Truth Index+: Office Holder Breakdown

The final post for 2012 will be an office holder breakdown from all PolitiFact rulings through the eve of the 2012 election (November 5, 2012).  The majority (about 53%, or 3,450) of statements put to the Truth-o-Meter at PolitiFact for fact-checking are from those in office:  from the president to senators and representatives, all the way down to local elected officials, such as mayors and city council members.   Here is how the official "pie" is cut:

Click to enlarge

Office holders as a group have consistently held a significantly higher Truth Index (14.7% higher overall) than that of those who were not in office.  For example, they had 43% more statements rated True, and 28% more statements rated True and Mostly True.  In the "subjectively rated" Pants on Fire category, office holders received just 45 percent of the Pants on Fire ratings percentage of those who did not hold office (5.4% versus 12.1%).

The reasons for this difference may be that a large portion of those "not in office" were advocacy groups and PACs, those without a "name" only seeking to promote a cause, and would not lose their voice in losing an election.  Pundits and chain e-mails, mostly in a position of "playing to the choir" could risk making ridiculous statements.

For Democrats versus Republicans, there's no Truth Index comparison for president/vice president: for most of PolitiFact's existence, the office of president has been held by a Democrat.  George W. Bush was only rated once prior to the election of 2008; PolitiFact preferred to concentrate on candidates Obama (168 rulings) and McCain (155 rulings) in 2007 and 2008.  So the chart below does not show any office of president comparison.

Click to enlarge:  Closest party to party Truth Index+ average was governors.

The (raw) Pants on Fire factor, a measure of how much more often a party is assigned a Pants on Fire when a statement rated by PolitiFact is determined False, shows a slight advantage for the Republicans overall and specifically in the categories of both houses of congress, governors and local governments.  The red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) bars are all the same--they all equal a one, with the "fire" bar a measure of how much more that party is assigned the Pants on Fire when they get a False.

Since there was no comparison for president (as I explained above), I decided to compare Obama to Romney for this chart, although Romney, since he was not in office, was not included in the 3,450 rulings.  It does show, however, quite a substantial variance between the two:  Obama has kept a very low percentage (2 percent overall) of Pants on Fire.  It may be a reflection of his very careful speech or maybe something to do with PolitiFact. 

More 2012 in Review: Gangnam Style

2012 in Review: JibJab

Truth Index+: By Occupation

Early in 2012, using PolitiFact's own Truth Index calculation method, I published a Truth Index by occupation for the year 2011.  That was for 1,919 PolitiFact rulings. This time it will be for ALL rulings through the 2012 election, that is, 6,535 rulings.  The result is somewhat similar to that for the 2011 analysis.  Here is how they break down by category:  

Click to enlarge:  Each proportional slice of the pie gives the number of rulings

 This time I am using the Truth Index+ method to calculate the results as applied to the 6,535 rulings, which equally measures (starting at zero for Pants on Fire to 100 for True) all Truth-o-Meter categories.  Office holders, of course, compose the largest group of PolitiFact "rulees" comprising over half.  This time, however, I've decided to separate out the "candidates" who were not in office at the time they made their fact-checked statements.  This greatly reduces the "Other" category which is where they would have gone.  The majority of candidates in this category were Republican: for example, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and from 2008, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.   In fact, there were only 22 statements in this category attributed to Democrats, which means any comparison between Democrats and Republicans in terms of the Truth Index means very little.

 

The Truth Index+ for those categories shows the disparity between Republicans and Democrats attributed by some to "bias."  Every category except one (PACs and Super PACs) had an index favoring the Democrats.  In the case of media (pundits, chain e-mails, blogs, etc.), the variance was quite large, at almost 40 percent, compared to the overall average variance of 16 percent, or 15 percent for those holding office.

 

Click to enlarge:  Media (chain e-mails, pundits, celebrities) was by far the least truthful.

Finally, here's the raw "Pants on Fire" factor graphed for the same occupation categories.  This factor is a measure of how much more often a party is assigned a Pants on Fire when a statement is determined False by PolitiFact.  The red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) bars are all the same--they all equal a one, with the "fire" bar a measure of how much more that party is assigned the Pants on Fire when they get a False.    Even with the Democrat dominance of a favorable Truth Index, this factor does not correlate that well with it, except in the case of the media.  The "presidential candidate" factor is not a good one, either, because as noted above there were so few Democrat rulings (of the 467 rulings, 22 were on Democrats.)  And it gets even more out of kilter when the "in office" number is broken down further by position, up next.

Click to enlarge:  While media had worst Truth Index, advocacy groups (Republican) told most "whoppers."

 

Tchotchkes: Tequila Sunrise!

Origins of Republican Gun Control Solutions

A joke from the 1970's  appears to be in the form of a sad reality today in our country:

The U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population, but accounts for half of all firearms world-wide and 80 percent of gun deaths in the 23 richest countries.

 

Last year, handguns killed 48 people in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 42 in Germany....and

 

10,728 IN THE UNITED STATES.

 

"Guns don't kill people....people kill people."

 

Well, then....

 

There should be mandatory gun safety courses for people, not guns.

 

There should be more thorough background checks of people, not guns.

 

There should be stricter negligence penalties imposed on people, not guns.

 

PolitiFact 2012 Lie of the Year: Factual isn't the same as Honest

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.
-- Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact"

(Really? Then...practice what you preach!)

When I saw the finalists for the 2012 PolitiFact Lie of the Year, I knew that its focus this year had to be on a fact-check that reflected some sort of "defining moment in the 2012 presidential election". I commented at Facebook, however, that it might not be good to do one on Romney or  Obama from the standpoint it made PolitiFact look ever yet more biased.  PolitiFact very carefully (perhaps deliberately) divided the finalists evenly betweeen Democrats and Republicans, although Romney had more direct statements.  On the other hand, they should not let "objectivity" get in the way of their choice, which is what they supposedly did here when they chose the "Jeeps to China" campaign ad that Mitt Romney ran in a last ditch attempt to convert swing Ohio voters, as the PolitiFact 2012 Lie of the Year.

 

I did feel vindicated that one of my choices discussed last August was selected as a finalist; it also received the most votes in PolitiFact's own poll. But given the newsworthiness of the election, I was not surprised it picked the Jeep ad. And all I hear from the Republican side is that it's "factual." Now, I covered this in a post on this statement when it first came out: it was the implications, the premise of the ad; it was certainly not the "fact" it was superficially "factual."

 

As I reviewed the Facebook comments and read PolitiFact's review of e-mail feedback, it looked to be a far greater right-wing deluge of faux outrage this year ("#Benghazi" the most oft-repeated comment, as if somehow PolitiFact could turn back the clock); of course, this shouldn't have been the case last year since the 2011 Lie of the Year was one from the Democrats.. But even though all these commenters were basically "hating on" PolitiFact, I'm watching its "like" count continue to grow past 75,000, when you'd think it would lose fans with all the "hate". Of course, having commenters like "TheFamily BackEast" and "NoLonger Proud" plus several with the middle name of Benghazi, takes a bit away from whatever that count means, and also makes it look like a few people may have been multiplying their Facebook identities to make the "hate" look more popular than what it really was.

 

My conservative counterpart added a comment at the Politico website trying to debate another commenter (his usual modus operandi) who stated that this was "Mitt Romney's last-ditch advertisement asserting that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China." He asked "What part of the ad made that assertion?" as if this was not was what was implicitly meant if Romney didn't say it. Someone by the name of Jack Brockway replied:

The ad was dishonest... even Jeep thought so. Are you asserting otherwise? Careful here - factual isn't the same as honest.

(It appears no response was made as of December 14). While I pointed out a lot of other factors concerning car manufacture (which I am deeply familiar with) that show it's not the case that anyone in the U.S. is going to lose their job if the Chinese exports were built in China, expansion had already been planned beyond current production in the United States. What is likely being planned for both China and Italy is expansion as well: the models are entirely different from what we have here, designed specifically for those consumers. We will never see those models here. What we export there isn't enough to justify building a plant there in lieu of exporting...it's just not economically feasible.

 

And even if for the sake of argument I went along with the contention that the Jeep SUVs now exported to China would be built in China, it still does not refute the implication of Romney's ad as well as his remarks. The ad gave the impression that all Jeep production was being moved to China by the concluding statement, for which there is also little evidence ("Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.") It was such a strong impression that the union local was receiving phone calls from workers at the Jeep plant who thought their jobs were in jeopardy. The ad was fear-based and boiled down to: if you vote for Obama, you will lose your job. And as noted by the PolitiFact ruling " it presents the manufacture of Jeeps in China as a threat, rather than an opportunity to sell cars made in China to Chinese consumers." To say the statements were correct and Romney didn't mean anything else (so why would he need to fight for those jobs?) and that there is no premise, no implication, no "underlying argument," is sheer intellectual dishonesty.

Truth Index+: The Top Ten PolitiFact Writers

There are ten PolitiFact (PF) writers who have produced just about half of PolitiFact's rulings, from its beginnings in 2007 up until I ended my compilation on Election Eve, 2012.  Another roughly 160 writers composed the rest of them, many serving multiple functions of writer, researcher and editor.  There were 47 writers who wrote just one to two rulings each.

 

The highest producer by far is Lou Jacobson, whose 676 fact-checks (some done in association with other writers at PolitiFact) make up a bit over 10% of PolitiFact's total output.  Number 2 is Angie Drobnic Holan, now the Editor at PolitiFact Florida, at 571.

 

Below is the Truth Index+  for the Top Ten, with scores for Republican versus Democrat.  The best way to look at these averages in terms of "bias" or "lean" would be the percent variance in the Truth Index+ between party for each writer.  Lou Jacobson, Angie Drobnic Holan, Robert Farley and PF Georgia's Willoughby Mariano have about a 22% variance leaning toward the Democrats, only to be exceeded by Number One C. Eugene Emery of PolitiFact Rhode Island, who has a whopping 38% Democrat lean.   Tom Kertscher at PolitiFact Wisconsin swings 22% in the opposite direction; the remainder go from 3% in favor of the Republicans to around 10% in favor of the Democrats.

 

Click to enlarge:  NA in parentheses = PF National; then number of rulings written.

So, what can we learn from the Truth Index+ for each writer?  I decided to take a closer look at the top four writers and an "outlier" in terms of some of the items I had keyed in:  party, titles, people, subjects.

 

Lou Jacobson, for example, was No. 5 in "lean" variance as noted above, although other than Emery he was in a virtual tie with four others.  But he had a few features in his 676 rulings that stood out:  he is definitely "the economics guy" on the PolitiFact team.   The subject of about 40% of his rulings was a fiscal one: economy, federal budget, stimulus, taxes etc..  This was a far larger percentage than any other writer.  Healthcare was the subject of 25% of his rulings.    In terms of "occupation" his being on PolitiFact National's team meant that about 30% of his rulings were on the president and vice president and the presidential/vice presidential candidates (in 2008 and 2012).

 

A check on names revealed a notable person who seems one of Jacobson's "fact-check favorites"--Michele Bachmann.  He did almost a third (17) of her 54 rulings, and gave her 5 of her 12 Pants on Fire awards, as well as five Falses (in other words, when a claim was found False for Bachmann, Jacobson determined it was Pants on Fire half of the time.)  In comparison, Angie Drobnic Holan only gave Bachmann one Pants on Fire out of five rulings found False.

Grading ZFC: More Republican Math!

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) writer Bryan White, via his conservatively skewed website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC), has committed a very similar error it pointed out in a recent PolitiFact Georgia fact-check on Cato Institute's Michael Cannon's statement concerning Obamacare "exchanges" being outlawed in Georgia. And I have to admit they both had a point: Cannon was talking about Obamacare exchanges in Georgia and in context he said--right at the beginning--that "by default" the feds would do their own exchanges in response. PolitiFact seemed to ignore this part of Cannon's claim and conflated it into something that should not have been called false. Yes, score one for PFB and Michael Cannon.

 

The error in this case is one which ZFC's writer Bryan White might call, if I had done the same thing, a logical "Red herring" or "Straw man." He does this in his fact-check of a statement by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)--that "Across the board tax rate cuts are regressive because a 20 percent tax cut for a millionaire – even as a share of income – amounts to a far greater benefit than a 20 percent cut for a hardworking low income American.” Instead of examining the premise of the statement he goes into a multifaceted dissertation on "effective tax rates" complete with pretty graphs, on how the overall rates were truly progressive up until seven years ago, and why poor Mitt Romney pays a lot more than Joe the Plumber.

 

He did not even try to actually calculate in numerical terms  whether there was a disproportional benefit to the rich of the across the board tax cut in and of itself. He even had something in his fact-check on how to "get there", quoting the IRS: “A tax that takes a larger percentage of income from low-income groups than from high-income groups.” So I will "get there", using two hypothetical progressive tax rates very close to what we have today, utilizing the 20% across the board factor.

 

Click to enlarge:  The 3rd thru 7th columns only needed formulas.

In the example above, we are using a 10% rate for a person with taxable income of $25,000 and a 25% rate for someone with income of $250,000, the current taxes paid using those rates, then re-calculated for a uniform across the board tax rate reduction of 20 percent. All other factors--excise taxes, corporate taxes--would be ignored because we are only concerned with the income tax cut itself and its effect on after-tax income (as that is the premise of the CPC statement). As shown in the last, highlighted bright yellow column, as a percent of after-tax income, the $250K earner has three times the additional income than that of the $25K earner. Now, you might say that it's because of the difference in tax rates, but even if you factor that in, the $250K earner still has 20% more after-tax income. THAT is the "far greater benefit" the CPC is talking about. The (yes, liberal) Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains this "concept" as well in a website article. They chart the "regression" by income category.

Truth Index+ by PolitiFact National and States

The state by state Truth Index+ has held pretty consistently since I first started crunching the data last year (even using the PolitiFact calculation).  Now I can present it (with a great deal more accuracy) for all rulings since 2007 through the eve of the 2012 general election on November 6.

 

Click to enlarge

That trend holds overall with one exception: that the Truth Index+ for Democrats exceeds that of Republicans.  Overall the variance is 15.9%.  To express it appropriately, the statements selected for Democrats by PolitiFact National as well as all state PolitiFacts have been on average rated about 16% higher in terms of more True/Mostly True/Half True(s) and fewer Mostly Falses/False/Pants on Fire(s) on PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter.  Also, if you designate the Pants on Fire as equivalent to False instead of rating it lower (that is, remove the effect on the Truth Index score of Pants on Fire), this variance decreases to 13.9%.

 

At the state level, the Truth Index+ variance between Republicans and Democrats ranges from a nearly dead even 1.4% at PolitiFact Virginia, to 27.7% at PolitiFact Tennessee, although there it may be an anomaly due to the fact it had the lowest number of rulings measured (73 total) as the newest PolitiFact state franchise.  And the exception is PolitiFact Wisconsin at a "negative" 7.2%, that is, their Truth Index+ is the only one favoring the Republicans.

 

The anti-PolitiFact propaganda website PolitiFact Bias (PFB) recently posted its 2012 Pants on Fire factor (how much "more" it claims Pants on Fire are assigned to Republicans) by PolitiFact state.   And it has discovered via the results it shows, as I've reported before, some of the states actually assign more Pants on Fire to Democrats.

 

In its original research paper, we are told that the factor is adjusted for chain e-mail and "intra party" claims.   Because of the primaries this year, there were a lot of such "intra party claims", and due to that, although I go in the general direction of PFB's calculations of the factor, I was not able to match it.

Tchotchkes: Mr. Burns Explains the Fiscal Cliff

Fox News Fake War on Xmas 2012?

2012 PolitiFact Wacky Awards

PolitiFact has its Lie of the Year, but I don't think anyone's considered all the ones that were....just maybe too plain weird, wacky, dumb, or silly for a Truth-o-Meter ruling from PolitiFact.  So here are the Politi-Psychotic Awards for PolitiFact's Wackiest Fact-checks of the Year. (BTW, here's my prediction for 2012 PolitiFact Lie of the Year, posted in August.)

 

□  The "Really Bad Economic Indicator" Award.  If Rick Scott wanted to overplay the Florida economy with this one, he should have waited just a month more for Fat Tuesday and counted pazckis.  How many donuts you say you sold in one morning pretending to work at a donut shop is SUCH  a profoundly brilliant way to preface your state-of-the-state address and I can't wait to see the "donut sales indicator" in all econ books.  But seriously....

I bet PolitiFact enjoyed investigating this one.

□  The "Excuse To Go To Vegas" Award.  A PolitiFact ruling onTampa being the strip club capital of the world (uttered by Florida State senator Ellyn Bogdanoff) was written by Angie Drobnic Holan, who had to call around to find out for sure, besides, perhaps, I'm curious...did Bill Adair, Lou Jacobson and Alan Sharockman go on any field trips to determine that "evidence [was] lacking" to help Angie?

□  The "Who was Buried in Grants Tomb" Award.  Dave Weldon, a Florida senate candidate, said there was no wildlife in ANWR, which stands for Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.  PolitiFact's writer Katie Sanders quotes an interviewee: " With regard to the lack of animals, he appears to be very uninformed."   Well, DUH.

□   The "Best of the Birthers" Award.  So, the governor of Hawaii actually went to Kinko's in person to forge Obama's birth certificate?  Gee, he could have  had someone in his office do it instead of getting his picture taken while there.  I mean, I've got the Onion to read stuff like this, I don't know what it's doing in PolitiFact.

□   The "Terribly Twisted Taxonomy Award".  So a Congress is a bunch of baboons, or vice versa?  I still see this "fact" come up on Facebook shared by well-meaning friends.  It's another joke, and I don't know why PolitiFact wasted its time rating it.  While there's a lot of groupings of like animals I haven't heard of, I just don't think congress of baboons is one that merits a fact-check.  Leave it for Snopes, instead of being so monkey see, monkey do.

□   The "Flinging Poo Award."  Conservative firebrand Michele Malkin got a True for saying Gloria Steinem called Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison a "female impersonator" back in 1993.  While Steinem's characterization seems ill-formed to me, it's not a sufficient "tu quoque" argument by Malkin to defend Rush Limbaugh for calling Sandra Fluke a "slut" as "slut" carries a lot more baggage than a (female as a) female impersonator.  Other than that, if anyone's a female impersonator, it's Ann "Adams Apple" Coulter...

□   The "Too Much Information Award." Wisconsin state senator Joel Kleefisch got into trouble for voting on behalf of two state senators who were in the bathroom, on his (found Mostly True) claim that the bathroom is considered part of the chamber.  PolitiFact Wisonsin's James Nelson tries to answer the question we all want answered " Are Assembly members really considered in the chambers when they are, um, on the chamber pot?"   Um, I was expecting PolitiFact to tell me the two state senators Kleefisch voted on behalf of had constipation which was why they couldn't make it back on time to vote.  Well, maybe (not) the next time.

Tchotchkes: How to Read Your Losing Powerball Ticket

Quantifying the PolitiFact Quants

There's certainly a lot of people out there scoring PolitiFact rulings... I'm finding more and more of them every day.  Presented and scored in different ways, in studies, articles and blogs, I think it may be time to add them as a special section to my PolitiFact Detractors page, though "detractors" are not quite what they are.

While I hope I'm one of the better ones, I do need to make the case.  I have probably looked at these rulings in the largest variety of ways, and have done so on an ongoing basis for quite a while (since 2010, when I started this blog).  I've looked at the score in terms of writer, topic, local versus national, by individual compared with other fact-checkers, etc.   I'm looking for patterns.  For example, if Republicans lie more, do they lie about every subject?  (No, there are some subjects for which they are more truthful than Democrats)  Are lies more ideologically based? (Yes)  Do some PolitiFact writers appear to favor one party over the other based on the Truth Index? (Yes) Most of the other PolitiFact quants have looked at them in terms of just the presidential contenders or Democrat versus Republican overall.  Some qualify their rulings as far as sampling/selection bias while others take the rulings at face value.

Straight Politi-Quant websites.  The website Who's More Full of Sh*t (authored by J. Kalgreen) graphically rates the same....with an ongoing feed from PolitiFact.  It uses a score heavily weighted to the negative rulings.  It also gives an overall Democrat versus Republican rating.  While it's a pure rating website, its website set up is quite sophisticated.  As noted by Benjamin "Brash Equilibrium" Chabot-Hanowell, "I seriously wish I could code CSS and PHP as well as J. Kalgreen [WMFoS author] can."

While a great site, Who's More Full of Sh*t might not be linked by PolitiFact because its name might offend some.

Instead of saying who's more "truthier" or "honest" it goes in the opposite direction--scoring zero for True down to 200% for Pants on Fire.  So if my conservative counterpart decided to try to troll-comment the site (which he can't because no comments are enabled) he'd have to complain that PolitiFact's selection bias is the cause for Democrats being less full of sh*t, or for Republicans to be more full of sh*t.  Because, you see, both are still full of sh*t.

Malark-o-Meter is more of the nerdy Nate Silver variety of  meta/probability analysis and in that respect is like no other PolitiFact quantifier.  A newer website based on (I'm guessing) Joe Biden's outburst at the vice presidential debate, author Benjamin "Brash Equilibrium" Chabot-Hanowell is interested in mathematically determining a possible "bias" factor as well as the probability of how much each claimant is prone to lie. He includes the Washington Post Factchecker rulings in his analysis as well.

"Serious" Studies.  I've posted about and often referred often to Eric Ostermeier's 2010 study of 511 PolitiFact rulings  where he concluded with the infamous selection bias statement.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs did a study of both PolitiFact and Washington Post Factchecker rulings but did not really reach any other conclusion ("[took] no position on their accuracy") as to why Republicans score as less truthful than Democrats.

And of course, the website PolitiFact Bias did a research paper on PolitiFacts False/Pants on Fire rulings, coming up with a percentage factor that I often use in my blog.    There are others who have looked at the Pants on Fire, some in a humorous way, or a lot like PolitiFact Bias.

Website Articles.  One of the very first to quantify PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter rulings was the pseudonymous "Cinematical" at the Daily Kos, back in 2009....and arrive at the conclusion as so many that would follow, that conservatives were less "honest" than liberals.  There's also been several scorings at the Daily Beast, as well as a nice quant review by the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight.com (Nate Silver's blog).

Blogs.  Anyone math-oriented knew the moment they saw the Truth-o-Meter that it begged to be measured.  I imagine there's a lot more than just those mentioned here. So (besides myself), here's three very good ones:

In 2011, I came across the blog Quibbling Potatoes authored by Steve, who had some great ideas for categorizations of the rulings that I now use for my data.  He also had a name for his score which he called...the Truth Index.  While I don't think PolitiFact took the name from Steve's site, one can certainly say Steve had a bit of clairvoyance.  It's obvious he put a lot of work into his charts and graphs and it would be nice to see him do it again.

Pandering Politicians is a blog (turned website like PolitiFact Bias) by someone who calls himself "PanderBear" and the Truth Index here is called the "Truth Quotient."  He has a lot of charts, especially time trendlines, and begs people not to even read chain e-mails because of their dismal "TQ."  And of course, in one of the comment sections we see the ubiquitous question from my conservative counterpart asking what he does about selection bias.  No answer from PanderBear.  At least as far as I could see.

Allen Allermann in a namesake blog entitled "Random Human Neural Firings" did a quantifying review about the same time as Steve called "Who do You Trust?"  He scored PolitiFact rulings in the opposite direction that many tend to do--he gave higher weight to the True and Mostly True instead of False and Pants on Fire.  He uses a "sports" analogy for what Brash Equilibrium terms the report cards of those rated by PolitiFact; he calls them "at bats."

So there we have, including my own, about a dozen attempts to quantify PolitiFact rulings.  Perhaps two qualifiers can be added: (1) None of these websites/studies/blogs are affiliated with or approved by PolitiFact (as far as I know) and (2) all numbers should be interpreted with caution.  And if you come across any websites/articles/blogs that quantify PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter rulings, please let me know in the comment section.

Truth Index+: The PolitiFact Saga on Obamacare

In the history of PolitiFact rulings, from its beginnings in 2007 to the election of 2012, the most covered subject was healthcare. PolitiFact currently has 42 pages of rulings related to healthcare. While there's a lot of overlap with other subjects (particularly fiscal ones) as designated in every ruling, my counts for 6,535 PolitiFact rulings show healthcare and Medicare were the "main" subject(s) for over 10 percent of them.

 

In 2007, the very first characterization of a Democrat national healthcare reform plan as "socialized medicine" which earned a False was from budding 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. PolitiFact called it "pure hyperbole."   In early 2008, eventual 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney was the first person fact-checked for what would become the PolitiFact 2010 Lie of the Year--that "Obamacare" (the meme not yet invented for healthcare reform) was a "government take over" of the healthcare system.

Click to enlarge:  Low number of Democrat rulings caused larger swings

There were very few fact-checks (12) evenly divided between party on healthcare reform as it related to Obama's proposals in 2007 and 2008, compared to what happened after he became president. So the Truth Index+ at that time did not tell us much. Indeed, as I noted in a previous post on what caused the big increase in Pants on Fire assignments to Republicans, the year 2009 was a very big ruling year when it came to healthcare reform and Obamacare. In that year, over 1/4 of PolitiFact rulings related to that topic.

Obamacare, however, was the leading PolitiFact ruling topic in 2009: healthcare was the subject of over 30% of the rulings with about 27% relating to healthcare reform, and made up over 1/3 of the Pants on Fire. With the majority coming from Republicans, this was for the most part what drove up the Pants on Fire factor against them.

The year 2010 was not as important in terms of PolitiFact's concentration on Obamacare; it was a pivotal year, however, in terms of the Republicans doubling down on attacking it. Republicans dominated on dubious healthcare claims as 64 fact-checks brought their Obamacare Truth Index+ down to under 34. It continued into 2011 and worsened in 2012. The number of Obamacare-related rulings doubled from 2011 to 2012, when it seemed as if the Republicans thought the public dislike of it would get them the same type of election results as in 2010.

Truth Index+: Are Election Winners More "Truthful"?

Since PolitiFact has been through three national election cycles and a few minor ones, I've always been curious as to whether the fact-checking matters in regard to who gets elected. Or to put it another way, are those who win more "truthier" according to the Truth Index.... or less? So as an experiment, I went through the PolitiFact rulings and keyed in whether the candidate/official won or lost in a pending election from the time he or she made the statement.

But first I had to do a lot of filtering of my list of 6,535 rulings (all rulings through 11/5/12).  All the non-official people (like pundits and advocates) and groups (like websites, bloggers, chain e-mails, PACs etc.) had to go, of course. I also didn't include (or partially included) the rulings of those who retired or lost in the primaries (good example: Dennis Kucinich). There were some who won and lost, like John McCain: I rated his statements prior to his 2008 presidential election loss as a "loser" and those since as a "winner" since he won re-election as Arizona senator in 2010. Local and state elections are also excluded except for governors races. And just for the heck of it, I also keyed in those who were in the Tea Party caucus. When I got done, I was down to 2,937 rulings.

Click to enlarge:  Winners appear to make fewer False/PoF statements regardless of affiliation.

As of November 5, 2012, for all 6,535 PolitiFact rulings, the Truth Index+ is 54.2. For the 2,937 candidates making campaign statements, it was about 5 percent higher at 57. However, the "all" includes everything along with the kitchen sink. A better comparison might be to the Truth Index for those were in office at the time of the statement, which is similar to those facing elections, which was a tiny bit higher 57.7. Compared to the overall, however, what this says is that individuals and those in official positions tend to be more truthful on their own than groups or those who advocate for them. I've already shown this to be the case when I've posted calculations of the Truth Index separately for office-holders versus the various categories of advocacy groups, party boosters, media pundits, etc.

The "bias" factor would not be as relevant here because I am not looking at this in terms of Democrat versus Republican. But it's evident from these statistics that the "winners" are found more "truthful" by the PolitiFact fact-checkers than are the "losers" by about 8 percent in terms of the Truth Index+. It's about 6 percent if you re-adjust the Pants on Fire category to False.

Comparing Republicans and Democrats gets a wee bit trickier. Democrats have always held a higher Truth Index in general, and even though some say it's due to selection bias, something did emerge from the analysis of interest concerning the Republicans that can't be totally attributed to bias. While the Democrats had a pretty substantive variance between winners and losers (63.6 versus 55.8, or 14 percent), the Republican's variance was insignificantly small--53.5 versus 52.8, or about 1.5 percent. What this says is that the Republicans have about the same level of "truthiness" based on statements evaluated whether they win or lose. What this means, I don't know.

Tchotchkes: Obama Responds to Secession Petition(s)

Truth Index+: Adjusting for Pants on Fire

The Pants on Fire factor as developed by anti-PolitiFact propaganda website PolitiFact Bias (PFB) leaves much to be desired--specifically, it does not take the other four rulings (True through Mostly False) into account.  Their reason is the more "subjective" nature of the Pants on Fire ruling as defined by PolitiFact itself (not just inaccurate but "ridiculous").  Basically it measures how much more (or less) Pants on Fire is assigned to Republicans when a ruling is false.  But when the Pants on Fire are taken out completely (and are calculated as False), the rulings still favor the Democrats on average about 17% (for all 2012 rulings through election day) using PFB's own baseline methodology (adjusting for intra-party, chain e-mails, pundits, PACs and party boosters).  Regardless, the Pants on Fire effect is very minimal, as recently pointed out by Brash Equilibrium's Malark-o-Meter and in an earlier review I did in 2011.

A better method might measure the overall percentage change in the (newly formulated) Truth Index+ when the Pants on Fire are removed and categorized with the same score as False.  In the example data above, the Democrats' Truth Index+ is improved 1.4% by eliminating Pants on Fire, while the Republicans Truth Index+ is improved 3.5%.  This percentage could be called the Pants on Fire Bias factor.

One could then either take the remaining Republican to Democrat difference in the Pants on Fire adjusted Truth Index, which in this case is 16.8%, as what would be the undefined or non-subjective "bias" variance.  One could also measure the difference between the 1.4% and the 3.5% which would be about 2.5.  This is a Pants on Fire bias factor which incorporates the other rulings.

In other words, in terms of ALL rulings True through Pants on Fire, the Republican Truth Index is effected 2.5 times as much by Pants on Fire than is the Truth Index of the Democrats.  All because Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire about 74% more than Democrats when a ruling is false (to use the PFB factor).

It's ironic that I came out to 16.8% since Brash Equilibrium's statistical testing of a sample of PolitiFact rulings hypothesized there may be as much as 17% variance in the rulings due to bias.  But that is a qualified "as much as" so it doesn't really tell us anything.  More to follow as I apply this to all rulings through election day, 2012.

PFB Unskewed: Slipping Up on the Wage Gap

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) posted what it deemed to be an "outstanding" contradiction in PolitiFact rulings having to do with the gender wage gap in the United States. They declared they had received a post from an anonymous source which pointed out a "glaring" inconsistency between a ruling on Mitt Romney and one on Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette on just that subject.  Apparently they rushed to publish it in their partisan glee, while neglecting to see what they already had done.

Click to enlarge: This might be Grading PF Liberal Style's comparative ruling to prove
right-wing partisan leanings from PolitiFact, by same logic as PFB.

So let's see what PolitiFact has done before on these types of rulings. PolitiFact has awarded Mostly False to Obama and Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline for saying (back in June) that women earned 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same job.

 

On the other hand, Diana DeGette and Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine both get Mostly True because they make the distinction that it's 77 cents (or 79 cents in Virginia) on average or overall. So in four rulings on wage disparity, PolitiFact has shown itself to be consistent. The Romney statement, however, is not the same as any of the four cited above.

PolitiFact Bias, through its companion site Sublime Bloviations, has previously posted on the disparity in the case of Obama's statement. They appear to be saying that they believe Obama deserved a worse rating than Mostly False:

The Obama campaign made a claim about disparate pay for men and women doing the same work and tried to support it with a statistic that doesn't take into account the type of work done. That's a flatly wrong approach, perhaps even "pants on fire" if one believes in applying subjective judgments to rulings on matters of fact.

PolitiFact's conclusion suggests that the Obama campaign was trying oh-so-hard to simply convey that men and women are paid differently irrespective of the jobs they do and (oopsie!) just happened to get a little mixed up in the delivery. There's one way to keep the statistic from earning a "False" rating or worse: Find out the real number and determine whether the 77 cent figure is somewhat close.

So in this ruling on Mitt Romney that's precisely what PolitiFact did--find out the real number. The four rulings above were quite generic, but this one was about the wage gender gap working in the White House, so they could actually find out with some precision. And this access to precise data enabled them to do exactly what PFB lamented: breaking it down respectively by job and title.

 

So let's try and answer the question posed by PFB: " What was the difference that allowed DeGette to earn a Mostly True versus Romney's Half True?" In the two claims PFB tries to equate, PolitiFact matched the (general statistical) data on DeGette, and found it close to correct, while it found the (specific White House) data on Romney wasn't as close, so found him Half True.

Zebra Factcheck is the PolitiFact *Unskewed*

(OR "Fact-checking you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better"....)

If there's one thing to be learned from the elections, it's that creating one's own realities doesn't work. From Salon.com:

Conservatives will hear that Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie delivered the election to Obama, that Mitt Romney wasn’t a true conservative, and that mainstream media bias blinded Americans to the truth. A few voices may acknowledge that the state of polling science is actually pretty good, and the demographics of the U.S. have fundamentally changed, but don’t hold your breath for a widespread reappraisal of the dangers of listening only to what you want to hear. The right-wing echo chamber is built of stronger stuff than the left’s.

And along with "mainstream media bias," fact-checkers must be 100% liberally biased as well! And Zebra Factcheck will unblind you to "the truth"! But I digress.

Current TV's Cenk Ugyur reported how much 26 polls were off in predicting this past election, listed in terms of accuracy: it almost came as no surprise to me that one of those near the bottom was the conservative Rasmussen--while the top poll was the liberal Public Policy Polling and one from the Daily Kos.

 

There were a number of polling analysis outfits, the most prolific being Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, along with Real Clear Politics. But then a website called Unskewed Polls became well known, especially with Republicans, with over 25,000 fans on Facebook, as authored by Dean Chambers who was very highly critical of Nate Silver. It essentially based its election prognostications adjusting for what it believed was over-sampling of Democrats by the other polls (and under-sampling Republican enthusiasm)--because those polls were part of the "main stream media" and that by "showing results unrealistically favorable to Obama that they are leading to a perception among voters of the inevitability of Obama's victory in the election." 



Unskewed Polls electoral map Nov. 4: Romney to win 52% to 47%

And so, the weekend before the election up until election eve, Unskewed Polls was basically predicting a Romney sweep of 342 electoral college votes to 196 for Obama, as shown above  in a screen-snip from its website. Sometime Election Eve Monday Dean Chambers did some quick back-pedaling (strangely, with almost all the polling done) on his electoral map to make it look like he only failed to predict four states for Obama, changing the electoral counts to 275 for Romney and 263 for Obama. Meanwhile, people like Karl Rove and Dick Morris were making similar errors to Dean Chambers on Democratic over-sampling, in predicting a Romney landslide on Fox News. Everyone ended up eating a lot of crow failing to discern the voter suppression backlash and growing minority demographics.

 

So you can see where I am going with PolitiFact Bias (PFB) and its new "project" Zebra Factcheck. I believe the writers at PFB commit the same type of cognitively dissonant blunder, insisting that PolitiFact is "Democratically skewed" like Chambers claims all the polls are. And they think they are unskewering PolitiFact's rulings at their websites, just as Chambers says he does.

Tchotchkes: Victory from Obama's Anger Translator

You can't touch this!

Giving ZFC a KO on CKDs

This first check of Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC) is also a postscript on something just posted as a response to PolitiFact Bias--on the misleading information in a late Mitt Romney campaign ad being used to rile autoworkers in Ohio.

ZFC writer Bryan White offers us this "these-are-jobs-in-China-from-the-U.S." citation from the Toledo Blade to back up the veracity of Romney's literal statement that Fiat/Chrysler is going to build Jeeps in China.

Jeep currently exports U.S.-made vehicles to China, which is Jeep’s largest market outside of North America. Last year, Jeep sold 22,294 vehicles in China. The company is expected to exceed that this year.

He then asks "If a Chinese Jeep plant takes over production of some or all of the more than 20,000 vehicles Jeeps sells in China then how does this not affect workers in the United States?"

Let's first start with the 22,294 vehicles from a relative perspective. One Detroit Jeep plant produces about 950 vehicles per day in 2 shifts. That means if the plant was working a normal 5-day work week, this would be roughly one month's production. Not very much, less than 10% of total annual production, and would be even less if the plant was at maximum production (3 shifts) or was working overtime. The Chinese production is what is called low volume. Even the 33,463 vehicles cited from the Business Standard fit the same definition: not enough for full production, not enough for a plant.

ZFC might counter that this could still be 10 percent of the workers being replaced....but that's not quite so black and white. If ZFC had been thorough in its fact-checking like it claims it is, it should have noted the paragraph at the bottom of the Toledo Blade article:

That commitment means Chrysler will not fully build and assemble Wranglers outside America. The automaker does currently ship low volumes of what the industry calls “knock-down kits” for final assembly in Egypt. Mr. Bragman said that's fairly common in the automotive industry, and the kits are not equitable to full-scale production plants. Parts would still have to be made and partially assembled elsewhere.

Knock-down kits (CKD = Complete Knock Down) contain "the parts needed to assemble a product" and are used when there is a low volume for export as "a method of supplying parts to a market, particularly in shipping to foreign nations, and serves as a way of counting or pricing." That is how Jeeps were produced in China up until 2009. The kits are assembled in the United States...and guess who does the assembly of the parts in those kits here for shipment to China? Now, if ZFC or counterirritant want to call Chrysler to find out if fewer workers are needed for CKD kit assembly than for full-scale assembly, they're more than welcome to find out. And, it is possible the kit assembly could be outsourced to a local supplier--but then, additional jobs would be created there to replace any auto plant jobs. 

So when Aaron Bragman, a senior automotive analyst at IHS Automotive, was quoted to say that the Chinese production "doesn't take any jobs away from anyone else" he was correct. Romney is not correct, and neither is ZFC nor counterirritant.

Finally, the original Bloomberg article said that Fiat was in "detailed conversations" about making Jeeps in China. It wasn't definite nor confirmed. So, what happens if the deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group doesn't materialize? I didn't mention this in my original criticism, but it is another large gray area on the Zebra. Because while Romney himself said the Italians ( I could do another post on that one as well) were "thinking" of moving the production to China, the ad (which was aired much more) said it was a sure thing...which it wasn't. That alone makes Romney's literal statement false.

But what else would one expect from right-wing fact-checkers.

Lil White Lies: Read It and Jeep

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) gleefully joins with the anti-PolitiFact blog counterirritant in misrepresenting a blatant misrepresentation by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as we enter the last 100 hours of the 2012 presidential campaign.

PolitiFact awarded a Pants on Fire (and WaPo FactChecker and Factcheck.org agree in line with it) when the Romney campaign released an ad which said:

Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama. Fact checkers confirm that his attacks on Mitt Romney are false. The truth? Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry. He is supported by Lee Iacocca and the Detroit News. Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

It basically was "piggy-backed" (Glenn Kessler's words) from a very similar statement Romney had made during an Ohio campaign stop: " “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America."

 

That's pretty much everything....so PFB and counterirritant decide that "building Jeeps in China" is technically true as parsed waaaaaaaay out of context, and the fact-checkers need to fact-check more, as the loud and clear, self-evident implication isn't enough. They need to actually verify that the Chinese production is replacing (at least some of) the American production. Counterirritant thinks he knows the fact of the matter, and he condescendingly tells us: "For those slow on the uptake: Jeep vehicles that will be produced in China by Chinese workers are currently produced in the U.S by U.S. workers."

 

Nope, not quite. Because when Chrysler or Fiat talk about this Chinese production, it's added production, not replacement. Chrysler built Jeeps in China--for the Chinese market--before Fiat acquired it in 2009. And Romney's fearmongering came on the heels of this report from the Detroit Free Press:

In fact, Chrysler is investing $500 million at its Toledo North Assembly Plant and plans to add 1,105 new workers by the third quarter of 2013 to build an all-new SUV that will replace the Jeep Liberty.

Production of the new SUV will begin next summer and the hiring process for the new workers, who are scheduled to start by the next fall, has begun, said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.

In other words, as noted succinctly by the New York Times: "Jeep is discussing increasing production in China for sales within China; it is not moving jobs out of Ohio or the United States, or building cars in China for export to the United States."