Politi-Hack Attack

Now that I’ve looked at the new blogspot site which is a one-stop shop for PolitiFact (PF) detractors as created by Jeff Dyberg and Bryan White, I do have to slightly “retract” a post done earlier, as I see that Bryan (not so much Jeff) has done some work to show how other conservative ideologues have charged PolitiFact with liberal bias. Other conservative ideologues. In other words, birds of a feather flocking together. That’s why I can’t completely retract, as they’ve made it amusing and predictable.

One site they link to is called PolitiHack Tracker, an actual website in lieu of a blog, which appears to have been created by someone named Weston Hicks, currently residing in Austin, Texas. He can be found on Facebook: one of his “favorite pages” is “I hate it when I wake up in the morning and Barack Obama is president” and the Heritage Foundation, which tells me all I need to know. Besides the fact that PolitiHack Tracker targets PolitiFact Texas, PolitiFact’s partner publication being the Austin-American Statesman.

I consider Bryan a superior critic to Jeff and Weston. He may go way overboard in employing the use of fallacies, and tries to make an argument with some semblance of reasonableness, but for the strength of his pseudo-explanations I prefer to challenge him instead of Jeff and Weston. He’s the closest one can come to being objective in his analysis, or at least sounding so. On that note, one of the things I’ve seen Jeff and Weston do, that I do not see Bryan do very often, is to compare PolitiFact rulings….the specifics of a ruling on a Republican as compared to a ruling on a Democrat, to show the “unfairness” of the application of PolitiFact’s writers standards. I suppose Bryan does not do it for the same reason I have not done it: it’s too often apples to oranges.

For example, Weston started his website with two articles on Texan politicians Rick Perry and Bill White: he compared a ruling of Half True on Rick Perry (R) for saying that Texas has the most Fortune 500 companies and is the fastest growing state, against a statement also ruled Half True by Bill White (D) that the Texas State Board of Education, led by a Perry appointee, voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from social studies textbook standards. According to Weston:

Politifact Texas has mercy on Bill White’s false statements, tortures Rick Perry’s true statements, and gives them the same rating.

Additionally, Politifact Texas harshly scrutinizes Governor Perry for truthfully bragging on Texas, while assisting Bill White in falsely making Texas look bad.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that, the way I read it, particularly the “assisting Bill White in falsely making Texas look bad” because I can’t see how replacing Jefferson with other members of the “enlightment” (Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone) constitutes making Texas look bad.

Bill White’s ruling was a bit more complicated than that of Rick Perry; while Perry’s was basically a two part “combined claim” and fairly straight forward, White’s was, as noted by PolitiFact, “multi-part.”

In assessing Rick Perry, PolitiFact’s “scrutinizations” were to look at the period for which Rick Perry was governor, not up to the moment. They found some slight discrepancies in both numbers: on “most Fortune 500 companies” they found Texas had them in the last three of four years. It was the fastest growing in absolute terms but not relative terms: “… Wyoming and Utah grew faster than Texas from July 2008 to July 2009. Texas was outpaced by other states during each of the two immediately preceding year-to-year periods as well.” And for those factors they ruled Half True. I might stretch it for a Mostly True.

Bill White’s statement, on the other hand, had a lot of complications that Weston decided to label “torture.”  

First, Weston claims that “Politfact Texas admits the SBOE was updating curriculum, not textbooks, as the Mr. White claimed.” But PolitiFact follows that with “the curriculum standards will serve as a framework when the board meets to revise textbooks in 2011.”

Then, Weston states that “Politifact Texas admits Mr. White incorrectly claimed the head of the SBOE was a Governor Perry appointee.” But as PolitiFact notes “Lowe, the chairwoman, is an elected official, not a Perry appointee. But the governor named her chairwoman of the board.” In this case, she was elected to serve on the board , but was appointed chairperson, at least according to NBC for Dallas-Ft. Worth and the Texas Education Agency (more TEA?).  I do fault PolitiFact for not making that clear, although I’m sure Weston was aware of it in making this patent misrepresentation.

Finally, Weston says:

Politifact Texas admits Mr. White falsely claimed Jefferson was being removed from textbook standards. He was only removed from one portion of the overall standards, leaving Jefferson included in six other places….

Weston repeats PolitiFact’s “admissions” yet does not recognize that it diminishes any of his claimed “deceptions” on their part in making the evaluation. Again, reading the PolitiFact ruling tries to clear this up in a fair way.

White's final sentence — that Jefferson was deleted from a list of historical figures who inspired political change — is a more accurate way to put it.

While I’m not a huge fan of PolitiFact’s rating system, if this were done on a “point” basis using my Politi-Score rating, i.e., 100 is the equivalent of True and 50 is the equivalent of Half True, I’d probably give Perry more “true” points than White, like 60 for Perry and 40 for White. But the PolitiFact ratings are not that defined.

Weston uses a Pinnochio-type Investigator to represent PolitiFact's fact checkers.

Anyone who is trying to be the least bit objective would see how Weston wrote a view of this from his own strong conservative bias and removed or failed to acknowledge critical points that should have been included in his refutation. In other words, he just ignored what would be obvious to anyone else (except maybe other right wingers). He basically complained about PolitiFact’s ratings from a straight reading (or maybe I should say, a “selectively biased” reading) of their ruling without citing anything else or researching what he was writing.

I hope this Weston is somehow getting his webhosting free because he is certainly wasting a lot of money.  And speaking of “selectively biased” I hope the PolitiFact Bias site keeps a headline link to stuff like this, as it exemplifies what their blog really is: A bunch of biased people (birds of a feather) going after a website they think is biased because they want it to be even more biased (in their favor).   Maybe Weston can use his website to be a conservative fact check site.

By the way, for all those Weston-types and other Texas-lovers out there, guess what grows all year round in Texas (besides the population)?