PolitiFact pimps NPR's Brendan Nyhan puffery

The truth-hustlers at PolitiFact have invoked fellow truth-hustler Brendan Nyhan to undergird their self-serving narrative of special expertise in divining the truth.

Who doesn't remember Bill Adair defending PolitiFact's 2011 "Lie of the Year" award based on the fact that most people live in a partisan echo chamber?

National Public Radio indulged its Nyhan fetish again under the story heading "Partisan Psychology: Why Do People Choose Political Loyalties Over Facts?"

Try this representative sample:

The flipped perceptions on gas prices isn't an aberration, said Dartmouth College political scientist Brendan Nyhan. On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.

Nyhan and Reifler (as they regularly seem to do) fail to take into account the complexity of political issues.  Many things affect gas prices, and partisans and non-partisans alike will adopt complex explanations for changes in the price of gas.  Survey data such as that used by Nyhan strips away subtleties and slots the answers into a narrow set of choices.  Most and perhaps all of the difference noted between the apparent change in party belief probably results from simply placing greater emphasis on one aspect of the issue, almost as though people have a natural ability to sell used cars.  If the car isn't better because of outstanding gas mileage then it's better because of large trunk capacity.  Likewise the presidential role in setting gas prices gets communicated according to a favorable narrative.  And it doesn't necessarily mean that the person selling the apparently inconsistent narrative doesn't understand the truth.

Don't buy a used car from Nyhan and Reifler, by the way.

Reminder: Why we hate the Yankees

Just watched a Yankees reliever strike out Carlos Pena on a called third strike to end the game.  The pitcher threw five pitches to Pena.  None of them were in the Fox Track strike zone.  Pena didn't swing at any of them.  Bases were loaded.

There's one mitigating factor:  It's not the Yankees calling the balls and strikes.

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.

May Artist: Mads Eriksen

I'm unhappy with the changes Reverb Nation has made to its music player embed, so the monthly music artist recommendation will have a random format until I settle on one I like.  This month's featured artist is Norwegian guitarist Mads Eriksen.

Eriksen has great chops and a superior melodic sense.  He also has an affinity for chicken pickin' country licks.  Two instrumental tunes in heavy rotation are "In the Streets and Alleys of Town" and "Admission of Failure." 

Here's a Spotify playlist featuring four of my favorite tunes including the two mentioned above.


And here's a video of the last song, "Destroyer."



Addendum: I'm giving the Spotify playlist a try in the sidebar. It's wider than the old nifty "Reverb Nation" player, so it's near the very bottom to minimize interference with searches of posts by the month or year.


Addendum Jr.:  If the playlist shows as "empty" for me I imagine it does the same for others (though it worked at first).  Bear with me as I leave things as they are for the sake of experimentation.

Addendum III: Jettisoned the Spotify playlist player; didn't seem to work and apparently interfered with stats.

Update: Fixed title to reflect the current month ("May") rather than the preceding month ("April"). Can't slow the advance of time that way, as it happens.

NPR and truth-hustler guests Adair and Nyhan

National Public Radio brought two of my favorite truth-hustlers on its "All Things Considered" program.   I refer to Bill Adair and Brendan Nyhan.

(clipped from npr.org 4/29/12)

Bill Adair serves as founding editor for Politico PolitiFact, a fact-checking operation started by a left-leaning Florida newspaper.  PolitiFact sacrifices journalistic objectivity in part for the sake of its marketing gimmick, called the "Truth-O-Meter."

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan mangles facts from the realm of academia.  Nyhan has tried to show that partisans don't accept facts that contradict their ideology.  His research often uses facts that beg the question (more on Nyhan), suggesting that Nyhan falls victim to his own research goal.

The relevant radio program segment deals with a column from Chicago Tribune columnist Rex Huppke, who bemoaned the state of truth following Rep. Allen West's statement, using Huppke's paraphrase, that "as many as 81" members of the Democratic Party are members of the Communist Party.

Huppke gets some kind of award for irony.  Journalists took West out of context.  West was jokingly, though to make a seriously point, referring to the Congressional Progressive Caucus.  The context makes that absolutely clear.

Stories like these are to Adair and Nyhan what the Trayvon Martin case is to Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton.  The media want the narrative that the former two spin and so seek them out for commentary when these issues make the news.  Adair and Nyhan are the truth-hustler counterparts to race-hustlers.

Adair shows up to remind us how great it is that Politico PolitiFact is there to save the day, if only we can place sufficient trust in its work.

Adair (transcript mine, from the NPR audio):

"What's funny is sometimes I'll get an email that'll say 'You guys are so biased.'  But I won't know who we're supposed to be biased in favor of, because we get criticized a lot by both sides.  And I think that's just the nature of a very rough-and-tumble political discourse."

Funny is Adair still using the "we get criticized from both sides" dodge to avoid the issue of bias.  Fortunately a journalist asked Adair exactly the right question earlier this year with equally hilarious results.

PolitiFact's system is perfect for filtering the truth according to media ideology.

Academia, unfortunately, carries an ideological slant somewhat akin to that found in the U.S. media.  Nyhan perhaps represents one of academic liberalism's top leaders in the war over political truth. 

NPR brought forth an old example of Nyhan's supposed "backfire" effect, where a correction of a falsehood leads to stronger belief in the falsehood. Though Nyhan's own research  (see descriptions of "Study 2") appears to show that the phenomenon does not occur with clear corrections, that hardly dampens mainstream media enthusiasm for the idea.  They can claim they're doing a great job but the audience is the problem.

There is something of an information crisis, but Adair and Nyhan probably do as much damage as good in addressing the problem.  We're not getting the best information from either journalists or academia.  Journalists typically do not have the expertise to sift through complex issues of truth.  Academics have shifted left ideologically and do an inadequate job of critically reviewing the journals that ought to provide our best sources of trustworthy information.

We don't have a reliable gatekeeper for our pool of information.  And it's hard to come up with good solutions to the problem.

Test everything. Hold on to the good.
--Paul the Apostle, 1 Thess. 5:21

Sen. Bill Nelson has budget crisis licked?

Got another Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) campaign email in the mailbox today:

We need to take a long hard look at everything we can to address our budget crisis. That means cutting wasteful spending where we see it, while strengthening our social safety net.

Cut wasteful spending.  Increase other spending. 

Sounds like a winner.  Just the kind of bold plan we need to avert the budget crisis, though perhaps not quite as good as the one where every American gets $10 million in loans.

PolitiFact's big oily mess

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

"(O)ftentimes when readers, um, disagree with our work and very passionately disagree with us, they disagree with us using evidence that we gave them.  It's not like they're going out and researching these things and uncovering these facts."
--PolitiFact Florida editor Angie Drobnic Holan

PolitiFact slips up sensationally on oil claims

Oil production.

Producing oil was not one of President Obama's priorities early in his presidency.  He preferred to ramp up the use of renewable energy sources while allowing the price of oil and other carbon-based energy sources to rise.  The rise in cost would help encourage the use of renewables.

As gas prices rose and Obama faced tougher prospects for his re-election, he started to make claims about oil production in order to co-opt Republican calls for more domestic drilling.

Here we'll examine the way PolitiFact treated a closely-related set of oil production claims over approximately the past year.

March 11, 2011:

Jan. 24, 2012:

March 28, 2012:

April 10, 2012:

There's little dispute about the facts.  Domestic oil production is up.  But things get a bit murkier when one starts trying to assign credit.  And that's precisely where PolitiFact flubs this series of fact checks.

There was something fishy about the "red herring" ...

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"?

Where's the fact check?

Sheila Bair: Fix income inequality with $10 million loans for all

Via Power Line:

Sheila Bair was chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for a five-year term that expired last year. At the agency she was a power player with sharp elbows that she deployed to defend and extend the agency’s turf. Today RealClearPolitics features her Washington Post column “Fix income inequality with a $10 million loan for everyone.”

And from Bair's column in the Washington Post:

Under my plan, each American household could borrow $10 million from the Fed at zero interest. The more conservative among us can take that money and buy 10-year Treasury bonds. At the current 2 percent annual interest rate, we can pocket a nice $200,000 a year to live on. The more adventuresome can buy 10-year Greek debt at 21 percent, for an annual income of $2.1 million. Or if Greece is a little too risky for you, go with Portugal, at about 12 percent, or $1.2 million dollars a year. (No sense in getting greedy.)

I published a parallel proposal to PolitiFact's Facebook page back in 2010.

Why wouldn't it work for the government to give everyone jobs with the federal government paying $1 million per year?

I used the challenge repeatedly to expose liberal thinking on economic policy and especially the supposed problem of income inequality.

Great minds think alike.  Though it's worth mentioning that vacant minds also think alike.

To be clear, the general idea of an expansive federal income subsidy, whether via loan or employment, is a pretty natural reductio ad absurdum for the "fairness" aspect of income inequality arguments.  I don't think Bair stole my idea.  But I'll claim my slice of credit.

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.