Bill Adair not afraid of being perceived as biased

Great news for those of us hoping to see PolitiFact clean up its act.  PolitiFact's creator and lead editor Bill Adair says PolitiFact restores teeth to fact check stories that had shrunken to the gums because of--what else?--fear of the perception of bias.




Perhaps the limited context fails to do Adair's talk justice, but what we have of it is pretty much bunkum.  It may be true that fact check stories have on occasion kept to providing the justification coming from both sides of the issue.  But was there ever a bar against the fact checkers providing solidly sourced data to contradict claims from the partisan combatants?  I know of none, unless it was indeed based on the fear of being perceived as biased.

But here's the rub:  The perception of bias may be an accurate perception.

I anticipate that PolitiFact will go down in history for making a breakthrough in public recognition of that fact.  Maybe Adair is starting to gather a glimmering of realization on that point as the glow of that 2009 Pulitzer Prize dims over time.

Grading PolitiFact: O'Reilly v. Obama on health care reform approval (Updated x3)

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor

Analysis:

The relevant exchange between Fox personality Bill O'Reilly and President Obama:

O'REILLY: But the entitlements that you championed do redistribute wealth in the sense that they provide insurance coverage for 40 million people that don't have it.

OBAMA: What is absolutely true is I think in this country, there's no reason why, if you get sick you should go bankrupt. The notion that that's a radical principle, I don't think the majority of people would agree with you.

O'REILLY: Then why do the majority people in the polls not support Obamacare?

OBAMA: Actually, I think it's pretty evenly divided.

O'REILLY: It's close.

OBAMA: It's evenly divided, Bill.

Politics Daily (yellow highlights indicate portions quoted in PolitiFact story)

On with the fact check:

Here, we wanted to referee the dispute on the poll numbers: Do a majority of people in the polls oppose the health care law? Since O'Reilly brought it up, we decided to check his statement.

Hold it right there.

PolitiFact has flubbed the fact check already.

O'Reilly:
(W)hy do the majority of people in the polls not support Obamacare?
(implicit assertion:  A majority of people in the polls do not support Obamacare)

PolitiFact version:
Do a majority of people in the polls oppose the health care law?
(implicit assertion:  O'Reilly claims a majority of people in the polls oppose Obamacare)

Granted, President Obama appeared to frame the argument the same way PolitiFact framed it.  But there's a big difference in bounding the group of persons who do not support Obamacare as opposed to the group of persons who oppose it.  A person who couldn't care less about Obamacare does not count as one who opposes Obamacare.  But that same person counts as a person who does not support Obamacare.

This is yet another PolitiFact blunder that is difficult to understand without invoking the blinders of bias as an explanation.  Isn't it basic logic?

The best evidence for O'Reilly's position was the most recent poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard School Of Public Health. In its most recent tracking poll, it found that 50 percent of respondents had an unfavorable view of the law, while 41 percent viewed it favorably. But another 9 percent said they didn't know or didn't want to answer. Certainly, the largest category in this poll didn't like health care, but if you combined supporters with the unknowns, you do get an even split.
(blue highlights added)

On what planet does it make sense to group the unknowns with the bill's supporters?  If the unknowns belong in either group they belong with those who do not support the reform bill.  The phrasing O'Reilly used gives him a much better claim on that group.

Things get even trickier when you ask people about repealing the law, because a significant portion of those who say they view the law unfavorably also say they they are opposed to a complete repeal. The most recent Kaiser poll showed that 19 percent said keep the law as it is; 28 percent said expand the law; 23 percent said repeal the law and replace it with a Republican alternative; 20 percent said repeal it and don't replace it. That means 49 percent want the law kept or expanded, and 43 percent want it replaced with a Republican alternative or simply repealed.
(bold emphasis added)

They're not kidding when they say things get trickier.  Things get so tricky that the 19 percent who want to keep the law as it is when added to the 28 percent who want the law expanded gives us a total of 49 percent who want the law.

On this planet 28+19 typically equals 47.  Nothing like a little creative rounding to inspire confidence in a fact check.

Do the math correctly and you get approximately 47 percent in favor of the law in comparison to about 53 percent who do not favor it.  Advantage:  O'Reilly.

Update 3:

PolitiFact:

Some polls have also found that at least a portion of people who dislike the health care bill dislike it because they wanted to see more dramatic changes to the health care system. A CNN poll in December found that 13 percent of those who opposed the law did so because it wasn't liberal enough. Another 43 percent favored the bill and 37 percent said it was too liberal.

While the 13 percent figure is interesting, it doesn't affect the premise of O'Reilly's question.  It does provide material that might have informed the president's answer to the question if he had elected to use it.  But the numbers break down to 54 to 57 percent not supporting the law compared to 43 percent expressing support.  A more current CNN poll also supported O'Reilly (50-55 percent not supporting compared to 45 percent supporting).

PolitiFact's conclusion:

O'Reilly said that a "majority of the people in the polls" do not support the health care law. If we were rating Obama's statement on its own, that the public is evenly divided, we would rate that True. But O'Reilly isn't entirely wrong, in the sense that support for the bill does not hit 50 percent or higher. Taking a broad picture of the polls reveals a divided public, so we rate his statement Half True.

Obama is correct that the country is evenly divided between those who favor the reform law and those who oppose it.  But Obama's response to O'Reilly did not address the issue, which was the number of persons who did not support the new law.  Obama's response was misleading in context with O'Reilly's on a point of fact ("It's evenly divided, Bill").  Obama was wrong on that point.  O'Reilly's premise was correct.

For PolitiFact, it's the fact-checking equivalent of striking out during batting practice.  O'Reilly's premise was accurate and could have warranted anything from "Half True" all the way to "True."  Based on the flawed reasoning and botched math discussed above, PolitiFact gave him the lowball rating.

The grades:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

Update:

Feb 11, 2011:  It's time to belatedly recognize PolitiFact's weak admission of the point on which I criticized the story:  "O'Reilly isn't entirely wrong, in the sense that support for the bill does not hit 50 percent or higher."  Of course, it ought to have read "O'Reilly is correct in the sense that support for the bill does not hit 50 percent or higher."  And because that's the sense of O'Reilly's literal words, PolitiFact needs some sort of reason for saying that O'Reilly was wrong.  I don't think PolitiFact can make that case.  The argument might be made that he didn't provide sufficient context, but that approach ought to also apply to Obama--yet PolitiFact was willing to give Obama an unqualified "True" despite the fact that the president did not admit the sense in which O'Reilly was correct.  The grades for Drobnic and Hamilton remain the same.

Update 2:

Very early on Feb. 13, I sent a message to the writer and editor pointing out the likelihood that the 49 percent figure was wrong and the lack of support for charging O'Reilly with error.  At about 11:30 a.m. today I received a message from the editor thanking me for pointing out the error in math and pointing me to a corrected version of the story.  Corrected for the math error, that is.  O'Reilly's still supposedly wrong, for reasons PolitiFact has yet to make clear.

Here's the relevant portion of my message to Drobnic and Hamilton:

Click for larger view

Update 3 (Oct. 30, 2011): 

PolitiFact eventually corrected the 49 percent figure, replacing it with the appropriate 47 percent figure.  PolitiFact did include a correction notice this time.  The logic error in evaluating O'Reilly's statement remains the central thread of the story, unfortunately.



Feb. 12, 2011:  I misidentified the PolitiFact editor throughout the original post and the update.  The post now reflects the fact that Martha Hamilton edited the story, not Bill Adair.  My apologies for the error.  Also deleted a redundant occurrence of "adding" in the paragraph about trickiness.

A true lie from President Obama

In the fact checking game, it's typically difficult to dependably divine the motives behind a given communique.  PolitiFact, for example, doesn't even really try, sticking with determinations of true or false as to the fact, except when designating a "Lie of the Year."  This despite the fact that PolitiFact rates "ridiculous" claims with a "Pants on Fire" rating, recalling the "liar, liar, pants on fire" taunt still used today by children and clever adults.

Fox personality Bill O'Reilly's interview of President Obama preceding the Super Bowl drew a whopper of a response from the president, however.  In answer to one of O'Reilly's questions, Obama gave a two part statement in support of his answer.  PolitiFact graded the two different parts like so:
 

The first rating is probably generous according to PolitiFact standards, ignoring as it does the considerable taxation embedded in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  The second rating is fair.

The gravity of the president's deceit is really only apparent in the context of O'Reilly's question.  PolitiFact did quote O'Reilly in both fact checks but never offered any determination about the truth value of Obama's answer to that question.

It was a softball question in some respects.  But apparently the president couldn't bring himself to admit who he is:

O'REILLY: Do you deny the assessment? Do you deny that you are a man who wants to redistribute wealth.

OBAMA: Absolutely.

O'REILLY: You deny that?

OBAMA: Absolutely. I didn't raise taxes once, I lowered taxes over the last two years.

Politics Daily

Obama categorically denies that he is a man who wants to redistribute wealth, and he offers as proof his tax record.  He says he did not raise taxes ("once," just in case that's important) and he lowered taxes over the last two years.

Neither claim, given the underlying facts, can support his denial.

Obama did raise taxes.  The most obvious example in the past two years is a cigarette tax hike.  Since that hike is regressive it suits Obama's argument reasonably well.  But the tax hikes embedded in PPACA tend to strike at the wealthy, such as the tax on high-end health insurance and a surtax on investment income.  At the same time, PPACA strongly subsidizes health insurance for poorer demographics.

Obama's key tax cut, the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, allowed workers who paid no federal income taxes to receive money back from the government based on the tax credit.  It was a "tax cut" that worked like welfare for lower-income workers and gave a gradually smaller tax break the more money workers made.  It was a tax policy that accentuated the progressive nature of the tax system and explicitly redistributed wealth, in other words.

The president cannot be ignorant of these facts.  Both of his justifications for denying he wants to redistribute wealth end up contradicting his claim.  He was again doing his artless impression of President Clinton, who also shamelessly twisted the truth in his public statements.

None of this should come as any surprise, given Obama's past statements and policy plans such as his proposal to raise taxes on those making more than $250,000 per year.

He must think you're pretty stupid.

PolitiProps: Obama's 12 judges

Credit where it's due:  The PolitiFact rating of President Obama regarding his claim of support from 12 judges for the constitutionality of health care reform seems quite fair.

I can see room within PolitiFact's grading system for anything from "Pants on Fire" to "Barely True."  PolitiFact aimed for the middle with a "False" rating.

An accurate grading, even if repeated regularly, obviously does not free PolitiFact from the charge of political bias.  But it does help serve as a reassurance that PolitiFact's journalists operate with the aim of doing their jobs fairly.

Grading PolitiFact: Glenn Beck and the Muslim Brotherhood

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.
--About PolitiFact

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Robert Farley:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

Let's jump right in with PolitiFact's fact check:

As Americans watch the Egyptian uprising from afar, politicians and pundits have speculated about whether the Muslim Brotherhood, an opposition group, will gain power.

On his radio show on Jan. 31, Glenn Beck said listeners should know that conspirators of the 9/11 attacks were part of the group.

Writer Robert Farley nearly fashioned a perfect beginning.  The main problem is the ambiguity of "were part of the group."  "Were" as in currently or "were" as in formerly?  The nature of the "al-Qaida links" may be quite different depending on what is meant.  So what did Beck say?

"So the Muslim Brotherhood, they're nothing to worry about," Beck began sarcastically.

That's an odd place to begin.  Does Beck's audience automatically possess functional knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood, that Beck can begin the tale more-or-less in the middle?  We have a major clue here indicating missing context.  I was able to locate the relevant segment of Beck's radio program at YouTube:



The video appears to show that Beck "began" talking about the Muslim Brotherhood following a commercial break.  Beck's opening provides a strong indication that the preceding program segment provides additional context for his remarks.  From a journalistic standpoint, it is inexcusable not to consider that full context as it colors the meaning of Beck's statements.  It is nearly as inexcusable for the journalist to consider that full context without giving the reader any indication that the author considered the full context.

After watching the video, it is also clear that PolitiFact left out much of the more immediate context.  Beck was lampooning the presentation of the Muslim Brotherhood as presented by the mainstream media, specifically by an unnamed CNN anchor who had described the organization as "tirelessly and many times courageously campaigned for elections.  It has campaigned against the government.  It has campaigned on behalf of the poor."

So maybe Beck was just trying to helpfully distinguish between  the Muslim Brotherhood and the March of Dimes or maybe the Peace Corps?  Let's return to what PolitiFact says Beck said:

SPT on Sen. Bill Nelson: If liberal label doesn't fit, we must elect?

The St. Peterburg Times seems to be trying to inoculate Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) against the charge that he is a liberal.

WASHINGTON — The punch is coming at him in slow-mo:

L ... I ... B ... E ... R ... A ... L.

Even in the earliest moments of his 2012 re-election campaign, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson can see the windup. Twice before Republicans tried to discredit him as a liberal. Twice they failed.

"Facts," Nelson says, "are stubborn things."

Huh.  Nelson must not be a liberal if Republicans failed to discredit him as one on two occasions.

The story goes on like that, even to the point of giving some detail about the two elections Nelson survived--one against the relatively bland Bill McCollum and the other against a self-destructing Katherine Harris.  Is it possible that, all other things being equal, Nelson could have been defeated by stronger candidates?

Could it be???  That the election isn't necessarily about labeling Nelson as a liberal?

Don't float that idea past the Times:

McCollum was perhaps too conservative for the time, and Harris ran a disastrous campaign. A more formidable opponent may be able to wield the liberal stick with more force.

Maybe Nelson will whack himself with that stick?  The story earlier admitted that Nelson reliably supports President Obama's legislative initiatives.  But, hey, maybe Obama is a moderate, too.

In 2009, Nelson ranked as the 39th-most liberal member of the Senate and the 60th-most conservative, according to a National Journal analysis. That puts him in the centrist camp. Longer-range studies show the same.

Interesting definition of "the centrist camp."  One would think that our government is not sharply polarized.  And maybe we'll forget that the Democrats had about 60 senators in 2009.  The cusp of the bottom third most liberal Democrats makes you a centrist.  Go figure.

A statewide poll released Thursday showed that 44 percent of voters think Nelson's views are "about right'' and 23 percent say he's too liberal. A plurality of voters, 46 percent, say Nelson generally shares Obama's views but his disapproval rating dropped 10 percentage points from August, suggesting criticism surrounding the president is not sticking.

That's the good news for Nelson.

The poll came from the folks at Quinnipiac.  Forty-three percent of those polled felt Nelson deserved another term in office.

"Sen. Bill Nelson's numbers are mixed. Only one in five voters is unhappy with his job performance, which indicates he hasn't stirred up strong opposition. But history shows that when only 43 percent of voters say an incumbent deserves another term, that incumbent sometimes doesn't get another term," said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

quinnipiac.edu

That's the bad news for Nelson.

But the Times is interested in the positives while pushing the theme that Nelson isn't a liberal and therefore should be re-elected.

We get it, St. Petersburg Times.  You want the incumbent to win.

Nelson's fortunes do ride with Obama's.  If Obama tacks to the right then Nelson can profitably tag along.  If, on the other hand, Obama tacks little then Nelson's record of supporting Obama's legislative agenda will be easy for Republicans to pin on Nelson's lapel.  And that's a true message to the effect that Nelson's a liberal.  Not the most liberal.  But right there in the camp.

Journalistic transparency alert: PolitiFact @ FaceBook

Not long after I finished praising PolitiFact for its willingness to entertain contrary views, I've been given reason to revisit the issue.

One does not necessarily obtain the same view of FaceBook when one is logged in as one does when one is logged out.

Here's a logged in view of a recent thread:

Four replies to the thread.  I do not lightly explain the obvious.

Logged out:

Reece Martin's comments do not appear, at least on my computer, when I am not logged in at FaceBook.  I've discovered that select comments of mine do not appear (on my computer) when I'm not logged in.

Curiouser and curiouser ... Reece Martin's comments do not appear in Google results searching the facebook.com domain.  We only get mentions of her name when she happens to be listed as liking something.

I suppose privacy settings might explain the search results for Ms. Martin.  They do not explain why some of my posts appear under certain conditions and some do not.

If the problem isn't wonkiness (admittedly not at all a settled question), then shouldn't PolitiFact offer some sort of explanation for its system of comment moderation?

Journalistic transparency alert: New York Times (Updated)

I love stuff like this:

The New York Times editorial board is never wrong. Or at least, they won’t print anything that says they are.

Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA law school, wrote on his blog The Volokh Conspiracy Tuesday about a friend of his, Andy Pincus, who had written a letter to the editor at the New York Times about a court case in which he was currently working on as a lawyer.

“The Times is just wrong,” his letter to the Times said, in part. The paper wrote him back, asking if an edited version of his letter, with that phrase removed, would be ok.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/02/04/york-times-wrong/#ixzz1D1zyD0uS

Gotta love that transparency and dedication to free speech.

While I'm at it, I have to toss some props to PolitiFact for allowing people like me to flatly call them wrong in their own domain at FaceBook. I'm on record predicting that it can't go on like that indefinitely. So far there's no real sign that PolitiFact will change its policy.

Update:

I may have spoken too soon regarding signs of PolitiFact's change of heart with regard to audience input.  There are now some signs, though it remains a question as to where they lead.

Grading PolitiFact: Mark Warner & the tax break crisis

The nation is hemorrhaging cash in the form of tax breaks, according to Democrat Mark Warner.  Something tells me I'm about to shadow one of the dumbest fact checks of all time.


The issue:

The fact checkers:

Warren Fiske:  writer, researcher
Daniel Finnegan:  editor


Analysis:

Sen. Warner's statement on Fox News was reasonable and unremarkable, on balance.  See for yourself:





PolitiFact zeroed in on the goofiest part:

"I don’t think that most Americans realize that we actually spend more on tax expenditures, or tax breaks, than we collect in personal income taxes each year," he said. "So that has to be on the table, also."

Why do I say it's goofy?
1)  A tax break is not an expenditure any more than the discount value of a retail coupon is a business expenditure.
2)  Any distinction between taxes stipulated by law and those legitimately not paid according to the same law is ultimately artificial (a business, for example, can issue a $2 coupon while raising the price $2 at the same time).
3)  In accord with point No. 2 above, Warner's conclusion that tax breaks need to be on the table is a non starter.

PolitiFact unaccountably treats Wanner's statement with perfect seriousness:

Personal incomes taxes are the federal government’s largest revenue source, providing 45 percent of its tax receipts. Is Uncle Sam exempting more than he’s taking in? We checked.

Why check?  We can count a 15 percent tax on $20,000 of income as an 85 percent exemption if we want.  None of it really means anything, and by itself does nothing to justify looking at removing existing tax breaks.

Wouldn't that explanation best serve PolitiFact's readers?

Apparently PolitiFact doesn't agree:

(W)e untangled the numbers. Computing data in a Dec. 21 report by the Joint Committee on Taxation, we found that individuals receive about 91 percent of the value of income tax breaks, with corporations getting the rest.

That means during the last two fiscal years, individuals received a total of about $1.98 trillion in breaks for the $1.85 trillion in income tax they paid. Warner’s claim, in other words, holds true when compare you the income tax paid by individuals to the tax breaks they receive.

 Heh.  Suckers.

Now watch as PolitiFact concedes the point I made above without apparently realizing it:

Under the commission’s proposal, individuals would be compensated for some of the loss in tax breaks by lowering the rates charged in all income tax brackets.

Exactly!  Just like raising the price of a mattress 10 percent to make up for the customer's coupon entitling him to 10 percent off.  There's no need to mess with the coupon at all.  Warner's rhetoric suggests that the coupon needs to be adjusted to a mere 8 percent off or something like that.  It's ridiculous.  Raising the price of the mattress works just as well as adjusting the discount on the coupon.

What neither PolitiFact nor Warner bother to explain is the parallel economic effect.  Most tax breaks exist for a reason other than to reduce federal revenues.  Like a factory coupon, they exist to encourage some type of economic activity.

I respect the overall aim of Sen. Warner's committee, but his reasoning on this particular point is specious, and PolitiFact ought to have done something to point out how ridiculous it is.  Before considering the removal of any tax break one needs to consider the reasoning behind the tax break.  It's foolish to treat the tax break itself as an expenditure and nothing more.

PolitiFact rated Warner "True."  It was a pointless exercise.  It was like trying to confirm whether or not a desert wanderer perceives a mirage.  Even if the mirage is confirmed it won't make it real.


The grades:

Warren Fiske:  F
Daniel Finnegan:  F

Fiske gets some props for his dogged determination in tracking down pointless data and playing the obligatory mathematical games with it.  But he's still a sucker at the end of the day.

Everyone associated with the editorial decision to rate this claim can share in the criticism.

Warner spouted malarkey and PolitiFact couldn't figure it out.

Grading PolitiFact: Paul Broun tweets on the Gummint

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.
--About PolitiFact

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor

Analysis:

Supposedly Paul Broun (R-Ga.) says government is a barrier to innovation and development.

Supposedly Broun says innovation would flower if government would get out of the way.

This is what Broun tweeted:

If the govt would get out of the way, we could have innovation and development

The first paraphrase of Broun ("government is a barrier to innovation and development") could pass as a universal rule.  Or it could pass as proverbial wisdom.  Or possibly as a recommendation applied to a specific set of circumstances.

The second paraphrase seems less like a universal rule and more like either proverbial wisdom or a recommendation applied to a specific set of circumstances.

How do we figure out which meaning matches Broun's intent?  The obvious first step, in keeping with PolitiFact's stated fact-checking policy, is to refer to the context.

Rep. Broun made a series of Twitter tweets during the president's State of the Union speech in January.

click to enlarge

The image above comes directly from Twitter.com, representing Broun's tweets.  Note that the tweets occur in reverse chronological order.  Knowing as we do that Broun was tweeting in response to President Obama's remarks, we can get an idea of the context of Broun's comments based on what was said by Obama at the time.  The tweet preceding the one in question contains an important keyword, "free enterprise," making it very likely that the 9:22 p.m. tweet was in response to the following portion of the president's address: