Sidebar: Barely True...or Mostly False? Part 2

In my "Part 2" of Bill Adair’s breakin’ out the Truth-o-meter on the June 28th edition of  MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, he mentions to host Chuck Todd that he is thinking of changing the “Barely True” category to “Mostly False.” At first I got all excited and thought maybe he read something I posted about six weeks ago which was headlined with precisely this suggestion. My ego eventually deflated, however, as I realized there could be other factors: I believe I saw some commentary at the Facebook page to that effect, but, more significantly, there was a ruling on a statement made around June 1 by the National Republican Congressional Committee where they essentially interpreted Barely True as True, which shows what can happen when you say something that’s mostly false is “Barely True.”

This is what NRCC spokesperson Tory Mazzola told PolitiFact (PF) in response to their inquiry as to why Mazzola claimed a PolitiFact-confirmed “True” for “Barely True”:

We [PF] sent him [Mazzola] an e-mail this morning (June 1) noting our puzzlement, and he replied. "By ruling it ‘true,’ albeit barely, you determined that the Democrats' responses were not believable, not credible, or false at least a degree more than ours were true," he said.

So, it all depends on interpretation…and a “Mostly False” ruling would likely have resolved this. As I said in my previous post, I do not like the words “Barely True” because the word True is somewhat misleading as it conveys the “True” or truth of the ruling more strongly than the False, even though it's more "False" than "True". And that’s exactly what was "conveyed" to Troy Mazzola and the Republican National Campaign Committee.

Politi-Score: Fact-checking Bill Adair

“…only chain e-mails score lower on the Truth-o-Meter than Michele Bachmann...”

PolitiFact’s Bill Adair has a recurring fact-checking role on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” hosted by Chuck Todd. I think yesterday’s (June 28) was the first one I’ve watched; while Adair does a pretty good job vocalizing the reasons for the rulings, he did say something (actually two things, one of which I’ll address in my next post) that merited this post.

Adair stated that only chain emails beat out Michele Bachmann as the “least truthful”. I wrinkled my nose at that statement (as something someone looking for a statement to fact-check might do) and said to myself, I don’t think that’s true. I recalled that the e-mails were all lumped together on PolitiFact’s “Personalities” page, regardless of political affiliation. There were 89 through the end of 2010, and to get a more accurate read on the Politi-Score, it we necessary for me to categorize them as to whether they were from Democrats, Republicans, or they were “unknown”. As it turned out, almost half (44) were in that “unknown” category.

Bachmann and chain e-mail total PF rulings and scores at the end of 2010.

Above is a screen-print of my filtered Excel spreadsheet reflecting Bachmann’s and the separated chain e-mail Politi-Scores at the end of 2010. The second to last column reflects the Politi-Score (the last column "DB Score" is the Daily Beast score, discussed below). Bachmann was way ahead of the chain e-mails because at that time she had 7 Falses and 6 Pants on Fire. In the Politi-Scoring methodology that means she didn’t even make a positive score, because False is assigned a zero and Pants on Fire is assigned a -25. Because among the chain e-mails there were 21 scoring from True to Barely True, only the e-mails of “unknown” affiliation scored a negative, although the negative wasn’t as high as Bachmann’s.  

Current Bachmann and chain e-mail total PF rulings and scores.

Politi-Score: First Half Preview--PolitiFact Writers Revisited

The first half of 2011 is almost over, so I have started compiling PolitiFact rulings from where I left off at the end of March. As I start with PolitiFact National and there’s just a few days left in June, I thought it would be worth it to take another look at the PolitiFact National writers again in terms of the Politi-Score. At that time, it appeared that PolitiFact writer Angie Drobnic Holan favored the Democrats more than the two other writers Lou Jacobson and Robert Farley; however, now that more rulings have been accumulated, that theory may have been a bit premature.

Holan’s Politi-Score dropped from 63 to 53 for Democrats and went up a bit for Republicans; both Farley and Jacobson dropped in “truthiness” on both sides. Here is the chart for the first quarter, and below that (outlined in red) is the chart for the first half (first and second quarters combined):

First quarter 2011 (click to enlarge).

First Half 2011 (click to enlarge).

Conclusions? Well, if we are to believe that PolitiFact is liberally biased, it would seem they selected more Republican statements in the second quarter that were false. They did select more Republican statements, aside from whether they “knew” the statements would be ruled False or Pants on Fire. For the record, there were 116 rulings total published by PolitiFact National for the second quarter of 2011 (as of Monday, June 27). Of these, 45 were Democratic/Liberal statements and 67 were Republican/Conservative (the rest were non-partisan). The Democrats had only two Pants on Fire rulings, and 10 False; the Republicans had 11 Pants on Fire rulings, and 19 False. That’s a ratio of 5:1 on Pants on Fire and 2:1 on False comparing Republicans to Democrats.

Yesterday, a Facebook commenter named Vic Pilkington addressed me on something similar:

… what is your tally when comparing right and left "pants-on-fire" and "false" starements? I contend the right have a 4:1 edge over the left on those statements considered as having no basis in reality.

Well, I guess it’s even worse than Vic thought. For the second quarter of 2011, at PolitiFact National, there IS some basis for that reality. On the other hand, we have about a quarter of all the rulings represented here, and the rest (the PolitiFact partners) need to be reviewed.

Politi-Score: Update on PolitiFact's New App

PolitiFact was supposedly going to publish something more ("next week" as I recall) on how the part of its new Mobile App,  the Truth Index, which it described as the "Dow Jones Industrial Average of truth", was calculated.  At least that was the impression I got from its announcement of this app.  However, now it appears that particular article has been withdrawn.  I've been waiting for this explanation, because frankly it isn't apparent to me how it works.  But I will keep working on it.

For example, it said something about "a seven days average of the previous rulings" but I don't know if that's in total (a rolling average) or the total just for that period.   But the large variances don't coincide with a rolling average.  Maybe PolitiFact will eventually "tell" me.

Postscript:  A few hours after this was posted, PolitiFact published an article "PolitiFact App Now Available for iPhone" ostensibly to replace the article lifted. 

Sidebar: Holy Troller, Batman!

Working for a highly political organization for many years, I watched the politics in action and learned the do's and don'ts...one if the many things I learned was that you don't "burn your bridges" by alienating everybody, because sooner or later, you're going to alienate someone who's going to hurt you back more than you think....in other words, actions have consequences.

For the first time, at the Facebook commentary suggestion of one Shiela Fahey Wallenius, I visited my conservative counterpart Bryan White's Facebook "Wall".  It looked like a laundry list of various PolitiFact commenters, Bryan's lengthy "j'accuse" of those committing some version of fallacy sin.

If she had been posting regularly at FB PolitiFact's page, she would know this is not true.

Wallenius, however, decided to take it one step further when Bryan decided to pick on her (see above snippet from Facebook).  She declared Bryan a "professional troll" since it appeared that his only purpose--his assignment--was being the in-house aggravator of PolitiFact's (Liberal or Democratic) Facebook page commenters, as noted by her suggestion above.  She stated she had not only blocked him but reported him. Another commenter, Barry Powers, joined in. Bryan's co-conspirator "Deff Jyberg" rushed to Bryan's defense, but the commenters ganged up on both of them, one of them linking Deff Jeff Dyberg to Bryan's PolitiFact Bias blog site.   It was an engaging reading.

Politi-Score: On the New PolitiFact App (Part 1)

Recently PolitiFact posted on Facebook about a new Android application available for only $1.99, which crunches its rulings and gives a “report card” by individual as well as what it calls a “Truth Index” which according to PolitiFact is “… like the Dow Jones Industrial Average of truth.”

As I don’t have a device which operates on Android and don’t intend to go out and purchase one to try to figure out the machinations of the PolitiFact app, I will try to figure it out solely from the graphics PolitiFact provided. The first one, the color-coded report cards by individual, was fairly easy. I reproduce it here using bar chart creation in Excel, compared to PolitiFact’s graphic.



Here's PolitiFact's Report Card in its new "App"



Here's how I did it along with the Politi-Score in parentheses next to the person's name.



Tchotchkes: The May 28th Ironic News Report

I was a little late again with this due to my holiday, but it's still pretty current.

Lil White Lies: Grasping for Straw (Men)

Lawyer’s Question at Deposition: “All your responses must be oral, okay? What school did you go to?”
Response: “Oral.”

So many things we say are subject to interpretation, and in a way, my conservative counterpart’s entire blog relies the most heavily on that: how PolitiFact (PF), interprets a statement it selects for fact-checking, compared to how he believes it should be interpreted. He even goes so far as to claim the statement they checked was never even made, as he does in this PolitiFact ruling on a statement Laura Ingraham made on the Bill O’Reilly Show, where she frequently appears and usually hosts on Friday evenings. Bryan White’s conclusion as to the misinterpretation:

PolitiFact assumed Ingraham was talking about the program's popularity in Massachusetts. But that doesn't fit the context. Romney's concern is RomneyCare's popularity with Republican primary voters. If Romney doesn't win the Republican nomination then he has no realistic shot at the presidency, period.

Not only did PolitiFact fail to figure that out from the context, PolitiFact has failed to respond to the call to revisit the issue. 

It isn't a close[d] issue. Does the need to protect the brand from admissions of error so easily supersede the desire to tell the truth? Or is ideological bias the better explanation for the reluctance to correct or clarify?

(Incidentally, PolitiFact does make corrections to its rulings despite Bryan’s claims of “the need to protect the brand from admissions of error.”)

Here’s Bryan White’s letter to Bill Adair and Lou Jacobson, imploring them to consider his interpretation as the only correct one, and theirs as a “failure”:

Dear Misters Adair and Jacobson,

The story on Laura Ingraham published on May 16 contains a substantial hole and a likely error.

The hole comes from the story's failure to provide context or background material sufficient to judge the context of Ingraham's statement. In other words, there is absolutely nothing in the quotation of Ingraham that would indicate she was talking about RomneyCare's popularity in Massachusetts. As such the presentation of the story conflicts with PolitiFact's aim of providing readers the tools to determine whether to agree with the "Truth-O-Meter" rating or not…

I say “failure” because Bryan uses this word repeatedly. It communicates negligence, it is intended to humiliate. So, what exactly did Ingraham say? Here it is straight from Bryan White’s own blog:

Which Dummy Will Throw A Hat Into THE RING?

More with Michele Bachmann!!!

PolitiFact Detractors are even on YouTube!

This latest PolitiFact detractor, some fellow named Peter Schiff, who sounds like a libertarian,  has a radio show somewhere in the Virginia area. I “wikied” him and, wouldn’t you know, he’s the “CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals, LLC, a gold and silver dealer based in New York City.”

In this "audio" YouTube video, he interviews Jacob Geiger, a writer for PolitiFact Virginia, who ruled that Tea Party senatorial candidate Jamie Radtke was "Barely True" in a statement she made earlier this year (see below audio-video):

"We’re spending so much money that we can’t even borrow it fast enough -- the Federal Reserve has to print more money just to keep up!"

Radtke continued: "The international financial markets know what it means when a nation monetizes its debt, even if Washington doesn’t. Commodity, food and energy prices have been climbing over the past 12 months: Corn prices have risen 69 percent; wheat prices have risen 44 percent; sugar prices have risen 15 percent; and gasoline is back at three dollars a gallon... and rising."

Geiger verified the price increases as actually 75% for corn, 52% for wheat and 12% for sugar; he came to his ruling of Barely True because “Radtke goes off track when she attributes these higher prices to a Federal Reserve that helps the United States "monetize its debt."

While Peter Schiff didn’t have the bombast of say, Rush Limbaugh, he was clearly off on a lot of things as he blamed everything on the printing of money and alluded to gold and silver as the favored monetary measure. But he was incorrect to say that economic growth doesn’t create inflation or that gold prices are an indicator of inflation. Economic growth in theory should not cause inflation, but in reality it almost always does (or, in reverse, there can be “stagflation”, recessionary inflation). Gold prices may serve as an inflation or deflation hedge, but it is not always a precursor to inflation. Gold reached a high in early 2008 along with oil, and then it declined. During that time, and for the rest of 2008 and 2009, core inflation stayed very low.

But Radtke wasn’t talking about gold and silver. She was talking about agricultural commodities, and Radtke’s take on it was correct (and Geiger shouldn’t owe her an apology, as Schiff continually demanded). Corn, wheat and sugar are not a finite supply like gold and silver, so I’m guessing futures speculation, due to the droughts and floods, had driven them higher for the time being. And by the way, the price of soybeans has declined this year—shouldn’t they be going up as well?

I don’t think Jacob Geiger was used to the verbal interview and his short silences and "uh, uhs" were disconcerting. He shouldn’t have let Schiff distract him over the prices of gold and silver, clearly what Schiff was trying to push. In other words, Schiff was trying to turn PolitiFact into a marketing tool for gold investments...perhaps, as well, the reason for the YouTube video.

 

Sidebar: A Theory on Why Michele Bachmann is the "Lyin' King"

Note:  Another article at the blog Motor City Liberal arrives at a similar but rhetorically excellent conclusion on Bachmann.  Great reading!

A recent article by Michele Goldberg of the Daily Beast gives some excellent insight into why Michele Bachmann probably believes that anything she says (and there's a lot of flat-out crazy remarks as well) is the “truth” despite PolitiFact’s rulings which show her to be the least truthful politician of those rated by them (and why she has no reason to answer their calls to her office when they are investigating her statements):

…A key moment in her political evolution, as for many of her generation, was the film series "How Should We Then Live" by the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who is widely credited for mobilizing evangelicals against abortion, an issue most had previously ignored. A Presbyterian minister, Schaeffer argued that our entire apprehension of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things. Christianity, he argued, is "a whole system of truth, and this system is the only system that will stand up to all the questions that are presented to us as we face the reality of existence." Theories or assertions from outside this system—evolution, for example—can be dismissed as the product of mistaken premises.

This accounts for some of the bafflement that occasionally greets Bachmann's statements. "Michele Bachmann says certain things that sound crazy to the general public," says author Frank Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer's son and former collaborator. "But to anybody raised in the environment of the evangelical right wing, what she says makes perfect sense."

But what does taking up such a closed world view in spite of the evidence really mean? In some respects, it makes Bachmann pathological, as she has essentially shut off all critical thinking skills.

Critical thinking doesn’t require a PhD, or even a college education. It simply means getting in to the habit of asking “What’s the evidence?” And if the evidence can’t be distinguished from wishful thinking or making stuff up, then you say “That’s wishful thinking” and “You’re making stuff up.”

If people started taking critical thinking seriously, belief in astrology, foot reflexology, homeopathy, crystal power, dowsing, faith healing, demonic possession, the Shroud of Turin, ghost hunting and young-earth Creationism would disappear overnight, freeing up an enormous amount of wasted time, effort and resources. And think of what more critical thinking would do for our politics. It boggles the mind.

Which is why I used to believe in astrology, etc., until critical thinking made me realize it was “stuff made up”, and why I became an agnostic after a lot of critical thinking since being “saved.”

Bachmann’s evidence is confined to the world view into which, like a baptism, she has been fully immersed . There’s likely no hope she would change. I suspect she is so pathologically complete in her Christian “reality” that if space aliens suddenly revealed themselves to our world with far advanced scientific knowledge and answered many mysteries by providing clear-cut evidence of big-bang creation, evolution and global warming (or, heaven forbid, that some humans are actually  born gay), she would still insist there was only her God, Supply Side Jesus, and the aliens needed to be saved...and their evidence didn't matter.

Based on Goldberg’s article, however, one can see a trend which may be useful in overcoming such candidates by revealing their inherent lack of depth: we’ve seen it in Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharon Angle as well. That is when confronted with critical questions or facts that challenge their reality (which can be as simple as “what do you read?” in the case of Palin), they go into a cowardly avoidance mode.

Michele, Michele, pudding and pie

Kissed the Christians and made them cry

But when those with reason came out to play

Michele, Michele ran away.

Tchotchkes: The Yuck-O-Meter