Grading PolitiFact (Texas): All out of "out of context" where Romney's concerned

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

W. Gardner Selby:  writer, researcher
John Bridges:  editor


Analysis:

I've tipped off that the key aspect to this fact check concerns whether Mitt Romney's statement was taken out of context.  Let's track PolitiFact's treatment of that aspect of this fact check.

PolitiFact:

"Mitt Romney, quite simply, doesn’t get it," the San Antonio mayor (Julián Castro) said in his Sept. 4, 2012, keynote at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C. "A  few months ago, he visited a university in Ohio and gave the students there a little entrepreneurial advice. ‘Start a business,’ he said. "But how? ‘Borrow money if you have to from your parents.’

That's the Julián Castro version of the context.  Romney was giving the students "a little entrepreneurial advice."

PolitiFact appears to accept the accuracy of Castro's version of the context at face value with its phrasing, in the very next paragraph, of the question of the fact check would answer:

Did Castro accurately recap Romney’s student advice?

PolitiFact might consider a different angle on that question:  Was Romney giving entrepreneurial advice to the students at Ohio's Otterbein University?

With both questions in mind, watch the video.



In context, Romney was talking about the historical climate for American entrepreneurship. He didn't tell the students to borrow money from the parents. He painted a general picture of ways entrepreneurs chase their dreams, and he gave borrowing money from parents as one example. Notably, the line segued to the example of Jimmy John, who founded a nationally popular sandwich chain using startup money borrowed from his father.

Castro gets the words right, but both Castro and PolitiFact get the context wrong. PolitiFact's conclusion doesn't fly as a result:

Castro told his fellow Democrats that Romney urged students at an Ohio university that if they have to, they should borrow money from their parents to start a business. Romney, in fact, said that. Castro’s claim rates True.

By PolitiFact's statement of principles, Castro's claim is "Half True" at best.


The grades:

W. Gardner Selby:  F
John Bridges:  F

PolitiFact stayed on the same page with Castro as he took Romney's statement out of context.  Castro attempted to make Romney seem out of touch and distant with the supposed suggestion of borrowing money to start a business.  But Romney was correct that borrowing money from parents is one way Americans historically chase their entrepreneurial dreams.  Plus the comment served as an apparently deliberate introduction to the Jimmy John anecdote.

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.

Former PolitiFact writer Robert Farley still spreading misinformation at Factcheck.org

Writer Robert Farley worked at PolitiFact before catching on with the more respectable Annenberg Fact Check (factcheck.org).

I've hoped that Farley would step up his game.  But the folks at Annenberg are, after all, liberally biased, so it's no surprise that Farley continues to fact check in a style similar to that he used at PolitiFact.

Our case in point:

A new ad from the Obama campaign claims that Mitt Romney “paid only 14 percent in taxes—probably less than you.” That depends. Romney paid a federal income tax rate that is higher than the income tax rate paid by 97 percent of tax filers. But if you include a combination of income taxes and payroll taxes — which make up the bulk of federal taxes for most taxpayers — the ad is accurate.

Liberal fact checkers tend to ignore a key evidence while fact checking claims about comparative income tax rates:  a report from the Congressional Budget Office that estimates effective tax rates while factoring in the effects of corporate taxes.  The tendency to ignore the CBO's report occurs despite the fact that fact checkers tend to believe the CBO almost without reservation, the classic example coming from the CBO's static analyses of the Affordable Care Act.

Google "effective tax rates" and the CBO report is right there (now on the second page of hits after a long time on the first page).  The report reveals that very high income earners pay much higher federal tax rates than liberal fact checkers claim.  Farley actually hints at the truth, perhaps without fully realizing it.

Farley (bold emphasis added):

There are all sorts of ways to slice tax data. According to the administration’s Economic Report of the President, the median effective tax rate for the middle 20 percent of U.S. taxpayers in 2012 is 13.3 percent when you include income, payroll and corporate taxes (Table 3-1). That also puts the ad’s claim in the right ballpark. But in order to get there, you have to compare Romney’s income tax only to the rates others pay in combined income, payroll and corporate taxes.

The second of the two sentences in bold makes false the claim that many people pay a greater effective rate of federal income tax (payroll taxes included) with corporate income taxes included in the mix.  Farley buries the key sentence with the lead-in "That also puts the ad's claim in the right ballpark."  The story ends up with one sentence that strongly upsets the argument about Romney's supposed low income tax rate, set in an arrangement that camouflages it sufficiently so that few are likely to recognize its meaning. 

Take a gander at Table 3-1:

click image for enlarged view

The bottom line across from "Top 1 percent" represents something of a bell curve showing the effective tax rates for the top 1 percent of earners.  It's likely that Romney pays a rate somewhere near the middle, though apparently he also gives a great deal of money to charity, which decreases his tax bill because of the charitable deduction.  One has to hunt on the chart to find effective tax rates higher than the median rate for the top 1 percent (29.6 percent). 

Yet here's the kicker quote/paraphrase Farley uses to wrap up:

No matter how you slice it, Toder said, Romney’s tax rate is very low for someone with his level of income. The average income tax rate for the top 0.1 percent (which is where Romney falls) is 23.6 percent.

Slice us up some of that horse hockey, Farley.

Fact checking is in a sad state.  But a least Annenberg Fact Check is still better than PolitiFact.

Grading PolitiFact: Characterizing Mitt Romney's characterization of Obama

PolitiFact's attempt to use an "In Context" item to soften the negative effects of President Obama's "you didn't build that" moment didn't work out so well.

More was needed to help the president.



The issue.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

Watch how many times PolitiFact uses partial quotations to protect its Obama from having his statement taken out of context.  We have two already in the graphic up above ("is the result of government" "hard-working people").

On with the fact check.

PolitiFact tells us that the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign have been wrangling over whether the latter insulted entrepreneurs.  That issue is somewhat settled when entrepreneurs perceive an insult.  Romney wins that point.  PolitiFact wants to let us know that Obama did not mean to insult entrepreneurs.  And maybe attacking Romney in relation to this issue is the ticket.

PolitiFact:

Romney, in comments at public events and in several ads, has argued that the remarks show a general disdain for business. The Republican National Committee and the National Federation of Independent Business are among the groups have [sic] released their own videos and statements echoing Romney that the president is out of touch.

The above summary is fair but potentially misleading.  We'll watch for those effects as the story progresses.

PolitiFact:

In one fundraising e-mail [sic], Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, decried Obama’s "naïve view that government, and not the hard work, talent, and initiative of people, is the center of society and the economy."

The email from Rhoades helps make it plain that PolitiFact distorts the Romney campaign's argument.  The argument is that Obama credits the government too much, not that he doesn't credit entrepreneurs at all. Yet the latter is what PolitiFact suggests in its graphic.

PolitiFact:

In another campaign e-mail [sic], Amanda Henneberg, a Romney spokeswoman, said Obama had "denigrated Americans who built their own businesses."

Henneberg's statement dovetails with the Romney campaign message that Obama overemphasizes the role of government, but PolitiFact can potentially make it look like she is saying that Obama gives entrepreneurs no credit.

PolitiFact:

The issue has become so big that the Obama campaign felt the need to address the issue head-on in a Web video titled "Tampered" that quoted media accounts saying the quote had been taken out of context.

The current size of the issue could mean that the Romney campaign is right that that Obama is out of touch.  But it would help Obama if it appeared that people were simply misled by Romney about what Obama said.  PolitiFact did the Obama campaign a favor, by the way, by overlooking for the sake of this story the Obama campaign video suggesting Obama did not say what Romney quotes him to say.



Not only was Obama taken out of context, he didn't even say it in the first place.

Or something like that.

PolitiFact settles on the latest Romney campaign video for purposes of its fact check, focusing in particular on the Romney campaign's preface to the video:

President Obama recently said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

Clearly, this President doesn't understand how our economy works.

Mitt Romney understands that we have to celebrate people who start enterprises and employ other people rather than devalue them. Success is not the result of government, it is the result of hard-working people who take risks, create dreams, and build lives for themselves and for their families.

PolitiFact:

In this item, we’ll rate the claim that Obama was saying success "is the result of government," not "hard-working people," when he said, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

PolitiFact distorts Romney's claim by taking his comments out of context.  Ironic, no?

PolitiFact tries to set the stage by asserting that Romney's quote of Obama distorts the meaning of Obama's claim.  In effect, PolitiFact suggests this is obvious if one reads Obama's statement in context.  But doesn't the entire context of Obama's statement emphasize the role of the government in business creation at the expense of the entrepreneur?  How does PolitiFact miss the obvious?

PolitiFact:

We believe, as do our friends at FactCheck.org and the Washington Post Fact Checker, that Romney has seriously distorted Obama’s comments.

PolitiFact is checking this fact by proclaiming it obvious that the context of Obama's statement puts the lie to Romney's claim.  Other fact checkers supposedly agree.  Hopefully one or both of them actually bothered to check some facts.

There's really nothing like that in this fact check.  It consists of PolitiFact insisting that Obama was taken out of context, and Romney's statements taken out of context make up the bulk of the case against Romney.

PolitiFact's conclusion, part one

In speeches and videos, the Romney campaign has repeatedly distorted Obama's words. By plucking two sentences out of context, Romney twists the president's remarks and ignores their real meaning.

The preceding sentences make clear that Obama was talking about the importance of government-provided infrastructure and education to the success of private businesses.

PolitiFact is partly right.  Obama was extolling the importance of the government role in allowing business to prosper.  He did so in the context of beneficiary businesses "giving back" as if it wasn't the taxes of businesses that helped pay for the infrastructure in the first place.  And the words he used diminish the role of individual effort ("Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there").

Why does PolitiFact simply ignore the material in Obama's speech that diminishes the importance of the entrepreneur?

PolitiFact's conclusion, part two:

Romney also conveniently ignores Obama's clear summary of his message, that "the point is ... that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

By leaving out the "individual initiative" reference, Romney and his supporters have misled viewers and given a false impression. For that, we rate the claim False.

Romney ignores Obama's "clear summary" because the summary is ambiguous.  The summary provides no justification for successful businesses "giving back."  That concept comes out as Obama essentially tells entrepreneurs that they were lucky (others worked just as hard) and owe a big honkin' portion of their success to Our Glorious Government.  And the government, Obama says, is ready to take its rightful cut.

By leaving out the reference to increasing taxes on entrepreneurs, PolitiFact misleads its readers and gives a false impression.

PolitiFact creates what Mr. Obama likes to call a "false choice."  It isn't whether the government gets all the credit or the entrepreneur gets all the credit.  It's which one has the lead role in the economy (bold emphasis added):

Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, decried Obama’s "naïve view that government, and not the hard work, talent, and initiative of people, is the center of society and the economy."

By neglecting the importance of that context, PolitiFact again misleads readers and gives a false impression.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

Once again, the subject of the fact check was arguably more accurate than his would-be fact checkers.

Afters:

The fact checks by Annenberg Fact Check and the Washington Post Fact Checker essentially leap to the same conclusions PolitiFact achieved with its leaps of logic.  But both of the other fact check services did a superior job to PolitiFact in providing context for the issue.


Aug. 4, 2012:  Fixed a handful of minor typos/grammatical errors

PolitFlub: Mitt Romney versus firefighters and police

Just another of many examples where PolitiFact administers a "Truth-O-Meter" rating with no noticeable appreciation for its statement of principles.

This time we have PolitiFact Tennessee checking whether the Tennessee Democratic Party accurately reported that Mitt Romney said we don't need "more firemen, more policemen, more teachers."

PolitiFact ends up largely hiding the way the TNDP misuses the quotation.  Here's a portion of the press release PolitiFact linked:

As Mitt Romney made his way to collect money from wealthy special interests in Williamson County yesterday, Rep. Mike Turner, a career firefighter, and Principal Roxie Ross, a lifelong educator, held a press conference call in response to candidate’s claim that we don’t need “more firemen, more policemen, more teachers.”

Tennesseans know that firefighters, policemen, and teachers are the backbone of a strong and successful community. Romney’s suggestion that these people aren’t vital to our wellbeing is nothing short of shocking. These are hard-working Americans who want to improve their cities and town, ensuring that every American has a shot at the American Dream and the opportunity to live in a safe, prosperous community.  To say anything otherwise is further proof that Mitt Romney is detached from reality in Tennessee, and indeed across America.

This was apparently the best PolitiFact could do in showing the context:

We note that Romney did not say there should be "fewer" policemen, firemen and teachers, but the full context of the quote makes clear he disagreed with Obama’s stated policy goal of having Congress appropriate more stimulus money to add more of them. The more accurate characterization of Romney’s remarks would have been that "Romney disagrees with President Obama’s goal of adding ‘more firemen, more policemen, more teachers,’ " though we recognize that doesn’t have the same zing as the TNDP’s wording.

No, it doesn't have the same zing at all.

The TNDP used the quoted snipped to suggest that Romney doesn't really think society needs police and firefighters ("Romney’s suggestion that these people aren’t vital to our wellbeing is nothing short of shocking").  In context, Romney was saying that expanding public sector jobs does not serve as a good method for relieving economic malaise.  It was in response to President Obama's claim that since the "private sector is doing fine" therefore the government should address the economy by focusing on adding more public sector jobs to replace those that were lost.

PolitiFact at least ends up in the ballpark with respect to Romney's intent and otherwise gives a free pass to the TNDP's taking the statement blatantly out of context.

We end up with this:

The Tennessee Democratic Party says Mitt Romney has said "we don't need 'more firemen, more policemen, more teachers.' "

That's a slight exaggeration of Romney's remarks -- he was responding to Obama's comments on them, not outlining his own specific policy against them. Still, that's pretty close to what Romney said. We rate the claim Mostly True.

"Mostly True"?  Seriously?

The claim from the TNDC indisputably fails to deliver an accurate picture of the context of Romney's statement.  Based on that abundant truth, the ruling has to match one of the following three options.:

MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

It wasn't an "important detail" that Romney was talking about restoring the economy and not whether police, firefighter and teachers are necessary to a healthy society?  Was the statement taken out of context or not?

Does considering the full context of Romney's statement give a different impression than that presented by the TNDP?

PolitiFact offers no clear guidance as to why "Half True" or "Mostly False" doesn't better fit this case.  Rulings like this one make it appear that things like "needs clarification," "needs ... additional information," "important details," "takes things out of context" and "critical facts" are subjectively determined rather than objective determinations.

PolitiFact head honcho Bill Adair edited the PolitiFact Tennessee story.  We infer that he approves of its content.

A comeuppance for PolitiFact and Rex Nutting (Updated)

The math simultaneously backs up Nutting’s calculations and demolishes Romney’s contention. The only significant shortcoming of the graphic was that it failed to note that some of the restraint in spending was fueled by demands from congressional Republicans.
--Louis Jacobson, PolitiFact

(clipped from PolitiFact.com;
click image for larger view )

The White House, with an assist from PolitiFact, has turned Rex Nutting's analysis of President Obama's spending into a key talking point for Obama's re-election campaign.

While I'm neither an accountant nor an economist, I've put together enough evidence to show that Nutting and PolitiFact are selling falsehoods as the truth.

Cherry picking the metric

As I illustrated in an earlier post (at PolitiFact Bias), the "annual average" increase in spending serves as a very misleading method of measuring increased spending.

Cherry picking the window

Nutting compared presidents according to a four-year window of performance.  But Obama has only spent money over a span of less than three years (not counting FY 2009).  This allows Nutting to hide Obama's spending increases over a four-year average by figuring in the constraints of a Republican House of Representatives and the loss of a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

Failing to adequately contextualize Obama's actual spending

PolitiFact admitted in an update that Obama had an unusually active role in spending during FY 2009.  Obama and Congress passed an expensive economic stimulus package among other spending bills.  Nutting and PolitiFact dropped Bush's spending in FY 2009 by $140 billion to offset that spending, but that fails to account for bailout programs like TARP.  TARP involved great sums of money disbursed in unusual ways, so any fact check failing to nail down the major impacts of bailouts on spending for FY 2009 will not definitively address the issue of spending increases relative to the FY 2009 baseline.  Nutting certainly made no serious attempt, and PolitiFact shamefully overlooked that failure.

Cherry picking the future projections for the cherry-picked window

Cherry picking the window was bad enough, but Nutting and PolitiFact amplified the error by also cherry picking the future projections used to complete the picture of Obama's window.  The Office of Management and Budget made future projections.  Nutting did not use the OMB projections despite his use of OMB data for figuring the spending increases of earlier presidents.  Instead, Nutting (and PolitiFact) used the lower of two CBO projections.  Needless to say, the CBO projections used were less realistic as well as more favorable to Obama than the other two.

Shielding a fact check from scrutiny

PolitiFact obscured the reasoning behind its rating of Nutting's claim by simultaneously ruling on a statement from Mitt Romney.  PolitiFact did not answer a request that it explain how it accounted for $140 billion taken from Bush's 2009 spending baseline and instead supposedly credited to Obama.  Was that amount added to Obama's FY 2009 spending or did Obama obtain the benefit of a spending Twilight Zone in FY 2009?


Fixing the problems

The right metric, the right window

Grading PolitiFact: President Obama and Romney's alleged outsourcing

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

PolitiFact finds "Half True" the statement from the Obama campaign that "Romney Outsourced call center jobs to India."  According to PolitiFact's statement of principles (see epigraph), the statement is "partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.


The fact checkers:

Molly Moorhead:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

I think I was drawn to this story out of a sense of wonder.  How can one obtain a "Half True" for a non-compound proposition?  For "Beavis and Butt-head broke the window with a rock" we have a compound proposition.  Beavis broke the window with a rock.  Butt-head broke the window with a rock.  If one of the two cartoon characters didn't break the window one could still consider the statement half true.  But no direct route to that kind of half truth exists for "Romney outsourced call center jobs to India."

Let's observe the experts at work.

PolitiFact:

The Obama campaign pointed us to news accounts of a budget issue in 2004, the second year of Romney’s term. The Democratic-controlled Massachusetts legislature sent Romney a budget with an amendment that "would prohibit Massachusetts from contracting with companies that ‘outsource’ the state's work to other countries," according to the Boston Globe.

Okay, we can see where this is going.  Romney vetoes the proposed legislation, leaving in place the status quo and allowing a company contracting with the commonwealth of Massachusetts to outsource jobs.

By analogy, Butt-head failed to confiscate from Beavis a rock that Beavis could throw at a window.  Since Beavis subsequently broke the window with the same rock, it is half-true that Butt-head broke the window.

Maybe we're missing something?

PolitiFact:

At the time Massachusetts had a $160,000 a month contract with Citigroup to process debit cards for food stamps. Citigroup outsourced its customer service call center to a facility in India.

A small but important detail: the state didn’t outsource the work -- a state contractor did.

So back to our analogy, somebody definitely broke the window with a rock.  Beavis did it, but Butt-head could have prevented it.  So, when somebody says "Butt-head broke the window with a rock" it is (by analogy) a small but important detail that Beavis was the one who broke the window with the rock.  Which brings us to "Half True," apparently.  Perhaps a larger and even more important detail might have caused the claim to drop as low as "Mostly False," such as Daria breaking the window with a baseball bat instead of Beavis breaking it with a rock.

PolitiFact:

Our ruling

Obama’s ad charges that "Romney outsourced call center jobs to India."

The Obama campaign's wording suggests a broader, more deliberate policy when the state was sending some work overseas. But in choosing to veto the bill, Romney let the arrangement continue. The statement leaves out important information. We rate it Half True.

The barely coherent summary matches the barely coherent logic preceding it.

PolitiFact ends up drawing a very rough sketch of its reasoning, but apparently the writer and editor was misled by placing an improper emphasis on the fact that jobs were outsourced to India.  The point of the ad is not that jobs were outsourced to India.  The ad stresses Romney's responsibility for that outsourcing.  If Romney had outsourced jobs to China rather than India then one could reasonably take the original claim as "Half True" since the point of the ad holds true:  Romney did the outsourcing.

Unfortunately for PolitiFact, the "small but important" detail is big and very important in this case.  It's very misleading to use language depicting Romney as directly responsible for outsourcing jobs when in fact he simply left intact a policy permitting contracting parties to outsource jobs.  The claim of the ad is literally false but with a germ of truth:  Jobs were outsourced and Romney could have prevented it by signing the legislation.  The closely related underlying argument that Romney outsourced jobs is likewise only supported by a germ of truth.

For comparison:

MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

Even if one thinks of Romney as a butt-head, he didn't break the window.  The greater part of the ad's message is false.


The grades:

Molly Moorhead:  F
Bill Adair:  F

 
June 15, 2012: Thanks to Matthew Hoy for highlighting this story on Twitter and via his Hoystory blog.  Hoy adds to the story with a eye-opening parallel.

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.

Grading PolitiFact: Obama's "Julia" and Medicare

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

I've written quite a bit about PolitiFact's problem with selection bias.  This fact check serves as an excellent example of a related and perhaps even more pernicious form of bias, that arising from the selection of a story's focus.  Two stories dealing with the same topic, such as the Medicare claim in the Obama campaign's "Julia" ad, can turn out very differently.  And the ideology of the writer or editor can easily alter the story focus.


The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Becky Bowers:  writer, researcher
Angie Drobnic Holan:  editor


Analysis:

As I pointed out in an earlier review of a "Julia" ad fact check, the context of the Obama campaign's claims about Mitt Romney has to do with hypothetical comparisons between her life under Obama's policies and Romney's policies.  Here's a closeup of the relevant part of the ad:

(click image for larger view)

For Obama we see the best-case scenario.  For Romney we get the worst-case scenario.  Medicare "could" end as we know it under either president's policies extrapolated into the future.  In Obama's case Medicare could end through a rationing regime.  In Romney's case it would end by adding expenses for recipients of the benefits to help mitigate the third-party payment dynamic that makes Medicare spending unsustainable.  Obama's argument is cherry-picked.

PolitiFact ignores Obama's point of comparison, narrowing the focus specifically to the claim regarding Romney's plan for Medicare:

We wondered, under Romney’s policies, is it true that, "Medicare could end as we know it, leaving Julia with nothing but a voucher to buy insurance, which means $6,350 extra per year for a similar plan"?

PolitiFact, at least for purposes of this fact check, does not wonder whether it is fair and proper for the Obama campaign to compare the cherry-picked rosy picture of Medicare under Obama with the cherry-picked bleak prospects for Medicare under Romney's supposed plan.  Julia's prospects under Romney could have read "Julia enrolls in Medicare, helping her to afford preventive care and the prescription drugs she needs."

Unfortunately for the Obama campaign, PolitiFact did find a few things wrong with the ad.

1)  It bases its statement of Romney's position on the older Paul Ryan budget proposal.  Romney has said he agrees in principle with the bipartisan Wyden/Ryan plan which is similar in some ways to Ryan's old plan and different in others.  Plus Romney has a plan of his own about which we know few specifics.

2)  Because of the outdated analysis, the ad has no foundation for its claim about the $6,350 voucher figure it cites.

3)  Various features in each of the plans undercut the claim that "Julia" would end up with "nothing but a voucher to buy insurance."

But the news for the Obama campaign wasn't all bad.

PolitiFact originally rated the claim "False," but after "readers" pointed out an error in the story, PolitiFact reconsidered and upgraded the rating to "Mostly False."  Woohoo.

What was the error?

PolitiFact: 

(R)eaders pointed out we had incorrectly said that the Wyden-Ryan and Romney plans for Medicare offered traditional fee-for-service Medicare alongside a premium-support or "voucher" system for purchasing private insurance. Instead, both plans offer traditional Medicare inside of a new premium-support system, as another plan that competes with private insurance.

One might well wonder why that fact makes a difference.  Unfortunately, PolitiFact made the original story unavailable.  That makes finding all the specific changes difficult.  But the summary paragraph likely includes most or all of the justification for the higher rating.

PolitiFact:

The Obama campaign ties Romney to an outdated plan with less generous spending growth and no traditional Medicare option. Romney does support a voucher-like system, but the graphic ignores critical facts that would give a different impression about his plan. We rate the claim Mostly False.

See, the Romney plan is "voucher-like" so saying his plan could only give "Julia" a voucher is true enough to qualify as "Mostly False."

By narrowing the focus to a fine point PolitiFact locates a portion with sufficient truth to avoid a "False" rating.  The problem with the fact check isn't the rating on this narrow point.  The problem comes from PolitiFact failing to provide any mention of the way the particle of truth powers a dynamo of deception.  The ad's argument is a stinker.  PolitiFact's ruling gives it more cover than it deserves.


The grades: 

Becky Bowers: D
Angie Drobnic Holan:  D

I've seen so many fact checks much worse than this one from PolitiFact that perhaps I'm being overly generous.  Bottom line:  A serious fact check takes into account the underlying argument and the context.  The overall argument of the Medicare portion of the "Julia" ad was deceptive and designed to scare voters with its manipulated comparison.  PolitiFact did not allow its focus to fall on the main issue.

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.

(for Glenn Kessler and PolitiFact) How to fact check the job recovery numbers

A valuable media watchdog watchdog post at the new blog "counterirritant" pointed out a problem with Glenn Kessler's fact check of a claim from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Kessler writes the fact checker feature for the Washington Post.  Romney claimed that in a normal recovery from recession the country should be adding something like 500,000 jobs per month.

counterirritant:

Kessler decided that the best way to “check” this was determine how frequently 500,000 jobs were created in a month in the last 65 year.

The post goes on to very effectively criticize Kessler's methodology throughout.

By a funny coincidence (general leftward lean of the mainstream media, maybe?), PolitiFact used very similar reasoning on the same claim:

Is 500,000 jobs created per month normal for a recovery?

The short answer is "no."

We arrived at this conclusion by looking at the net monthly change in jobs all the way back to 1970. Since Romney was referring to total jobs, rather than private-sector jobs only, we used total jobs as our measurement. And since Romney was talking about job creation patterns during a recovery, we looked only at job creation figures for non-recessionary periods, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Finally, we excluded the current recovery.

The Kessler/PolitiFact method is entirely wrongheaded.

Romney didn't claim that 500,000 jobs created per month was a normal figure during a recovery.  I can imagine the furrowed brows of Kessler, Louis Jacobson and other mainstream media fact checkers.  Aren't they the experts?  What am I talking about?

It's actually pretty simple.

The size of the economy changes.  If country A enters a recession losing 1 million jobs  then it takes two months to regain the lost jobs at a rate of 500,000 per month.  If country B experiences a recession losing 10 million jobs then it takes 20 months to regain them at a rate of 500,000 per month.

Not only does the size of the economy vary, but so does the depth of the recession.  The rate of recovery for lost jobs needs  to account for both factors.  Neither Kessler nor PolitiFact gave any apparent consideration to those critical criteria.  It's like comparing prices between now and the 1950s without adjusting for inflation.

The Romney campaign has made a number of statements like the 500,000 jobs claim, and they probably relate to the following chart or one like it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Clipped from nytimes.com

Romney's claim almost certainly derives from the fact that post-war recoveries usually replace lost jobs much faster than the present recovery. 

So how does one check that claim?  It's not that hard.  Take the bottom point of employment, then count the number of months that it takes to get employment back up to the peak level.  Divide the number of jobs lost by the number of months it took to return to return to the employment peak at the start of the recession.  Do the same for each of the post-war recessions, then average the numbers to obtain the average job recovery time.  After all of that, divide the number of jobs lost from the 2007 recession by the averaged job recovery time.

Why didn't the Washington Post or PolitiFact do anything remotely resembling the fact check I just described?  It could be gross incompetence.  It could be ideological bias.  Or it could be both.





Correction 6/7/2012  Removed a redundant division operation from the next-to-last paragraph

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.

American Journalism Review and the lying liars who accuse lying liars

American Journalism Review published a story late last year in defense of today's fact check fashion.  It carried the title "Calling a Lie a Lie," but that was deceptive.  The subsequent deck material was more clear:  "When something is clearly false, journalists shouldn’t be bashful about pointing it out."

The deck sentiment is correct. Unfortunately, writer Rem Rieder appears uncertain whether to support the ambiguous sentiment in the title or the more reasonable assertion from the deck.

Rieder strangles his message in ambiguity from the start:

So should journalists brand a lie a lie?

This should not be a tough call: Of course they should.

If we understand "lie" as  a clearly false statement, then Rieder is correct. 

If, on the other hand, we're talking about the much more widely understood definition of "lie" as a statement intended to deceive, then the answer is no, at least in objective reporting.  Objective reporting does not permit the journalist sufficient leeway to judge the motives of a speaker or writer.

So already we've got a problem.  If an "objective" journalist calls a statement a "lie" in the false statement sense and the audience understands "lie" to refer to intentional deceit, then the journalist is, in effect, communicating a false message to the reader.  A lie?

Why would the journalist use ambiguous language if not for the express purpose of misleading the reader?  Assuming the journalist is intelligent enough to distinguish between the different meanings for the term "lie," of course.

Rieder then follows with a nearly perfect illustration of his own problem with ambiguity:

The issue is very much in the air now in the wake of Mitt Romney's completely duplicitous ad about President Barack Obama.

The "Believe in America" ad shows Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

What Obama really said was, "Senator [John] McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.' "

This is a completely cynical distortion of the president's remark. It's an incredibly cynical piece of political mischief. It needs to be called out. 

 Just to state the obvious, journalists very often truncate quotations.  They lop material off the front.  They omit material in the middle.  They chop off material at the end. 

It's okay to shorten quotations under one condition:  It doesn't substantially change the meaning of what the person wrote or said.

President Obama's handlers immediately reacted to the Romney ad, alleging it distorted what President Obama said.  Romney's defenders pointed out that the ad provided enough context so that the viewer--even including left-leaning journalists--should be able to tell that Obama was speaking back in 2008 well before Mr. Obama would have thoughts of whether to talk about the economy when seeking reelection.

To amplify the point, Romney's ad carries the same message substituting the full quotation Rieder provides.  The only exception comes from viewers such as Rieder who assume, contrary to the facts presented in the ad, that Obama referred to himself in the context of the 2012 election.

Plainly the ad was intended to portray the irony of Obama condemning the economy in 2008 while holding responsibility for a worse economy leading toward the 2012 election.  And it's the journalist's responsibility to expose a lie in that?

No, it's the journalist's responsibility to explain the ad in terms of the facts and in terms of its message, correcting any obvious errors of fact in accordance with the statement in Rieder's deck.  It is not the journalist's responsibility to make false statements about how the ad is obviously false and in need of rebuke.

This controversy over fact checking helps illustrate time and again how journalists have lost touch with the concept of objective reporting.

Piquing PolitiFact: Building a straw man with which to attack Mitt Romney?

A recent fact check of Mitt Romney has drawn criticism from two of the experts cited in the story, in addition to Politico and the Huffington Post (find summary and links at PolitiFact Bias).

I'm not doing many "Grading PolitiFact" posts because of some research projects involving PolitiFact, but I took time out to submit a fact check suggestion to PolitiFact:

Dear Truth-O-Meter, 

It is said PolitiFact rates those who make political claims. I ran across a political claim a moment ago that seems highly questionable and I'm wondering if you would please consider fact checking it. 

A political fact check operation presented Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as saying the following: 

The U.S. military is at risk of losing its "military superiority" because "our Navy is smaller than it's been since 1917. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947." 

The quoted snippets are accurate enough, but please check the "because." Romney in the immediate context talked of administration proposals to cut military spending. Isn't that the chief reason Romney is suggesting as the risk to U.S. military superiority? 

Thank you oh-so-much, Truth-O-Meter.

I suspect that PolitiFact will triple down on its rating of Romney (either that or turtle and wait for the furor to die down), but in the unlikely event the editors decide to retract, a fact check of their own item might serve as a partial antidote to the high-handedness that pervades PolitiFact's typical response to criticism lately.

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney's Obama ad and talking about the economy (Updated x2))

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

PolitiFact delivered on the above principle this time--after a fashion.


The issue

On occasion I'll provide an expanded clip of PolitiFact's visual presentation of the story to help emphasize the way our supposed fact checkers mislead the audience.

This is another of those times.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

PolitiFact sends the message that it is beyond merely false that Barack Obama said "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

This is an amazingly inept effort by PolitiFact.

You've been warned.

PolitiFact:

On the eve of a presidential trip to New Hampshire on Nov. 22, 2011, Mitt Romney’s campaign released an ad targeting President Barack Obama. In the ad, the Romney campaign used a quote that prompted an immediate counterattack from the Obama camp, which argued that it had been taken out of context.

Wait a minute.  The Obama camp complained about the quotation being taken out of context?  So Obama actually said what Romney claimed he said?   What about the headline and deck material making it look the opposite?  What about that "Pants on Fire" rating when PolitiFact's rating system until recently had a category for accurate statements that take things out of context ("Half True")?

What's going on here?  Jacobson had better come through with a spectacular explanation for this one.

PolitiFact:

The 60-second ad, called "Believe in America," is designed to contrast "candidate Obama from 2008 with President Obama of today," highlighting "his failures in between," according to the Romney campaign.

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."

The ad then has a clip of Obama saying, "If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose."

PolitiFact fails to make clear that every one of Obama's words come from that same 2008 campaign speech. And the Romney ad prefaces the quotations with the year in which they were made:  2008.

Here's the ad:



The ad contains nothing to cue the viewer that Obama was speaking about the 2012 election in the last clip.  Paying attention to the context, the viewer is left to figure out what Obama was talking about in 2008.  Obviously Obama isn't talking about his own re-election prospects on Oct. 16, 2008--not in those words.  Obama hadn't been elected at that point. The election didn't take place until November of that year.

PolitiFact somehow fails to see it:

The clear implication is that Obama believes that his economic record is so bad that he will lose in 2012 unless he can steer the conversation away from the economy.

Why would Obama have any beliefs at all about his economic record as president way back in 2008?  This supposed "clear implication" occurs only if the viewer either ignores the context or has an unaccountably difficult time taking obvious clues from the context.  We're not in Sherlock Holmes territory, here.

But PolitiFact rolls with it:

But the Obama camp, among others, immediately charged that the clip was taken out of context. Was it?

Here’s what Obama said in the October 2008 speech, which came about two weeks before he defeated Sen. John McCain:

"Even as we face the most serious economic crisis of our time, even as you are worried about keeping your jobs or paying your bills or staying in your homes, my opponent's campaign announced earlier this month that they want to ‘turn the page’ on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead," Obama said in the speech. "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.’"

So the comment is drastically different than the way it's portrayed in the Romney ad. Obama was actually saying that his opponent’s campaign three years earlier had said, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." That context is not included in the Romney ad -- and leaving it out sends a profoundly different message.

1)  The claim from the Obama camp that the quotation was taken out of context deserves its own fact check. 

2)  PolitiFact is correct that Obama was referring to something said by the McCain campaign.

3)  PolitiFact is incorrect that omitting the context sends a profoundly different message.   I will illustrate.

Let's make it a 35 second ad instead of a 30 second ad, adding in the full quotation from Obama, and let PolitiFact explain it just like before:

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."

The ad then has a clip of Obama saying, "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose.’"

What is the message of the ad with the context included?

No doubt someone could complain that in our augmented version Romney makes it look like McCain is saying that Obama can't get re-elected on his economic record.  But we can even make it a 45 second ad, including context sufficient to ensure that every viewer understands that McCain was talking about the economy in 2008 and the GOP prospects for the presidential election and it still doesn't change the point of the ad.

The point of the ad is that if it wasn't proper to run on the economy in 2008 then it's even worse to run on the economy in 2012, with many economic indicators far worse than they were in 2008.

And the fact that Obama mockingly brought up what the McCain campaign said pretty well confirms that Obama did not think the 2008 economy was good election material for the incumbent party.  Is Obama supposed to think otherwise in 2011-2012 with unemployment over 8 percent, the housing market still a shambles and an anemic growth rate?

That's the point of the ad.  It doesn't change with the context added.  And the fact that it doesn't change with the context added means that the quotation was not taken misleadingly out of context. 

PolitiFact, of course, fails to see it that way:

Our ruling

We certainly think it’s fair for Romney to attack Obama for his response to the economy. And the Romney camp can argue that Obama’s situation in 2011 is ironic considering the comments he made in 2008. But those points could have been made without distorting Obama’s words, which have been taken out of context in a ridiculously misleading way. We rate the Romney ad’s portrayal of Obama’s 2008 comments Pants on Fire.

Kudos to PolitiFact for at least admitting the real point of the ad is legitimate despite missing the real point.  Only viewers completely unable to appreciate the significance of Obama's remarks from 2008 could miss the real point of the ad.  The real point flies whether McCain said it of himself, whether McCain said it of Obama or whether Obama said it of himself.

In a situation like that no additional context is needed.  The Romney campaign was justified in omitting it.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

What can you say about a team that wrote a knee-jerk response to the Romney ad?  What can you say about a team that produced a presentation that makes it appear false that Obama said something that Obama did say?  What can you say about a team that corrupted the Truth-O-Meter's supposed grading system in favor of its subjective knee-jerk response?

They're journalists reporting badly.



Update:

ABC News serves up a handy reminder that PolitiFact isn't the only impossibly inept news source out there.  ABC ran the following under the headline "Mitt Romney ad misquotes President Obama":

Mitt Romney’s inaugural TV ad of the 2012 campaign aired today in New Hampshire just as President Obama traveled to the state, but the ad immediately came under fire from Democrats and fact-checkers for incorrectly quoting Obama.

The White House, the Democratic National Committee and Obama’s re-election campaign accused the Romney campaign today of unfairly twisting the president’s words.

We have people reporting the news who do not know what is and what is not a misquote.

It's stuff like this that makes it plain to so many, regardless of a want of an easy scientific proof, that the leftward tilt of media ideology results in left-tilted news reporting.


Update 2:

Jim Nolte at Big Journalism evaluated the Romney ad the same way I did, and he published first:

Watch Romney’s ad again. The point wasn’t “look at what Obama said!” The point was that the statement about talking about the economy is true when it comes to Obama.  You could add the full context and it might even hit Obama harder because of the obvious irony. Moreover, campaigns do this kind of thing all the time.

Word.

But don't expect PolitiFact to pay any attention to the criticism unless it is picked up and amplified by its primarily liberal fan base.

Grading PolitiFact: Mitt Romney and $95 billion in savings

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

Ordinarily I do not participate in PolitiFact's uber-lame "Lie of the Year" voting, but I'll consider the above as a write-in entry when the time comes.

This issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

Even though I see stuff like this from PolitiFact pretty much every week I still can't believe my eyes sometimes.

PolitiFact rates "False" Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's claim that repealing ObamaCare would save $95 billion.  So let's see how PolitiFact reasons it out (bold emphasis added):

Mitt Romney has recently been emphasizing one of the favorite themes of the tea party movement: cutting government spending.

He’s been getting pretty specific about some of his ideas, both in an op-ed in USA Today and in speeches on the campaign trail. His plans include ending subsidies for Amtrak, stopping funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and eliminating foreign aid to countries "that oppose America’s interests."

He also wants to save money by rolling back President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

See the change?  PolitiFact avers that Romney's op-ed talks about ways to cut government spending.  That's in the first graph.  By the third graph, the idea has morphed into saving money.  The two can mean the same thing but do not necessarily mean the same thing.

PolitiFact:

He made the point in the USA Today op-ed, suggesting he would  "repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016."

We were surprised by his suggestion. As we remembered the health care negotiations, Democrats took pains to make sure the 2010 health care law was projected to reduce the deficit, and they bragged repeatedly about their numbers.

PolitiFact's surprise is apparently a product of a liberal bias.

Romney was writing about reducing spending in that section of his op-ed, not about the net effect of repealing the health care reform bill.  It's easy to prove (bold emphasis added):

There are three ways to reduce spending, which combined, will achieve a fiscal turnaround of this size.

First, eliminate every government program that is not absolutely essential. There are many things government does that we may like but that we do not need. The test should be this: "Is this program so critical that it is worth borrowing money to pay for it?" The federal government should stop doing things we don't need or can't afford. For example:

 

•Repeal ObamaCare, which would save $95 billion in 2016.

Taking context into account, Romney's list of bullet points are his suggestions for cutting spending.  It is perfectly legitimate to talk about spending cuts as distinct from overall deficit reduction.  Somehow this is lost on the fact finders at PolitiFact.  Even setting aside the misleading nature of the CBO scoring for the PPACA (the doc fix and CLASS, to name two obvious examples), PolitiFact constructs a straw man version of Romney's argument.

As a result, the subsequent paragraphs lauding the supposed budget savings from the PPACA are irrelevant.  Romney was talking about cutting spending, not cutting the deficit as such.

PolitiFact sums up:

So according to the CBO analysis, a full repeal of the bill would reduce the deficit by $16 billion in 2016, much less than the number Romney cited.

Romney cited a number for a reduction in spending.  PolitiFact grades him on deficit reduction.  Of the two, PolitiFact is the one engaged in partisan spin.

It's disgusting to label this schlock as a fact check.

The judgment from On High:

If Romney had only criticized the law as an expansion of government spending, he would have been on firmer ground. Instead, he asserted that a repeal of the law would save significant money -- $95 billion. In fact, the law included new taxes and cost reductions so that the actual savings for the year he cited would be much smaller -- $16 billion. And, over the long haul, repealing the law actually adds significantly to the deficit. So we rate his statement False.

Romney did criticize the law in terms of its expansion of government spending.  And not spending $95 million saves $95 million in spending.

The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  F
Bill Adair:  F

Together, they are journalists reporting badly.