Nyhan explains Birther reversal--sort of

Awhile back I did some tweaking of political scientist Brendan Nyhan over his prediction that the release of President Obama's long form birth certificate would not significantly dent the proportion of Americans who believe Obama was not American-born.

A Washington Post poll showed a big shift in belief as well as a surprising (to me, anyway) number of self-identified Democrats who doubt Obama was born in the United States.

I figured that left Nyhan with some explaining to do.  And, to his credit, Nyhan has stepped up to the plate to do just that:

So why was this correction so effective when others tend to fail? (PDF) The answers aren't entirely clear yet, but here are some initial thoughts. First, the birth certificate's release was an unusually definitive debunking that became a major news event, so there was saturation coverage of some very strong corrective information.

Nyhan's first possible explanation is interesting given that his past "misperception" studies place little weight on the strength of the debunking material.  Indeed, even the supposed misperceptions are often controversial regarding the degree of truth they hold.

Nyhan ought to have considered the strength of the debunking in this case before putting his doubts in print.  It ended up making him look a tad foolish.  He should also have considered that Obama's failure to release the long form certificate when it was apparently in his power to do so did plenty to help fuel the "Birther" movement.  Of course cutting off a major fuel source will affect the level of belief under such conditions.

Nyhan:

Second, no prominent elites on the right contested the validity of the birth certificate, which meant that coverage of its release was almost entirely one-sided.

That fits with my counter-Nyhan argument that the source of contradicting information has much to do with whether we accept a supposedly strong debunking account.  Perhaps it is a failure on my part, but I don't recall Nyhan taking such things into account for purposes of his past research.

Nyhan:

Finally, it's possible that support for the myth was soft because poll respondents didn't really believe it but were using poll questions about Obama's religion and place of birth as a way to express disapproval (as some commentators and pollsters have argued).

Such influences on polling, if they exert an appreciable effect on the results, certainly must make it tough for people like Nyhan to do their research.  How is a researcher to know when people are telling the truth about their beliefs?

Nyhan's three would-be explanations all tend to undercut the conclusions he's drawn from his research.  Will this contradictory information correct his misperceptions?  Was the debunking unambiguous enough to shake his beliefs?

Grading PolitiFact: Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Medicare solvency & kid gloves

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

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Angie Drobnic Holan:  writer, researcher
John Bartosek:  editor

Analysis:

"To assess the truth for a numbers claim," wrote PolitiFact editor Bill Adair back in 2008, "the biggest factor is the underlying message."

Adair's fact-checking guideline accords with Adair's "Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter," where he emphasizes the importance of looking at statements according to the underlying message.

Newly crowned DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz made a numbers claim.  PolitiFact fact-checked it.  And we will examine whether PolitiFact made a serious effort to tease out the truth of the underlying message.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

PolitiFact:

"It's the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to who's engaging in Medi-scare," said Wasserman Schultz in an interview on MSNBC on May 25. "The Republicans leading up to the 2010 election actually fabricated what Democrats did to Medicare. In fact, we added 12 years of solvency to Medicare and ensured that it would be better for seniors overall. And what the Republicans have done under Paul Ryan's plan is actually end Medicare as we know it, turn into it into a voucher program. There's no running from that."

Adding solvency?   Add to that making Medicare "better for seniors overall" and we seem to have an underlying message suggesting the PPACA improved Medicare.

PolitiFact found a document from the Medicare Board of Trustees that initially appeared to support Wasserman Schultz's claim of adding 12 years of solvency, solvency meaning that Medicare income (clarification:  plus assets) pays 100 percent of Medicare bills on a yearly basis.

On the other hand, PolitiFact also located a more recent report from the same Medicare Board of Trustees recalculating the extension of solvency down to eight years.  Both reports contained very similar warnings from Medicare's chief actuary, Richard Foster.  Foster's objections received a one-sentence mention in the following paragraph in PolitiFact's story: (bold emphasis added):

We should note those estimates come with a few warnings. The report itself says that projecting health care costs into the future includes many uncertainties. Additionally, the report doesn’t include changes that Congress will likely make to current law, especially the predictable increases in payments to physicians known as the doc fix. Also, the independent chief actuary for Medicare questioned whether the projected cost savings were realistic.

Saying Foster "questioned" the saving is one way to put it, and arguably softens the blow with ambiguous rhetoric.  Here's how Foster said it (Foster's recommended URL activated by me for the reader's convenience):

The financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions in price updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable). I encourage readers to review the “illustrative alternative” projections that are based on more sustainable assumptions for physician and other Medicare price updates. These projections are available at http://www.cms.gov/ActuarialStudies/Downloads/2011TRAlternativeScenario.pdf.

Foster appears to question the report's projections in the strong sense of flatly challenging their reliability ("do not represented a reasonable expectation") rather than in the softer sense of having doubt the projections will pan out.  The context provided by PolitiFact offers no clue as to which meaning applies, though the subsequent paragraph from the story misleadingly implies Foster intended the softer sense:

But overall, the board of trustees report is an official estimate for the Medicare program, the reports are put together with a consistent, detailed methodology, and its annual reports are usually referred to by both parties.

Since the report is "official," uses a "consistent, detailed methodology" and the results are used by both parties therefore we ignore the fact that the projections are unrealistic.  Welcome to the wonderful world of PolitiFact fact checking.

PolitiFact:

So Wasserman Schultz’s number is off by about a third.

Nevertheless, her overall point, that the Democrats’ health reform law added to the overall solvency of Medicare, is correct. The 2011 report included the same warnings that estimating health care savings for the future is an uncertain process, but it also concluded that the financial outlook for Medicare is "substantially improved as a result of the changes in the Affordable Care Act."

Missing the number "by about a third" represents more kid glove treatment.  If 12 years had been the benchmark, then 8 years would be off by about a third.  Where the benchmark is 8 years, the number 12 is off by half (a 50 percent inflation).

On the bright side, Drobnic Holan does identify a underlying message, albeit a slightly different one than I came up with.  Supposedly Wasserman Schultz's point was the improved  solvency of Medicare.

I'd argue that Drobnic Holan has a weak case, here.  If Medicare simply stopped paying for treatment, it would immediately improve the solvency picture for Medicare since Medicare payroll taxes would continue to roll in while disbursements would cease.  Wasserman Schultz's claim is misleading and empty without her associated claim that Democrats made Medicare "better for seniors overall.  As the preceding illustration showed, merely achieving prolonged solvency does not automatically translate into a Medicare program that is better for seniors overall.

A critique of "Two Years Later: The Media Response to Death Panels and Why It’s Still Important"

Note:  This is a response to an article based on the report "Two Years Later: The Media Response to Death Panels and Why It’s Still Important."

Sarah Palin's "death panel" comment from her FaceBook page led to an ensuing controversy in which some people said Palin was correct and some said Palin was incorrect. 

"Two Years Later: The Media Response to Death Panels and Why It’s Still Important," by Matthew L. Schafer and Regina G. Lawrence delves into the competing models for reporting truth claims in the media.  Schafer authored the condensed mass media version of the same name.

Schafer concludes that the media bore considerable responsibility for the supposedly false belief in Palin's "death panels" simply by repeating the phrase, along with the arguments for and against:

Thus, the dilemma for reporters playing by the rules of procedural objectivity is that repeating a claim reinforces a sense of its validity — or at least, enshrines its place as an important topic of public debate.  Moreover, there is no clear evidence that journalism can correct misinformation once it has been widely publicized.  Indeed, it didn’t seem to correct the death panels misinformation in our study.

 What to do, then?  Suppress "death panel" mentions in the news?  Apparently so:

Journalists should verify information.  Moreover, they should do so without including quotations from those taking a stance that is demonstrably false.  This creates a factual jigsaw puzzle that the reader must untangle.  Indeed, on the one hand, the journalist is calling the claim false, and on the other, he is giving inches quoting someone who believes it’s true.

Schafer's recommendation might prove palatable if fact checking organizations dependably reached objective conclusions.  They don't, and Schafer's choice of Palin's "death panel" phrase helps illustrate the point.

In his summary, Schafer claims that FactCheck.org (Annenberg Fact Check) debunked Palin's claim about death panels:

FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenburg (sic) Public Policy Center, would also debunk the claim, and later Politifact users would later vote the death panel claim to the top spot of Politifact’s Lie of the Year ballot.

The supposed debunking does not at all debunk Palin's death panel statement.  Later in his story, Schafer and Annenberg Fact Check acknowledge that Palin made no reference to any particular feature of the health care reform legislation.  The fact check in question rabbit-trails into Palin's critique of Obama's claims about end-care physician counseling.  Palin made clear in that reply that her "death panel" comment was aimed at government rationing of health care services.  Fact checks by PolitiFact and Annenberg Fact Check ignored that original context of Palin's remarks.

Thus we find a fundamental flaw in Schafer's thesis.  We can't assume the accuracy of the media, therefore it makes little sense to simply believe what the media tell us.  That goes for supposed fact checks the same as anything else.  Yet how is one to question a media account that simply ignores a controversy?  Schafer effectively advocates an informational power grab by the establishment media.  Proclaim the "truth," and marginalize those who question the received account by ignoring their protestations as irrelevant.

Grading PolitiFact (Georgia): Herman Cain confuses the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence?

Is the statement significant? We avoid minor "gotchas"’ on claims that obviously represent a slip of the tongue.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Willoughby Mariano:  writer, researcher
Jim Denery:  editor
Jim Tharpe:  editor

Analysis:

I've heard Herman Cain speak on occasion over the years, as he often serves as a guest host on the Neal Boortz radio program.  On the radio, I've heard him incorrectly state on at least one occasion that passages in the Declaration of Independence occur in the Constitution.  Now PolitiFact claims he did the same thing during his announcement speech for his presidential run.  Is Cain confused?

PolitiFact:

"We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States," Cain said. "We need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution."

"And I know that there’s some people that are not going to do that. So, for the benefit for those that are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believe in, they instilled in you. When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don’t stop right there, keep reading.

"’Cause that’s when it says that when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. We’ve got some altering and some abolishing to do."

Cain’s exhortation sent your PolitiFact Georgia team scrambling for a closer look at the U.S. Constitution.

That last line is pretty funny.  The PolitiFact Georgia team did not immediately realize that "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" does not occur in the Constitution?  That certainly inspires confidence.  Though perhaps it was meant as a snarky way of pretending to assume that Cain must know what he's talking about.  Either way, it reflects poorly on PolitiFact Georgia.

Getting past that, it's clear that the line isn't in the Constitution.  So what does it mean?  Is it a significant statement?  Does Cain believe the line is in the Constitution or did he misspeak?

PolitiFact:

Constitutional history scholar and University of Pennsylvania professor Richard R. Beeman came to our assistance via email. That phrase is in the second paragraph of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which was written in 1776, 11 years before the Constitution was drafted during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Beeman agreed with Cain that we don’t need to rewrite the Constitution and it’s more important that Americans read it.

"It might be a good thing if Mr. Cain would undertake that task," Beeman said.

Snark from PolitiFact's expert source?  Say it isn't so.  Did Beeman assume that Cain did not simply misspeak?

PolitiFact:

We asked Cain’s campaign to respond. A spokeswoman said he sometimes mentions the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the same time.

"Quite often, he references them together when speaking of his appreciation for the work of our Founders," she said.

I'd like to see the whole of that response.  The bit above falls short of saying Cain misspoke.  But it accurately states what Cain was doing during his speech.  The quotation from PolitiFact left out part of the relevant context (transcript mine):

You know, the founding fathers did their job.  And they did a great job at it.  And they kept it simple.

They wrote the Declaration of Independence.  They designed and wrote the Constitution of the United States of America.  And one of the other things that's part of our vision, is that we don't need to rewrite the Declaration.  We don't need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States--rewrite it, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution.  We don't need to rewrite, let's reread.

And I know that there are some people who are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those that are not going to read it because they don't want us to go by the Constitution, there's a little section in there that talks about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believed in, they instilled in you.  When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness don't stop there, keep reading.  Because that's when it says when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

We've got some altering and some abolishing to do.

In context, Cain was talking about both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  So does that mean that he knew the two clauses he apparently attributed to the Constitution were actually in the Declaration of Independence?  Not necessarily, but there's a pretty easy way to figure that out.  Not that PolitiFact shows any interest in following that proper course:

(C)onfusing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is no small mistake, especially for a candidate for president, said Donald E. Wilkes Jr., a University of Georgia law professor.

The Declaration is a statement of beliefs. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land.

"No court makes a legal decision based on the Declaration of Independence," Wilkes said.

Though I'm not a University of Georgia law professor, I'm going to partly contradict professor Wilkes.  Confusing the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution is a small mistake when one merely misspeaks yet well knows the difference.  Though certainly the minor error may be magnified by irresponsible reporting in the media as well as by comments from intellectual elites who have ignored the broader context.

PolitiFact rules Cain "False."

As noted via epigraph, the Truth-O-Meter, according to principle, does not rate obvious slips of the tongue.  That's why then-candidate for president Barack Obama was not rated from his statement about campaigning in all 57 states.  It is not reasonable to believe that Obama thinks there are more than 50 states.

Likewise, it is not reasonable to believe that Herman Cain thinks "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" occurs in the Constitution.

Why not?

Because Cain talks about the founding documents frequently.  He has correctly attributed those statements frequently over time, and it's easily verified.

Iowa (go to 3:24):




Cain talking about the Declaration of Independence at a high school:




Given the broader context, totally ignored by PolitiFact, it is plain that Cain committed a minor error of misstatement.  He knows the source of the words as well as Obama knows the number of states.

If PolitiFact did not bend its principles then the supposed principles are so ambiguous as to be effectively meaningless.

The grades:

Willoughby Mariano:  F
Jim Denery:  F
Jim Tharpe:  F

Cain's from the Atlanta area, so Mariano, Denery and Tharpe (all of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) have added reason to know Cain knows the origin of the words he referenced.

This was a minor "gotcha" on a minor slip of the tongue from Cain.  PolitiFact's principles ought to have prevented this fact check.

Third party payment by any other name still smells as stinky

Rep. Paul Ryan explains the basic problem with our current Medicare system (third party payment) without naming it:



Many Republicans are concerned about the difficulty of messaging for Ryan's approach. People like the idea of paying for other people's health care, especially when they can do it with other people's money.

The Republicans are gambling that people will wake up to the truth before we drive off the cliff.


Hat tip to Hot Air.

To what lengths will PolitiFact go to suppress the truth?

I've posted a number of times about PolitiFact's FaceBook "Matrix," where participants in the discussion thread can live in a reality separate from that of the others by virtue of what groups can view their comments.

Days ago, before I got around to checking out the fine details of PolitiFact's supposed source for a story about conservative pundit and radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, I left a message challenging the PolitiFact version:

Pam Phillips wrote:

***It's very diligent of Politifact to actually look up some polls. No way did Laura Ingraham bother; she just said what she wants to believe. I call that Pants On Fire.***

Most likely Ingraham did not say what PolitiFact claims. That is, that RomneyCare is unpopular in Massachusetts. It really doesn't matter how popular RomneyCare is in Massachusetts. What matters to Romney's bid for Republican nomination is its popularity with conservatives. PolitiFact provided no material from the "O'Reilly Factor" transcript to substantiate its claim that Ingraham was talking about the system's popularity in Massachusetts. And none of you who made comments noticed to the point of saying something about it? You trust PolitiFact that much? To simply believe minus the evidence?

It's extremely likely that Ingraham was talking about RomneyCare's popularity among Republicans. The truth will come out eventually.

To me and my small circle of FaceBook friends, it looked like this:

 To the rest of you it would look much more like this:

Color me deeply amused.

But the truth is now out there.  It's just a matter of people finding it.  And realizing that they're not going to get it consistently from PolitiFact.

More fun with PolitiFact's FaceBook "matrix"

I've posted before about the quirky results one obtains with the discussion area at PolitiFact's FaceBook page.

Here's another example of a post apparently made invisible to all save the friends of the one making the post.

Generic FaceBook account view:

 Account used to post comment:

As a debate forum, PolitiFact's FaceBook page is a joke.  These results I find inexplicable based on my admittedly limited experience with an organizational FaceBook account.  Probably PolitiFact has employed customizations that put them all or mostly in charge of what appears and to whom on their FaceBook page.  In other words, the discussion is most likely deliberately censored.

Answering Ken's question:

Here's why, Ken.

With property there is a thing called "mineral rights" that most folks don't get. That's something that governments retain control over. So, you can look at it like the government in most cases reserving oil resources to itself (not to mention that land not owned privately is claimed by the government. So, you've got the problem of getting resources that people need to the people who need it, such as Ken Jones. You could let the government do it (many nations do that). But that means the investment money and capital need to come from taxation. And liabilities such as oil spills are automatically the financial responsibility of the taxpayers assuming the government is willing to clean up its own messes (government's sometimes aren't so willing). In the United States we let private companies bring those resources to those who need it, using the profit motive to provide the incentive. Take away the profit and you lose the incentive. The government charges for leases and such, but obviously if the lease cost reaches a certain high point no private company will show interest. As a result, it is in the interests of our government to provide very adequate incentives for oil companies to take the oil from government lands and turn it into energy that you can use to get to work and connect to the Internet.

Our government takes its biggest share of the proceeds at the pump rather than by charging oil companies for the leases and such. Either way, we all foot the bill.

So, that's why it's private enterprise to provide tax breaks and loopholes to oil companies. If the government were simply doling out cash to oil companies (which isn't the case, so far as I can tell) then we'd have a problem. The smart people in government recognize that oil companies provide a crucial service, and to a reasonable person a middling profit margin isn't so very disturbing.

PolitiFact's push poll (Updated)

Push polls are not really polls at all; their object is not to measure public opinion, but to manipulate it by providing as many “respondents” as possible with hypothetical, sometimes blatantly false information, about candidates, political parties or initiatives.

Election Law Journal

The third-rate fact checkers at PolitiFact published a push poll yesterday.

Are they trying to make it easy for me to prove they're biased?  I'm literally astounded by some of the things they do.  I couldn't have been more surprised if a magical plesiosaur pointed out the way to Candy Mountain.

Okay, so it was set up as a quiz rather than a poll, but other than that the structure was the same.  Writer Angie Drobnic Holan (who ought to know better) reviewed for readers a couple of (skewed) PolitiFact ratings noting the similarities between RomneyCare and PPACA, the latter also known as ObamaCare.  No mention is made of differences between the two through that point unless we count the different names.

Drobnic continues from there:

Both leave in place the major insurance systems: employer-provided insurance, Medicare for seniors and Medicaid for the poor. They seek to reduce the number of uninsured by expanding Medicaid and by offering tax breaks to help moderate income people buy insurance. People are required to buy insurance or pay a penalty, a mechanism called the "individual mandate." And companies that don't offer insurance have to pay fines, with exceptions for small business and a few other cases.

She moved on from talking about the similarities to talking more about the similarities.  Apparently RomneyCare and ObamaCare are so similar that there's not much point in mentioning differences, if any.

After having the similarities impressed on us, we're supposed to take a quiz to see if we can even tell the difference between the two.  We get ten descriptions which apply either to RomneyCare or ObamaCare.  One is a poll result rather than a feature of the bill, leaving us with nine relevant points of comparison.

The first concerns the individual mandate, an obvious and well-known similarity between the two plans.  The second concerns employer penalties for failing to carry insurance--another fairly well-known feature the two plans have in common.  The third mentions tax credits for those who have trouble paying for health insurance.

Notice a trend?  We're a third through the nine relevant points and the focus is strongly on the similarities.

The fourth and fifth touch on two different ways the plans expand Medicaid coverage.  The first mention of a difference of any significance comes in terms of a similarity (expanded Medicaid coverage).

The sixth mentioned a poll showing people split on favoring one of the health care plans.  The plan was ObamaCare, as it turned out, and Drobnic helpfully achieved an even 41 percent in favor with 41 percent against without mentioning the substantially higher percentage within the latter figure who "strongly oppose" ObamaCare.  The later explanation does make clear that RomneyCare is relatively popular in Massachusetts, but the overall message remains one of equivalency.  Massachusetts is, after all, a predominantly liberal state.

The seventh was a tax credit for small businesses designed to provide an incentive for the purchase of employee health plans.  This represents the second difference of some significance, as apparently no such provision exists in RomneyCare.

The eighth was a gimme.  It talked of "experience" showing that the plan would not lower the cost of insurance premiums.  Those who do not realize that ObamaCare has no real track record yet might consider the statement to apply to either plan.  And it's a pretty good prediction for ObamaCare, but PolitiFact insists that it applies to RomneyCare alone.  Perhaps that's based simply on the past experience angle.

The ninth referred to the establishment of an outcomes research board featured in ObamaCare.  This is the first major difference between the two, though it is described in entirely innocuous terms throughout the story despite the fact that it was roundly criticized from the right for its similarity to Great Britain's NICE.  And even NICE sounds pretty nice until you hear about some of the ways they meddle in patient care.  Conservatives think the outcomes research feature in ObamaCare is intended as a rudimentary NICE, poised to blossom into the real thing as the federal health care bureaucracy burgeons.  PolitiFact makes it sound nice, but not NICE at all.

The tenth touches the tip of the iceberg for the most significant differences between ObamaCare and RomneyCare:  the taxes.  The PolitiPush poll mentions an increase in the Medicare payroll tax applied to families with earnings over $200,000 and for individuals earning over $250,000.  The increase from 1.45 percent to 2.35 percent applies only after the aforementioned income thresholds, which isn't how PolitiFact described it.  PolitiPush also mentions a 3.8 percent hike on investment income.  Find the balance of the iceberg here.  PolitiFact couldn't mention them all because there simply wasn't room in a quiz of this kind.

The ordering of the quiz questions seems designed to establish the impression of strong similarity.  The differences may have been chosen with an eye toward public acceptance, though to be fair the taxes mentioned were among those expected to generate the greatest revenue.  The fees imposed on insurance companies warranted no mention in the PolitiPush poll.

Did we miss anything?  Well, yeah.  There's the IPAB, the continued federal government crush of unfunded mandates on the states and a set of regulations that may end up putting private insurance companies out of business in the United States.

Push polls like PolitiFact's suppress certain information on the publisher's behalf while leading the person answering the questions toward a set of desired beliefs.

What possessed PolitiFact to publish something like this?  Disgusting.


Update (1/14/2012):

A PolitiFact story on Mitt Romney from Sept. 5, 2011 helps show that PolitiFact was well aware of the purpose of its push poll:

Previously, we’ve concluded that the Massachusetts plan and the Obama plan are similar. We even did a quiz: Romneycare & Obamacare -- can you tell the difference?

They're so alike that PolitiFact even did a quiz (to communicate to people the similarity).

Great.

Grading PolitiFact: Newt Gingrich and the "food stamp president"

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

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor

Analysis:

This fact check reminds me of the job the same PolitiFact team (Jacobson, Adair) did on conservative pundit Laura Ingraham on the same day.

Sometimes it doesn't matter what you say.  It just matters what fact PolitiFact wants to check.

Here we go again:

On the May 15, 2011, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich defended his earlier characterization of President Barack Obama as "the most successful food stamp president in American history."

Host David Gregory first showed a clip of Gingrich’s earlier comment, made at a Georgia Republican Party dinner.

As with the Ingraham fact check, the beginning's not half bad.  And the similarity persists with the subsequent decline:

"You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama's is an enormous success," Gingrich said in the recorded excerpt. "The most successful food stamp president in American history.  Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?"

Gregory went on to ask Gingrich if his statement had "racist overtones."  Journalists are great.

Gingrich waved off that question.

PolitiFact:

Gregory responded, "What did you mean? What was the point?"

Gingrich replied, "That's, that's bizarre. That -- this kind of automatic reference to racism, this is the president of the United States. The president of the United States has to be held accountable. Now, the idea that -- and what I said is factually true.  Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps.  One out of every six Americans is on food stamps."

From there, PolitiFact zeroed in the the 47 million figure and went about its fact check.  This time they remembered to check the underlying point, which they identified as Gingrich blaming Obama for the record number of people receiving food stamps.

I wish I was kidding.

PolitiFact's approach to the fact check is profoundly wrongheaded.  Note the exchange between Gregory and Gingrich immediately subsequent to the portion PolitiFact used:

MR. GREGORY:  Well, what did you mean?

REP. GINGRICH:  Well, it's very simple.  He has policies--and I used a very direct analogy.  He follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit.  I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas.  You know, Texas two out of the last four years created more jobs than the other 49 states combined.  I'm suggesting we know how to create jobs.  Ronald Reagan did it.  I was part of that.  We know how to create jobs.  We did it when I was speaker.  And, and the way you create jobs is you have lower taxes, you have less regulation, you have litigation reform.  When the New York Stock Exchange puts its headquarters at Amsterdam, Holland and, by the way, follows 40 other companies in the last year; when General Electric pays zero in taxes; there's something fundamentally wrong with the current system.  The Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state.  The Environmental Protection Agency trying to control the entire American economy by bureaucratic fiat.  The Obama system's going to lead us down the path to Detroit and destruction.  I think we need a brand-new path.  It's a path of job creation.  And one of the central themes of this campaign is going to be paychecks vs. food stamps.

msnbc transcript

If PolitiFact paid attention to "the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make," it's certainly difficult to tell from the finished work.  The PolitiFact story offers no hint of Gingrich's full answer to Gregory's repeat of the question.


PolitiFact:

We're not going to address the racial implications but decided to check Gingrich's main comment. We see two points to investigate. First, are Gingrich’s numbers accurate? And second, is it fair to blame Obama for today's high use of food stamps?

PolitiFact does not address the racial implications.  I'm speechless.

It's fair to check Gingrich's figure of 47 million on food stamps.  But Gingrich does not blame Obama for the number of people on food stamps.  Rather, he used food stamps as an "analogy" (metaphor's more like it) to Obama's approach of relying on government action rather than private initiative.  It isn't that Obama gave out food stamps, it's that he did not pursue successful job-creating policies.  PolitiFact somehow must have missed Gingrich's explanation while hastening to figure out if Obama is to blame for the number of food stamp recipients.

As it turns out, the SNAP program has 44.2 million beneficiaries, so Gingrich was a bit high with his number.  Gingrich likely conflated food stamps with poverty, since the numbers he used match the numbers used in news reports for the latter.  Be that as it may, the number of recipients Gingrich mentioned represents an inflation of 6.3 percent and PolitiFact makes no big deal of that degree of inaccuracy.

PolitiFact's subsequent foray into the blame game misses the point, as noted above, so we'll skip to the end to see how it turns out:

Gingrich was close on the numbers of Americans receiving SNAP benefits. In addition, the number of beneficiaries is at a record level, and it has risen every month of the Obama presidency. On the other hand, Gingrich oversimplifies when he suggests that Obama should be considered "the most successful food stamp president in American history," because much -- though probably not all -- of the reason for the increase was a combination of the economic problems Obama inherited and a longstanding upward trend from policy changes. On balance, we rate Gingrich’s statement Half True.

One cannot rightly rate something "on balance" when the evaluation itself is unbalanced.

Gingrich's analogy does not even require record-setting numbers of food-stamp recipients.  His point, as he stated, was the nature of Obama's approach to job creation.

(chart clipped from data.bls.gov)

With the unemployment rate high along with the number of food stamp recipients, it's hard to argue with Gingrich's point.  Calling it "racist" might be the most effective defense.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

If this PolitiFact team could miss the obvious context of Gingrich's statement, I have even more confidence that they succeeded in similarly botching the Ingraham fact check.  In the latter case I have yet to locate the missing context.


May 18, 2011:  Went with "Gingrich waved off that question" rather than "Gingrich waved off that comment" and altered tense in a number of places.  Restored the gone-missing quote of the final paragraph from the PolitiFact story and added a hotlink to my review of the Ingraham story.

WaPo's Fact Checker weighs in: Did harsh interrogation help nab bin Laden?

The press treatment of waterboarding has interested me for some time, so naturally the fact check to determine whether waterboarding helped pin down bin Laden's location piqued my curiosity.

The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler picked up with a minor war of words between former Bush administration attorney general Michael Mucasey and Sen. John McCain.  I'll start with Kessler's conclusion and work back from there:

We do not have enough information to make a definitive judgment. But it appears that Mukasey is straining to make a connection between the killing of bin Laden and the harsh interrogation techniques that appears, at best, tangential. Otherwise, he would not have had to resort to verbal sleight of hand to make his case. McCain, by contrast, appears to clearly connect the dots from the courier to bin Laden, citing information derived from conventional techniques.

At the same time, while the enhanced techniques may not have provided the Rosetta stone to bin Laden’s whereabouts, Mukasey may be right when he asserts that valuable leads in the broader war against al-Qaeda were derived through these techniques.

We probably will never know whether the same information -– or more accurate information -- could have been obtained through conventional interrogation. The use of these techniques also harmed the U.S. image overseas — another question U.S, policymakers will have to balance in the future.

Kessler did a better job than I thought at first.  The first paragraph of his concluding section made it appear that he had largely bought McCain's view and discounted Mukasey's.

Marc Thiessen's book "Courting Disaster" makes clear the role of enhanced interrogation.  It is not used to elicit information from a detainee but rather used to make detainees cooperate with "conventional techniques."  Thus every piece of information will occur as a result of using "conventional techniques."  But not every piece of information gathered using conventional techniques would necessarily obtain all the information accrued after using enhanced techniques.  In particular, the detainee might delay in revealing information minus the use of enhanced interrogation.  But it's hard to say if such delays might have obscured the trail to bin Laden.

Kessler might have been clearer about the role of enhanced interrogation, but his conclusion is substantially correct.