Politi-Score: Good Golly Ms. PoliGraph

In MPR PoliGraph’s profile (on its “About PoliGraph” web page), there’s an interesting cross reference to PolitiFact (PF) as follows: (emphasis added)

If this reminds you of PolitiFact.com, the Pultizer Prize-winning from the St. Petersburg Times, you'd be right. We know good ideas when we see them.

Who Works on PoliGraph?

Catharine Richert writes PoliGraph. She is an experienced journalist who previously worked at PolitiFact.com and Congressional Quarterly. She has a Masters in Public Policy from the University of Minnesota and a bachelor's degree from Oberlin College.

Mike Mulcahy, MPR News' political editor, directs the feature.

That Pultizer sure has....pull. So Catherine Richert went off in a different direction, back to Minnesota where she got her Masters, with a different version of PolitiFact, called PoliGraph, using her PolitiFact training and experience. She (or Editor Mulcahy) decided it would be better to have four rankings, throwing out the ubiquitous Pants on Fire, and including a more descriptive “Inconclusive” to replace the equivocating Half True. No “Mostly” True or False, but a “Misleading” something like FactCheck.Org. But with a signature PolitiFact generic checkmark.

Richert holds the PF checkmark close
to her heart.



So we have the PolitiFact state partnerships, and then this sort of PolitiFact offshoot. PoliGraph functions as a sort of PolitiFact Minnesota. Michele Bachmann was a good person to start off with since I had four fact-checking sources, the fourth (PoliGraph) being one from her home state. Then there’s Tim Pawlenty, the other Minnesotan presidential candidate (and even Al Franken the Minnesota Senator, although he’s not given much attention by PolitiFact National). In other words, there’ll be nothing on poliga-statist (pun sort of intended) Mitt Romney or Texan Rick Perry from PoliGraph.

This means PoliGraph’s utilization for me in the Politi-Score is limited. In certain respects, it can’t be weighted as heavily as PolitiFact, FactCheck or the Washington Post Fact Checker because of its somewhat symbiotic relationship with PolitiFact. Although it should be noted, PoliGraph slightly differed on a ruling it shared with PolitiFact: that of the $105 billion hidden in Medicare (by Michele Bachmann). PoliGraph called it False, while PF was “Mostly False.” So, the caveat for PoliGraph on shared rulings will be those where it differs with PolitiFact, along with those rulings it doesn’t share.