Politi-Score: First Half 2011 Results à la PolitiFact

This blog has looked at the PolitiFact (PF) scoring methods of various political websites such as the Daily Beast and Smart Politic’s Eric Ostermeier. PolitiFact, in its new mobile app, has developed its own “rules” (as far as I can see) with regard to “scoring”—

1. Everyone is included (office holders, non office holders, blogs, e-mails, non-partisans).

2. Individual “scores” are not shown based on numbers but relatively based on percentages (in a color coded bar chart format).

There seems to be an avoidance of any comparison of Republican/Conservative with Democrat/Liberal because to do so would reveal, as the Daily Beast and Smart Politics have found, that the rulings favor Democrats. Below is how PolitiFact’s mobile app would look if, for the first half of 2011, you could get a reading of Republicans/Conservatives, Democrats/Liberals, and “Other” in total. I’ve put the Politi-Score to the right of each one in the Bar Chart.

Percentages are included in the bar chart for better clarification.

As I was compiling these rulings, it appeared that there were a lot more Republicans being reviewed, perhaps because of their nationwide rout of the Democrats in the elections this past November…just more Republican statements to review because there’s just more Republicans in office! Indeed, a quick computation revealed that the percentage of Republican rulings had increased about 8 percent from just over 50% to 54%, while the Democrats dropped 16% from about 44% to almost 36% of all PolitiFact rulings.

Democrats still have, on average, a higher truthiness than the Republicans, as noted by the Politi-Scores in the first graphic. PolitiFact gets within a hairs’ breath of telling you, but it doesn’t come out and say it. For 2011 I added a new field to my database of rulings: whether the ruling had been reviewed by my conservative counterpart. I found that he had reviewed 50 rulings this year—he’s been pretty busy attacking PolitiFact. That amounts to about 5% of its rulings. Whether that means anything—well, you know what I think.

Parsing sentences, making vague *nano-measure* comparisons as if they were substantive, blowing even minor mistakes far out of proportion, using code words, seemingly reasonable but unverifiable assertions, an over-abundance of alleged logic fallacies, and confirmation bias: this is how Bryan makes his case that PF has made rulings he deems “biased” or incorrect. But what’s more is what ties it all together: a sort of monolithic certitude, an implicit officialness, a self-belief reflected in his writing that he is the final authority on what he believes is the truth. In other words, as my impression from his blog is that he’s into Star Wars, his style of writing sounds like it’s coming from Darth Vader.