically corrupt United Nations will not result in funding the movement of Gazan refugees into the United States?
Sorry, but I just don't trust journalists with that type of guarantee. But at least the fact checking efforts at Snopes and Annenberg hew far better to pattern of objective reporting.
Note carefully what Farley has done. He has shifted emphasis away from the chain e-mail and has effectively twisted the findings of the two better fact-checking organizations. Snopes and Annenberg emphasized the wild claims in the e-mail along with the apparent nature of the refugee programs set to receive the presidentially authorized funds. Farley twists this in an attempt to undercut any justification for Kyl's push to bar the use of the funds to bring Gazan refugees to the United States. But also note carefully what Kyl did, as related by Farley:
... Kyl withdrew the amendment after receiving a letter from the Department of State, which he entered into the Senate record.
Kyl made a shrewd move, though Farley presents it as an attempt to save face. By entering the letter into the Senate record, Kyle had the Department of State on its word regarding the use of funds, and by putting it in the record achieved essentially the same effect that this resolution would have had.
Kyl did what a responsible Senator should do. He addressed an ambiguous statement from the executive branch with a call for clarity. He got clarity and he put it in the public record. It is important to note, since PolitiFact fails to do so, that Kyl's actions in no way logically entail that he accepted the e-mail claims at face value. That assumption from Farley, having endured the editing of Bill Adair, accounts for the severe grading to follow.
The grades:
Robert Farley: F Bill Adair: F
Afterword:
I wanted to keep the main point of my analysis fairly streamlined, but this issue was rich in blogworthy material. In the afterword I will address three things. First, the ambiguity of the president's statement. Second, the statement of John Kyl. I'll simply quote the material to make my point.
Presidential Determination No. 2009-15:
By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, including section 2(c)(1) of the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 (the "Act''), as amended (22 U.S.C. 2601), I hereby determine, pursuant to section 2(c)(1) of the Act, that it is important to the national interest to furnish assistance under the Act in an amount not to exceed $20.3 million from the United States Emergency Refugee and Migration Assistance Fund for the purpose of meeting unexpected and urgent refugee and migration needs, including by contributions to international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations and payment of administrative expenses of Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration of the Department of State, related to humanitarian needs of Palestinian refugees and conflict victims in Gaza.
You are authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register. (GPO.gov)
The statement of Sen. Kyl:
Mr. President, until Senator McCain arrives, let me briefly describe these three amendments.
Amendment No. 630 requires a report on countersmuggling efforts in Gaza. Within 90 days of the enactment of the Act, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Director of National Intelligence, shall submit a report to Congress on whether additional funds from our military foreign financing assistance, provided annually to the Government of Egypt, could be expended, No. 1, to improve efforts by the Government of Egypt to counter illicit smuggling, including arms smuggling across Egypt and the Gaza border, and No. 2, to intercept weapons originating in other countries in the region and smuggled into Gaza through Egypt. This amendment requires a report to ensure the Egyptian Government can be even more effective in dealing with this difficult problem.
Amendment No. 629 is a prohibition on the use of funds in this bill for resettlement into the United States of Palestinians from Gaza. There has been a suggestion that perhaps that might be permitted, and we simply want to make it clear that will not be permitted with any funds in this bill.
Finally, related to Gaza reconstruction, amendment No. 631 provides that none of the funds available in this bill may be made available to aid reconstruction efforts in Gaza until the Secretary of State certifies that none of such funds will be diverted to Hamas or entities controlled by Hamas. The reason for that, of course, is that in providing money to people in Gaza, it is very difficult to ensure that money doesn't go to terrorists, and we want the Secretary of State to ensure that doesn't happen. That is what this amendment would provide.
Mr. President, that is the explanation of these three amendments, and I now yield to my colleague from the State of Arizona, Senator McCain. (C-SPAN)
I did mention three things. The third consists of a statement worth fact-checking. PolitiFact quoted it without questioning the content, which suggests that they trust that the information was reliable.
"Frankly, it is unnecessary and for the United States, a Nation of immigrants, it goes against everything we stand for," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont. "We don’t resettle anybody from Gaza, nor do we resettle anybody from Gaza who is living in the U.N. refugee camps in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan. The amendment is a solution looking for a problem. If a Palestinian from Gaza gets to a place like Italy, or somewhere in Europe, the amendment would prevent the State Department from even considering that person for resettlement to the United States. We would have to tell them 'Sorry, you can’t come in, because you are from a place that has terrorists.'"
An amendment barring the use of the $20 million to assist refugees coming to the United States would bar the State Department from even considering that person for resettlement in the United States? It seems to me that the State Department could consider the move all it wished, and even put the move into effect if it was accomplished without using the $20 billion earmarked for Gazan refugee assistance.
