PolitiFlub: PolitiFact grades Callista Gingrich by the wrong measure

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"

It's a testament to PolitiFact's warped self-image that it continues churning out journalistic offal even while enduring a wave of substantive criticism.

Our latest example comes again from the Republican National Convention, where Callista Gingrich claimed that the Obama administration's foreign policy has led to decreased respect for the United States.

A legitimate fact checking enterprise immediately suspects that Gingrich referred to respect from foreign governments in terms of recognizing the U.S. as a power to which deferral yields the most beneficial results.  In other words, other nations fear the United States depending on the degree to which they operate contrary to our policy designs.  Based on that premise, the legitimate fact checker asks Gingrich to clarify the intent and tries to find a verifiable statistic that measures her accuracy.

That's not PolitiFact:

While surveys are currently being undertaken in 20 nations, only 14 of those have been done for long enough to shed light on Callista Gingrich’s claim.

The question asked is, "Please tell me if you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable or very unfavorable opinion of ... the United States." While favorability isn’t exactly identical to respect, we think it’s very close and a good approximation.

Seriously?

No doubt PolitiFact used the opinions of foreign policy experts to determine that the Pew data were an appropriate measure.

Or maybe not:

Seriously?  No expert sources?  Not one?

That's not a responsible fact check.  The global standing of the United States does not depend on popular view among the world's peoples.  It comes directly from the way the world's leaders view the United States and whether they believe they can flaunt their power contrary to U.S. interests.

PolitiFact chose the wrong measure.

Why does anyone take PolitiFact seriously?

PolitiFlub: PolitiFact Wisconsin, the Obama promise and the Janesville GM plant (Updated)

PolitiFact has earned its status as the least-dependable of the stable of left-leaning fact check organizations.  PolitiFact Wisconsin gives us one more sparkling example supporting that judgment with a fact check of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Ryan said President Obama broke a campaign promise to keep the Janesville (Wisc.) plant open.   PolitiFact Wisconsin detected no such promise from Mr. Obama.

 Here's what then-candidate Obama said in February 2008 (bold emphasis added) during a speech in Janesville:

This can be America’s future. I know that General Motors received some bad news yesterday, and I know how hard your Governor has fought to keep jobs in this plant. But I also know how much progress you’ve made – how many hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles you’re churning out. And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years. The question is not whether a clean energy economy is in our future, it’s where it will thrive. I want it to thrive right here in the United States of America; right here in Wisconsin; and that’s the future I’ll fight for as your President.

Importantly, Obama opened his speech with references to the plant.  He then sketched his vision of America before mentioning how the Janesville plant could stay open if the government provides support.  In that context, Obama pledged to provide that support.  Does Mr. Obama use the specific term "promise" in his statement?  No, certainly not.  Does he guarantee the plant will remain open?  Again, no.  However, there is little doubt  that every person in Janesville listening to his speech took it as a pledge from the president to work to enact policies to keep the plant open. Mr. Obama did, in fact, pledge to do just that.

PolitiFact Wisconsin located no such pledge.

But it gets worse.  Much worse. PolitiFact builds its conclusion primarily on its claim that the Janesville plant closed before Mr. Obama took office (bold emphasis added):

Ryan said Obama broke his promise to keep a Wisconsin GM plant from closing. But we don't see evidence he explicitly made such a promise -- and more importantly, the Janesville plant shut down before he took office.

We rate Ryan's statement False.

GM announced the likely permanent closure of the Janesville plant in June of 2008, less than four months after Mr. Obama pledged to work toward an agenda that would keep the plant open for "another hundred years."

So, when is the plant closed?  When it closes for the last time?  When it produces its last GM vehicle?  When the company announces its permanent closure on a particular date?

When President Bush left office, he had provided Chrysler and GM loans to keep them going until the automakers could present restructuring plans to the Obama administration in April.

GM announced the final closing of the Janesville plant in April of 2008, and the final Chevy Tahoe came off the line in December 2008, before Obama took office as president.  On the other hand, the plant stayed open so that GM could build trucks for Isuzu:

The company stopped building SUVs at the plant just before Christmas.

That decision left about 1,200 workers unemployed.At the time GM said a crew would remain to complete an order for Isuzu.

But by June of 2009, while the Obama administration was still negotiating GM's fate and after completing the work for Isuzu, Janesville continued to maintain hope that its plant might reopen:

JANESVILLE (WKOW) -- There is a lot of optimism in Janesville today, after receiving word GM could reopen one of its idle plants to produce new fuel efficient cars, according to the Wisconsin Department of Workforce development.

If the GM restructuring deal brokered by the Obama administration resulted in continued production at GM's plant in Janesville, is there any doubt at all that Obama would receive credit for delivering on a promise?  Especially if the work involved hybrid vehicles?  The opportunity was there for the taking.

Why is so much of this information missing from a fact check?


Update 8/30/2012, 4:15 p.m.:

NPR fills in some of the missing information PolitiFact omitted.



Correction 8/31/2012:  Original version had wrong date for Obama's Janesville speech on first reference:  "Here's what President-elect Obama said in December 2008 (bold emphasis added) during a speech in Janesville:"  That sentence has been made accurate.

PolitiFlub: PolitiFact again ignores data on effective federal tax rates

PolitiFact's latest fact check involving federal taxation sticks with its persistent pattern of ignoring and/or minimizing data on effective federal tax rates, including a study by the otherwise esteemed Congressional Budget Office.

A new ad from President Barack Obama’s campaign continues the drumbeat that Mitt Romney is a privileged rich guy who isn't paying his fair share of taxes.

"You work hard, stretch every penny," a narrator says. "But chances are, you pay a higher tax rate than him: Mitt Romney made $20 million in 2010, but paid only 14 percent in taxes — probably less than you."

Huh.  The Obama campaign didn't specify federal income taxes.  No worries.  Obama isn't Michele Bachmann, so PolitiFact can overlook the campaign's oversight.

PolitiFact then:

Bachmann would have been right if she’d said, "the top 1 percent of income earners pay about 40 percent of all income taxes into the federal government." But she didn’t say that -- and even if she had, her decision to focus on income taxes, rather than looking at the whole federal tax picture, would have presented the numbers in such a way that wealthier Americans would look more heavily taxed than they are.

So we want "the whole federal tax picture"?  Not so.  PolitiFact wants the tax picture minus the effects of corporate and excise taxes.  The thread is consistent and continues through today.

PolitiFact:

If you just look at income taxes, Obama is incorrect.

Bummer.  But since Obama didn't specify "(federal) income taxes" PolitiFact can consider payroll taxes while continuing to ignore corporate and excise taxes.  Or something like that.

PolitiFact:

So what happens when you add payroll taxes to income taxes? Obama's ad is accurate. Here's the breakdown when you include income taxes and both sides of the payroll tax (the parts paid for by employee and employer):

Bottom fifth of earners: 1 percent
Second-to-bottom fifth:  7.8 percent
Middle fifth: 15.5 percent
Second-highest fifth: 18.7 percent
Highest fifth: 24.3 percent

Once again, we can’t know exactly what percentage of Americans paid a higher effective tax rate than Romney's 14 percent, but the top two ranges, plus a significant share of the middle group, most likely did. So probably more than half exceeded Romney’s rate, making the Obama ad accurate.

Yippee!  Obama's ad is accurate!  Average out the true and the false, give the president a "Half True" and nobody really needs to know about that messy corporate and excise tax stuff.

Speaking of that messy corporate and excise tax stuff:

(click image for enlarged view)

The chart comes directly from the CBO report mentioned up above.  There are two important things to note.  First, excise taxes fall more heavily on those in the lower income quintiles.  That's a minor point.  Second, the burden of corporate taxes falls heavily on those with higher incomes.  And the higher you go with income, the higher the corporate tax burden.  That likely means that persons like Romney pay higher portions of the corporate tax burden as a percentage of their federal taxes.

Using "the whole federal tax picture" that PolitiFact once cited as its ideal standard, the middle quintile pays less than half the average federal tax burden of a person in the top 1 percent in 2006 (14.2 percent compared to 31.2 percent).  That means that it is very probably false that most people pay less in federal taxes than Romney.

Luckily for the president, PolitiFact can make it look otherwise by cherry picking.

That's PolitiFact for you.


Afters: 

See also the review of a similar story from Annenberg Fact Check.


After Afters:

Just a little review of what PolitiFact wrote while rating Bachmann "False":

[Bachmann's] decision to focus on income taxes, rather than looking at the whole federal tax picture, would have presented the numbers in such a way that wealthier Americans would look more heavily taxed than they are.

PolitiFact's hypocrisy is pretty overwhelming, isn't it?

PolitiFlub: Fact-checking Limbaugh on the Bane/Bain connection

PolitiFact is a joke.

One of PolitiFact's latest fact checks purports to find the truth about Rush Limbaugh's supposed claim that the new Batman movie's villain, "Bane," was chosen by design to damage Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney through the latter's association with Bain Capital.

Setting aside the strong probability that Limbaugh was making a joke, this fact check is complete nonsense.  It's easy to see in PolitiFact's conclusion:

In politics, conspiracies are everywhere if you look hard enough. But Limbaugh’s superpowers of persuasion can’t make this theory stand up. The villainous Bane first appeared in Batman comic books in 1993, long before Romney entered presidential politics. Even the character’s creator called a suggested link "ridiculous." We rate this statement Pants on Fire!

It should be absolutely obvious that it doesn't matter when the Bane character was created.  I could use a cartoon character named "Boosh" from 200 years ago and make a movie out of it today to mock George W. Bush.  It isn't relevant whether the character was created without any knowledge that George W. Bush would serve as president.

If one takes Limbaugh's claim as a serious one, which is doubtful on its face, one fact checks it by looking at those who decided to make Bane the villain in this movie and when that decision was made, for starters.

The fact check is completely illogical, and that tells us something about PolitiFact.

PolitiFlub: PolitiFact puts a price tag on ObamaCare

Hilarious.

In fact, the CBO has said that overall the health care bill actually reduces government spending by about $124 billion over 10 years.

PolitiFact makes this claim in the context of a story about spending under the Accessible Care Act, also known as ObamaCare.

PolitiFact doesn't use "spending" normally, here.

People use "spending" to refer to outlays.  If you make $2000 per month and spend $1500 on rent and essentials while saving $500, your spending for the month is $1500.  PolitiFact would have you count your income against your expenses and find that you spent -$500 for the month.  But that's a budget surplus, not a reduction in spending.

It's misleading to present a budget surplus or deficit as a spending figure.

No serious person thinks the ACA reduces spending.

The closest to that we can get comes from crediting the ACA with reducing the increase in Medicare spending.  We'll ignore the cautions from Medicare's chief actuary that the projections are unrealistic.  Here's what the left-leaning Center for American Progress says about Medicare savings: 

$424.4 billion: The amount of federal deficit reduction from 2010 to 2019 due to changes in Medicare coverage and payment rules under ACA. These include limits on annual rate increases for hospitals and other health care providers.

Nothing else in the ACA suggests a decrease in federal spending.  It spends more on subsidies and more on Medicaid.  The federal government will spend more with the ACA than without.

This CBO report may represent the source of PolitiFact's claim:

In March 2010, CBO and JCT estimated that PPACA and the provisions of the Reconciliation Act related to health care would produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $124 billion over the 2010–2019 period as a result of changes in direct spending and revenues.

Drop the part about "revenues" and it makes for an ObamaCare-friendly soundbite.  The CBO figures the ACA as a deficit reducer not because of decreased federal spending but because of tax increases combined with the accounting trick (built into the CBO's standard methodology) of not foreseeing changes to statutorily mandated decreases in health care provider reimbursements under Medicare (see the "doc fix").  The CBO has to pretend that the "doc fix" will not occur even though it very probably will occur regularly.

PolitiFact's misstatement is the stuff of misleading political ads.  But they call it fact checking.

PolitiFlub: PolitiFact math on equal pay for women (Updated)

President Obama's re-election campaign alerts us that women receive only 77 cents on the dollar for performing the same work as men.

No worries.  PolitiFact is on the case:

The 77 cent figure has become a rallying cry for those who seek to eliminate employment discrimination based on gender. And it’s a genuine statistic.

I already know it's a genuine statistic.  It is, for example, the amount of money one should expect as change when using $1 to buy a 33 cent item.  It is probably not at all a genuine statistic in the context of equal pay for equal work, however.

PolitiFact explains, notwithstanding its own muddying of the waters:

In a report released in September 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau wrote that in 2010, the female-to-male earnings ratio of full-time, year-round workers was 0.77." Translated into dollars, that means that in 2010, women working full-time earned 77 cents for every dollar earned by men working full time.

And that's for the same work that men do?  No, of course it isn't.  Consequently, PolitiFact's explanatory paragraph is about as relevant as mine explaining how much change one should expect after using $1 to pay for a 33 cent item.  It's not relevant, and one would hope that a campaign supporting a candidate who presumes to address the problem would know which stats are relevant and which are not.

Probably the campaign knew the stat was misused but did it anyway to improve the impact of the ad.  The error's just too obvious.

Speaking for myself, the right approach to this fact check involves trying to estimate the real difference between pay for men and women doing the same work and confirming whether the Obama campaign landed anywhere near the ballpark.  PolitiFact chose instead to explore the ins and outs of the 77 cent statistic, in the end admitting that it serves as the wrong vehicle for the ad's claim about men and women receiving different pay for the same work.

PolitiFact's approach yielded the following conclusion:

The Obama campaign took a legitimate statistic and described it in a way that makes it sound much more dramatic than it actually is. The 77-cent figure is real, but it does not factor in occupations held, hours worked or length of tenure. Describing that statistic as referring to the pay for women "doing the same work as men" earns it a rating of Mostly False.

That's just PolitiFact spin.

The Obama campaign made a claim about disparate pay for men and women doing the same work and tried to support it with a statistic that doesn't take into account the type of work done.  That's a flatly wrong approach, perhaps even "pants on fire" if one believes in applying subjective judgments to rulings on matters of fact.

PolitiFact's conclusion suggests that the Obama campaign was trying oh-so-hard to simply convey that men and women are paid differently irrespective of the jobs they do and (oopsie!) just happened to get a little mixed up in the delivery.  There's one way to keep the statistic from earning a "False" rating or worse:  Find out the real number and determine whether the 77 cent figure is somewhat close.

Nothing else will do.


Update:

Factcheck.org tried to do the fact check the right way.

The conclusion:

But the president was flatly wrong to say that women are paid 77 percent of the pay of men for the “same work.” And the fact that women’s median annual earnings are 77 percent of men’s isn’t all or even mostly due to discrimination, as the ad implies.

"Mostly False" gives the Obama campaign considerable benefit of the doubt.

PolitiFlub: No credit or blame for Bill Clinton?

Rookie mistake?

Close on the heels of a hard-to-explain discrepancy involving call-and-response claims from the Obama and Romney campaigns, PolitiFact New Jersey sheds one of PolitiFact's principles like newly adult cicadas shed old exoskeletons .

Recall PolitiFact editor Bill Adair's edict that the fact checkers would start taking credit and blame consistently into account:

About a year ago, we realized we were ducking the underlying point of blame or credit, which was the crucial message. So we began rating those types of claims as compound statements.

Now watch PolitiFact New Jersey duck blame or credit as Bill Clinton claims credit for balancing the budget and partially paying down the national debt:

Our ruling

At a June 1 campaign event, Clinton touted his fiscal record in the final years of his presidency. "Then I gave you four surplus budgets for the first time in more than 70 years, paid $600 billion down on the national debt," Clinton told the crowd.

Clinton delivered four consecutive surplus budgets for the first time in more than seven decades, but the former president misstated the level of debt reduction. During those four fiscal years, the debt held by the public dropped by nearly $453 billion, but total debt jumped by about $400 billion.

We rate the statement Mostly True.

Who says the executive branch doesn't control the purse strings of the federal government?

PolitiFlub: Blaming Romney for blaming Obama

PolitiFact has found yet another method for allowing inconsistent standards to taint its ratings of political statements.

Call it the "blame game" game.

We saw an early warning of this tendency in the form of gauging credit rather than blame.  PolitiFact repented of supposedly overplaying the degree to which President Obama took credit for positive changes in job numbers.  Obama received an upgrade from "Half True" to "Mostly True" in that case.

We saw it again earlier this week when PolitiFact gave both the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign "Half True" ratings based on blame.  Obama adviser David Axelrod tied Romney to Massachusetts' job creation ranking during Romney's tenure as governor.  Romney campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom responded by pointing out a positive trend in the Massachusetts ranking under Romney as well as an overall positive picture of unemployment in the state.  Did Fehnstrom simply add important context to the situation described by Axelrod or was he giving Romney credit?  PolitiFact ignored the former possibility and docked Fehrnstrom down to "Half True" despite accurate statistics.

Later in the week PolitiFact gave us yet another example.

PolitiFact:

In a new Web ad, the Romney campaign questions how Hispanics in the U.S. have fared under President Barack Obama.

The ad, titled "Dismal," flashes shadowy faces of Latinos along with text citing rising unemployment and poverty rates in that minority group. The statistics are bookended by clips from Obama’s own Spanish-language ads that say the country is moving in the right direction.

"Really?" the ad asks.

To PolitiFact, the above unquestionably shows that the Romney campaign is blaming Obama for the economic plight of Hispanics.  PolitiFact communicates this clearly in the conclusion (bold emphasis added):

Our ruling

Romney’s ad correctly states that more Hispanics in the U.S. have fallen below the poverty line since Obama took office: 2.25 million more people through 2010, according to the census.

But the ad’s clear message is that it’s Obama’s fault but experts say it's a much more complicated picture than that. We rate the statement Half True.

Isn't the ad's message much more complicated than simply blaming Obama for the level of Hispanic unemployment?

The ad shows Obama's claims that the country is moving in the right direction.  Is Obama claiming credit for taking the country in the right direction?  The Romney campaign ad does not address that question.  Instead, it uses the stats on Hispanic poverty rates to question Obama's claim that the country is moving in the right direction.

PolitiFact badly overstates the degree to which the ad blames Obama for changes in Hispanic poverty rates.  At most, the ad faults Obama for not doing a better job of improving the American economy, even to the point where the poverty rate among Hispanics would bear out a claim like "We're moving in the right direction."

The Romney campaign hit Obama on a legitimate discrepancy between Obama's claim and the Hispanic poverty rate.  PolitiFact's use of blame to drop the rating amounts to grasping at straws, and grasping at straws is an unbecoming behavior for fact checkers.

Fact checking as PolitiFact does it in the above cases remains indistinguishable from deliberate partisan spin.

PolitiFlub: The argument over job creation in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts

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

Apparently PolitiFact simply isn't capable of applying the results of its examination.

A  pair of fact check stories published yesterday illustrate the point.

The Obama campaign has hit former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney over his record on job creation in that state.  The Romney campaign has replied with numbers that imply Romney performed well in Massachusetts on job creation.

PolitiFact picks up on the context of battling rhetoric:

Both presidential campaigns are using job statistics to attack each other. President Barack Obama and his allies have spent months criticizing Mitt Romney’s job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts. Now, Romney and his surrogates are arguing that job creation in Massachusetts actually improved on Romney’s watch.

So who’s right?

PolitiFact's wrong, at least if we take its "attack each other" description to apply to this pair of fact checks.  The Obama campaign is attacking.  The Romney campaign is defending.  PolitiFact mischaracterizes the relationship between the two claims and botches at least one of the rulings.

PolitiFact:

For this fact-check, we'll follow our usual approach of looking at the claim in two parts: first, are the numbers correct, and second, how much is the change because of Romney's policies?

The described approach works well, at least potentially, for the attacking claim from Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod.  Axelrod says Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation under Romney.  The claim only makes sense in the campaign if Romney is significantly responsible for the number.

The same approach is wrong for Eric Fehrnstrom's reply because Fehrnstrom is countering Axelrod's attack.  Fehrnstrom's argument doesn't require credit to Romney for the rise in rankings.  Fehrnstrom's statistic plays its primary role in undercutting Axelrod's argument.  Fehrnstrom, in effect, supplies part of the context that Axelrod deliberately neglected.

PolitiFact often bases its rulings on the degree to which a statement ignores context that might shed different light on a claim.  Fehrnstrom's head and shoulders over Axelrod in that regard in this case, but PolitiFact misreports Fehrnstrom's role in the argument and laughably gives both statements a "Half True" rating.

Want some partisan spin with your fact checking?  PolitiFact's your source.

PolitiFlub: When words don't really matter that much

The impetus for this PolitiFlub comes from PolitiFact Texas, rating a claim by Democrat Gilberto Hinojosa.

PolitiFact quotes Hinojosa:

"A large majority of the Republican Party believes that this man is a Muslim and was born in a foreign country, was not born in the United States," he said at the Central Texas Democratic Forum on April 24, 2012.

I'm in favor of charitable interpretation for all, but it's appropriate to at least mention each reasonable interpretation.

Hinojosa may have intended to say that a majority of Republicans believe both (and not or) propositions.  In other words, the exact same group in the sample supposedly holds both beliefs.

For example (figures simply for the sake of argument):

52 percent believe Obama is a Muslim and born outside U.S.
8 percent believe Obama is a Muslim, but born inside U.S.
11 percent believe Obama is not a Muslim but was born outside U.S.
(71 percent believe Obama is a Muslim or born outside U.S.)

Consistent with PolitiFact's statement of principles, the fact check should have considered the less charitable interpretation.  It is the best practice to inform the reader when one is using the principle of charitable interpretation in a fact check.

In this case, contrary to PolitiFact's principles, words weren't important.  Hinojosa's specific wording was forgiven without comment in favor of a less literal interpretation.

PolitiFlub: President Obama's near-sterling record on spending?

MarketWatch's Rex Nutting published a defense of President Obama's spending record on May 22.

Quite a number of conservatives have written to rebut Nutting regarding his point that Obama has not presided over an unusually large increase in federal government spending.  But, strangely, conservative-leaning PolitiFact did not join the chorus of criticism.

Instead, PolitiFact rated a secondhand viral Facebook version of Nutting's argument "Mostly True."

The problem? The flub, that is?

PolitiFact entirely ignores the fundamentally accurate criticism undercutting Nutting's argument in favor of Obama's light-spending ways:  The Bush budget of 2009 provides a very unusual baseline against which to compare Obama's spending.

PolitiFact simply closes its eyes to that context:

Our ruling

The Facebook post says Mitt Romney is wrong to claim that spending under Obama has "accelerated at a pace without precedent in recent history," because it's actually risen "slower than at any time in nearly 60 years."

Obama has indeed presided over the slowest growth in spending of any president using raw dollars, and it was the second-slowest if you adjust for inflation. The math simultaneously backs up Nutting’s calculations and demolishes Romney’s contention. The only significant shortcoming of the graphic is that it fails to note that some of the restraint in spending was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans. On balance, we rate the claim Mostly True.

The rest of the fact check is equally blind to the critical context of the claim. 

PolitiFlub: PolitiFact Florida and the loss of existing insurance

PolitiFact Florida published a fact check yesterday parallel to one I blasted just last week concerning the loss of existing insurance plans with the implementation of the health care reform bill.

The PolitiFact Florida conclusion:

Our ruling

The U.S. Chamber said, "Obamacare could cause 20 million people to lose their current coverage." It's a claim that is oft-repeated and much exaggerated.

The chamber employs a worst-case projection by a nonpartisan research agency. The agency’s other forecasts are lower, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the ad. And unlike Priebus, the group does not specify that the type of insurance potentially affected is a specific type of insurance -- "employer-based" insurance.

Plus, this 20 million estimate only counts people who receive coverage from their employer -- and not those who might receive better coverage elsewhere.

Most importantly, this figure does not represent uninsured people who will get coverage because of the law.

We rate it Mostly False.

How doth PolitiFact mislead thee?  Let me count the ways ...

1)  "The chamber employs a worst-case projection by a nonpartisan research agency"  Following as it does on the heels of "oft-repeated and much exaggerated," this sounds bad.  But the worst case scenario is exactly how one ought to support a claim of potential damage ("could cause 20 million people to lose their current coverage").  PolitiFact's observation is a positive posing as a negative.

2)  "The agency’s other forecasts are lower, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the ad." Hidden context?  One wouldn't know that "could cause 20 million" calls for a high-end estimate from reading PolitiFact's fact check.  Basic English interpretation tells the viewer that "could cause" implies a high-end estimate and a worst-case scenario.  But the 20 million figure is neither of those in the context of the ad.

3)  "(T)he group does not specify that the type of insurance potentially affected is a specific type of insurance--'employer-based' insurance."  PolitiFact doesn't tell you that by using a number specific to one type of insurance it implies that any loss from other types of insurance gets added to the worst-case scenario number.  Consider all types of insurance and the number can only be equal or higher.  So how is it misleading except by underestimating the worst-case scenario?

4)  "Plus, this 20 million estimate only counts people who receive coverage from their employer -- and not those who might receive better coverage elsewhere."  This isn't even a coherent objection.  PolitiFact is probably trying to say that the 20 million figure includes those who opt for "better" coverage apart from an employer-offered plan.  The report on which PolitiFact relied makes no reference to spurning the employer offer for a "better" plan unless by "better" PolitiFact means cheaper.  The report indicates that customers offered more than one option for health insurance strongly prefer less expensive plans.  The report does not mention any alternative motivation, so PolitiFact apparently dreamed up the one it mentions.  It's possible to argue that those who leave employer insurance because of pricing are not forced into cheaper insurance plans, but PolitiFact's implication that consumers freely choose better plans obscures the factors at work and allows readers to assume that the "better plans" idea comes from the CBO/JCT report.  It doesn't.

5)  "Most importantly, this figure does not represent uninsured people who will get coverage because of the law."  A figure for persons losing current coverage should never represent uninsured people who will get coverage because of the law.  Uninsured people have no existing coverage to lose in the first place.  PolitiFact's most important point is irrelevant to the accuracy of the 20 million figure.  At most, it is relevant as context trying to balance the 20 million figure against a benefit of the health care reform law.

6)  A real fact check would have looked for types of existing insurance other than employer insurance likely lost as a result of the health care law.  The same CBO/JCT report lists such losses on the line below losses to employer insurance.  PolitiFact somehow neglects to notice (the figure is an additional 3 million for the baseline scenario and an additional 1 million for the worst-case scenario):

http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-15-ACA_and_Insurance_2.pdf

Nice job of plowing another train into your existing train-wreck, PolitiFact.

We rate it Mostly False.

Trading on what credibility, pray tell?

How did this fact check pass an editor's examination?

PolitiFlub: Comparing apples and appanges?

PolitiFact determines whether Mitt Romney flip-flopped on President Obama's stimulus plan:

Our ruling
It’s misleading to say that Romney flip-flopped on supporting "the president's Recovery Act." At the time of the CNN interview, no Obama stimulus bill had been introduced, much less enacted. With such complex bills, the devil’s in the details.

But before Obama took office, Romney had spoken in favor of a stimulus -- particularly if the stimulus in question had been passed when a Republican was in the White House. We rate this a Half Flip.

 So he never supported Obama's stimulus but half-flipped on supporting Obama's stimulus.

That's because he supported some type of stimulus according to the description he gave prior to Obama taking office.

This is a little like flip-flopping on Pepsi cola.  You've never liked Pepsi cola, but you do drink Coca-cola.  Since you like Coca-cola you've half-flipped on liking Pepsi cola.

It makes perfect sense once you think about it.

PolitiFlub: A static number of federal jobs programs?

What can you say about a fact-checking organization that's often no more accurate than the statements it critiques?

Case in point, PolitiFact did a check on Mitt Romney's claim that the federal government runs 49 jobs programs and oversees those programs using eight different agencies.

PolitiFact used as its key source a Government Accountability Office report that focused on fiscal year 2009.

The current year is 2012, and it is the year in which Romney made his statement.

PolitiFact made a very weak effort to update the GAO numbers with reports of new federal job training programs or changes in the number of agencies overseeing said programs.  Indeed, PolitiFact did not make any mention of the Wall Street Journal column that probably served as Romney's source:

There are no fewer than 49 federal job training programs administered by nine agencies that cost taxpayers some $14.5 billion in 2010. A General Accountability Office performance audit in 2011 looked at fiscal year 2009 and determined that "only 5 of the 47 programs have had impact studies that assess whether the program is responsible for improved employment outcomes."

If the Journal report is correct then Romney is off by one as to the number of agencies overseeing job training programs and did not overestimate the number of federal jobs programs.  PolitiFact, if the Journal report is correct, was accurate regarding the number of agencies but off by at least two regarding the number of programs, with the latter an understatement of the actual number.

It looks very much like PolitiFact simply whiffed on the attempt to check for new information updating the GAO numbers.  Without that information PolitiFact has no business trying to rate the truth of Romney's claim.

PolitiFlub: The Romney Flip-Flop on man-made global warming?

PolitiFact's rating of a "Half Flip" for Mitt Romney's position on man-made global warming gives me an excuse to dust off the "Flub-O-Meter" and attach the ol' electrodes to PolitiFact's reasoning behind the rating.

The rationale behind the "Half Flip" rating comes from a single statement Romney made on the issue.

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

But at a campaign event in Pittsburgh, Pa., a few months later, Romney offered a somewhat different perspective. His comments were videotaped and promoted by the liberal advocacy website Think Progress.

A voter asked Romney, "What is your position on man-made global warming and would you reject legislation, such as cap and trade, which is based on the idea of man-made global warming?"

"My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us. My view with regards to energy policy is pretty straightforward. I want us to become energy secure and independent of the oil cartels. And that means let’s aggressively develop our oil, our gas, our coal, our nuclear power."

PolitiFact detects a contrast between that statement and his other statements, as Romney typically acknowledges a role for humans in causing global warming while stating he doesn't think we know the degree to which humans contribute to the phenomenon.

In the summary paragraph, PolitiFact uses that difference to justify the "Half Flip" rating:

It’s unclear to us whether this was an inadvertent omission or a calculated attempt to say divergent things to different audiences. Because Romney, in our view, is savvy enough to know the difference between suggesting a human role in climate change and leaving it out, we think it’s reasonable to perceive Romney as taking two distinct stances in these two statements. We rate this a Half Flip.

PolitiFact's rating ignores the fact that it is normal to communicate using varying degrees of precision.  There are a good number of reasons for not drawing too much into the one statement from Romney, among them the fact that the question was specifically about man-made global warming.  If Romney didn't think mankind was at all responsible for climate change then he could have answered that he does not believe in man-made climate change.  The most reasonable interpretation takes Romney as referring to the principal cause(s) of climate change when he says the cause is unknown.

It's fairly easy to illustrate this variation in precision using statements by PolitiFact editor Bill Adair regarding PolitiFact's process for choosing which statements to fact check.

Adair last year:

"We are a news organization and we choose which facts to check based on news judgment. We check claims that we believe readers are curious about, claims that would prompt them to wonder, 'Is that true?'"

Adair this year:

"We try to check roughly the same number of claims by Democrats as we do for Republicans."

In both cases Adair was addressing the issue of selection bias.  Like Romney's statements on man-made climate change, Adair's descriptions differ from one another.  PolitiFact would probably conclude that Adair is savvy enough about PolitiFact's operations to know that even back in 2011 that PolitiFact tries to check roughly ht same number of claims from either party.

But is that the correct conclusion?

It's more reasonable to take Adair as simply offering differing accounts of the same process.  It's called "charitable interpretation," and PolitiFact struggles particularly in applying it to the claims of conservatives.

Regarding Romney, his statement was probably neither an inadvertent omission nor a calculated attempt to play to two different audiences.  Romney simply used normal human language, complete with normal ambiguity, to communicate his position on climate change.

Heightening the aggravation of these types of PolitiFact findings, PolitiFact exempts itself from the "Burden of Proof" standard it applies to those it rates.  A politician has the burden of proof for supporting his claims, PolitiFact says.  But PolitiFact can claim a "Half Flip" just because it's supposedly "reasonable" to reach its conclusion.

It's hypocrisy lumped on top of a poor evaluation process.

And it's a "Full Flub" on the Flub-O-Meter.

PolitiFlub: PolitiFact covering for Democrats on Medicare

Today PolitiFact's Angie Drobnic Holan unveiled a PolitiFact primer on Medicare.

It's not all bad.  It provides some helpful information.

But it ignores and/or distorts perhaps the central issue in the Medicare debate:  cost.

How does PolitiFact do it?

PolitiFact (bold emphasis added):

The health care law, though, is loaded with other changes to Medicare. Most notably, Democrats found ways to reduce projected spending by $500 billion over 10 years, which they then counted as deficit reductions against new spending in the health care law.

The idea is to steer Medicare away from paying for each treatment (called "fee for service") and toward a system that pays doctors and hospitals based on improving patient health.

The savings came from reducing payments to Medicare Advantage and to hospitals, nursing homes and other skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies. The reductions are part of programs intended to improve care and make it more efficient — for instance, by lowering payments for preventable hospital readmissions.

The above three paragraphs from PolitiFact are fairly loaded with misdirection.

First example:  "Democrats found ways to reduce projected spending by $500 billion over 10 years."  The statement is true but misleading.  Democrats found ways to reduce projected spending by pretending the "Doc fix" will not occur.  The "Doc fix" keeps Medicare reimbursement rate schedules from dropping so low that it chases doctors from the practice of medicine with a resulting shortage of services. 

Here's how the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds described it in a 2012 report:

Most of the ACA-related cost saving is attributable to a reduction in the annual payment updates for most Medicare services (other than physicians’ services and drugs) by total economy multifactor productivity growth, which the Trustees project will average 1.1 percent per year. The report notes that sustaining these payment reductions indefinitely will require unprecedented efficiency-enhancing innovations in health care payment and delivery systems that are by no means certain. In addition, the Trustees assume an almost 31-percent reduction in Medicare payment rates for physician services will be implemented in 2013 as required by current law, which is also highly uncertain.

Drobnic Holan's second paragraph above settles on a relatively minor feature of the Democrats' health care reform.  As the Medicare trustees note, savings from changing the nature of reimbursement does not certainly lead to savings.  Incentives for better patient care lead to patients living longer and thus more likely needing additional medical services in the future.  Does it lead in practice to a net savings over a baseline projection?

In her third paragraph Drobnic Holan pulls a "bury the lede" move by sticking the cuts to Medicare Advantage in just ahead of cuts to traditional Medicare services.   Seriously, try reading it this way:  "The savings came from reducing payments to hospitals, nursing homes and other skilled nursing facilities and home health agencies, as well as to Medicare Advantage."  For the ACA's first 10 years a large share of the projected savings come from also cutting payments to doctors (see "Doc fix").

Paying for Medicare in its current form will not just be "a challenge," as Drobnic Holan puts it.  The structure of Medicare under the ACA makes it likely that "Medicare as we know it" will end in fiscal ruin unless reforms under the ACA result in deep and widespread rationing of services.

Democrats running for election in 2012 will appreciate it if we're all unaware of that.  And PolitiFact did its part to help.

PolitiFlub: Noted enabler of political distractions identifies "red herring"

Red herring:

1. A smoked herring having a reddish color.
2. Something that draws attention away from the central issue.

--Answers.com

The logic-challenged fact checkers at PolitiFact believe they have discovered a red herring amidst Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's criticisms of President Obama's record on women's issues.

Romney charged that the Obama administration has the worst record for participation of women in the work force.  The summary from PolitiFact's response, in part:

The increases for presidents between 1948 and the late 1980s are largely due to broader social trends beyond the control of any president, so saying that Obama did worse than them is a red herring.

Hmmm?  And from what central issue is Romney distracting?

PolitiFact's response is just too funny.

The "Republican War on Women" rhetoric from Democrats is the red herring.  The central issue is the economy.  The Romney campaign is ingeniously addressing the Democrats' rhetoric of distraction and bringing attention back to the economy.  PolitiFact flags Romney for using a red herring.

Priceless.

And now to look up PolitiFact's past attempts to use "red herring" correctly in a sentence.

PolitiFlub: The unaccountable redefining of "unaccountable"

Few things succinctly illustrate PolitiFact's incompetence than its routine re-imagining of word definitions.

PolitiFact's March 22 item on Mitt Romney's claim that ObamaCare "ends Medicare as we know it" (the parody wasn't obvious to PolitiFact, apparently) included a repeat of PolitiFact's insistence that the Independent Payment Advisory Board is not an "unaccountable" body.

What does "unaccountable" mean?

I'll put the bulk of the evaluation at the end (see "Afters"), but the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary provides the operative definition:

2 unaccountable (to someone/something)  
not having to explain or give reasons for your actions to anyone 

• Too many government departments are unaccountable to the general public.

PolitiFact confuses the limits on the IPAB's power with accountability:

Is IPAB unaccountable? The answer is: No.

Members are chosen by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The board would not issue edicts. It would make recommendations. If Congress does not act on its recommendations within a set time, the recommendations are automatically implemented.

But Congress has other opportunities to intervene. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation analysis, the full House and Senate may consider amendments that change or repeal the board's recommendations as long as those changes meet the same fiscal criteria as the board itself uses. Congress is even granted a one-time opportunity to introduce legislation to dismantle IPAB permanently. This would require approval between January 2017 and Aug. 15, 2017, with the support of three-fifths of the members of the House and Senate.

So Congress has multiple ways to intervene. This negates the argument that its actions are "unaccountable."

PolitiFact's supposed negation of Romney's argument relies on making up a new definition of "unaccountable," something along the lines of "able to do whatever you want no matter what anybody says or does."

By the operative definition, however, the IPAB is unaccountable by design, name and definition.  It is the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

The word "Independent" does not occur in the name by accident.

The board is specifically designed to work independently of executive branch authority just like the Supreme Court (appointed by, but not under the authority of).  And it is likewise independent in exercising authority within its statutory limits without owing any reason or explanation for its decisions to anyone, including Congress.

In short, the IPAB is unaccountable by name and definition but PolitiFact can't figure it out.


Afters:

Webster's New World College Dictionary is the standard for publications using AP style.  PolitiFact publishes based on a variant of AP style.  Here's "unaccountable" as defined by Webster's New World College Dictionary:

Not accountable; not responsible

Not much help, is it?  Perhaps we can fill in the blanks with the definition of "accountable":

Obliged to account for one's acts; responsible

And there it is, approximately as clear as in the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary version.  The IPAB never has to account for its actions.  It was made explicitly independent.  Congressional actions that forestall implementation of IPAB recommendations are irrelevant to the accountability of the IPAB.

What does it say about PolitiFact that it can flub this issue with no less than a writer/researcher, editor and a team of three editors overseeing the final product?



Correction/Update:  Changed "'Medicare are we know it'" to "'Medicare as we know it.'"  The team of three editors that reviews my work prior to publication has been sacked.

PolitiFlub: Fact checkers use grading criteria selectively on Gerry Connolly rating

Let's see ... how long ago was it that Louis Jacobson proclaimed in a PolitiFact National story that PolitiFact "consistently ruled in the past that the economy is too complex to assign full blame (or credit) for job gains or losses to a president or a governor"?

Not long ago, as it turns out.

Fortunately the ups and downs of the Dow Jones industrial average pose no such problems of complexity.  Consideration of cause and effect was apparently pitched out the window when PolitiFact Virginia rated a claim by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.):

"We’ve doubled the stock market from where we started when he was sworn into office -- Bush had gotten it down to 6,500. It’s double that today," Connolly said.

Connolly's wording certainly seems to push the cause-and-effect angle, but the fact check contains no hint at all that PolitiFact Virginia docked Connolly for taking credit on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.  At least Connolly was generous enough to share with President Bush the credit for dropping the Dow to 6,500 while modestly withholding credit to a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party during the precipitous decline.

In the end PolitiFact rated Connolly "Mostly False" based on cherry picking a time frame inconsistent with the one he specified.  One sentence in PolitiFact's summary takes note of the claimed cause and effect relationship, but without the assumption that Connolly's "exaggeration" refers to the credit offered to Democrats rather than his fudging of the numbers it looks like Connolly isn't docked for offering dubious credit:

The Dow rose 55.5 percent from Inauguration Day to the day of Connolly’s statement. Two broad indexes tell a similar story: the S&P 500 went up 59.1 percent and the Wilshire 5000 increased by 66.1 percent. It’s debatable how much of the improvement can be pinpointed to the president’s policies.

So Connolly’s claim has a foundation that is cracked by the weight of exaggeration and cherry-picked data. We rate it Mostly False.

With Connolly's cherry-picking justification set aside, his claim was off by almost 45 percent--typically the stuff of a "False" rating using PolitiMath.

If one claims to consistently rule with cause-and-effect relationships taken into account then one ought to do so consistently.  It seems likely that PolitiFact Virginia did not penalize Connolly for his claim of causation; if Connolly was penalized then the story failed to clearly communicate it.

PolitiFlub: Udderly confused by EPA's milk regs

This.
just.
doesn't.
look.
very.
easy.
to.
reconcile:

(link to story at PolitiFact.com)

That's President Obama from yesterday's State of the Union Address.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The latter rating came from PolitiFact Virginia almost a full year ago.

On the face of it, one can imagine a reconciliation of the two rulings.  But it's doubtful if you've looked at the one for Obama after evaluating the one for Griffith.

The best part of it is that PolitiFact may have flubbed both rulings.  The EPA was leaning toward an exemption for homogenized milk.  But the exemption would not have covered raw milk, which should have left Griffith's claim at least partly true.  And if raw milk received no exemption from the EPA then Obama's claim is approximately half true as well.  A raw milk spill would still be treated just like an oil spill even after President Obama supposedly eliminated the rule that required a milk spill to be treated like an oil spill.

Welcome to the wonderful world of PolitiFact fact checking.

Update:  Looks like the EPA did get around to exempting all milk products from the rule. Griffith was still partially correct at worst, and President Obama did not eliminate an EPA rule.  Rather, Obama's EPA exempted milk from a rule that remains in effect.  And Obama's statement obscures the administration's vacillating actions on the issue:

"The Obama Administration pulled back the rule in January of 2009, then reissued it in November, and to large degree it was the same rule," Schlegel said.