The number of PolitiFact (PF) detractors who yelled “foul” at its choice for 2011 Lie of the Year could make a whole new blog page, there were so many. In Part 1 of this post, there’s displayed a cartoon someone even created about it.
In the course of my research, I found what is believed to be the first “claim” that Medicare was ending, before the Democrats decided to really publicize it. It was from the Wall Street Journal in an article by Naftali Bendavid: (emphasis added)
…The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills. Mr. Ryan and other conservatives say this is necessary because of the program's soaring costs. Medicare cost $396.5 billion in 2010 and is projected to rise to $502.8 billion in 2016. At that pace, spending on the program would have doubled between 2002 and 2016.
Then there were some (like Dave Weigel at Slate), as noted by PolitiFact, who believed the choice of PLOTY was because of the lobbying efforts of Paul Ryan, who upon learning of the nominees, posted a YouTube video asking viewers to vote for the Ryancare ending Medicare claim in PF’s poll. It seems he might not have known that it was the PF editors who make the final selection, not the winner of the poll. But we don’t know that he may have called PF’s Washington Bureau, or asked constituents to call, or made other lobby efforts behind the scenes.
Along with Weigel, Matt Ygelsias at Slate had a pretty good review called “PolitiFact lies about lying.”
It seems the most “noticed” and quoted PolitiFact detractor was Paul Krugman at the New York Times, who stated that this choice was “awful” in a memorial obit entitled “RIP PolitiFact.” Without much ado, he hit upon the real reason:
The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.
Well, perhaps useless and irrelevant to Paul Krugman until the next time they make a Democrat statement Lie of the Year? Or call a blatant Pants on Fire on whoever the Republican candidate is next year as he campaigns against Obama? Because to dismiss PolitiFact on the basis of this one ruling is vastly under-rating it, however one may agree with Krugman’s assessment.
Media Matters published quite an extensive response to PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year, lending support to my contention that the Stimulus creating zero jobs claim should have been the winner, by not just pointing out the other PolitiFact rulings on it as uttered by others, but linking an additional ten examples, such as the publications Washington Times (9/7/11) and Washington Examiner (8/22/11), and well-known conservative pundits like Sean Hannity (video 7/13/11), Laura Ingraham (video 2/4/11) and Charles Krauthammer (video 5/31/11). From the Media Matters article:
When asked about his explanation about the "zero jobs" lie by Media Matters' Joe Strupp, Adair said that the Lie of the Year "is a subjective decision of Politifact editors. ... [I]t's not based on data points."
Given how often the lies about the stimulus and the Obama apology tour were repeated by conservatives, it may have been helpful for Politifact to look at "data points" rather than just their editors' "subjective" sense of how widespread the lie was.
Data points? How does one determine how “widespread” a lie is without data points? I discussed data points in terms of the number of rulings in my previous post. The number of rulings that PolitiFact does relating to the economy, such as jobs, taxes, budgets, the deficit, far exceed those about healthcare and Medicare. I suppose the judgment of how “widespread” a lie is has to do with what might be termed its “urban mythology”—how it seems to have made an impact culturally, how much it has become accepted as a common belief. The first Lie of the Year, Sarah Palin’s death panel claim, is definitely in that genre.
But how does the public get informed in order for a myth to get rooted? I’m thinking it’s perhaps an “image” that the claim conjures up in peoples’ minds. The “image” makes the claim compelling, gives the claim a unique “brand”. In 2009, it was this board of faceless people having a meeting and saying who would live and who would die. In 2010, it was the incompetent socialist government taking over, bullying doctors and allowing the patient no choices. In 2011, it was…grandma getting thrown over the cliff. The “stimulus creating zero jobs” does not have any memorably associated image except maybe a Democrat congress and Obama throwing money down a toilet, but that’s not unique in that it could be associated with the debt ceiling or the deficit as well. So maybe I’ve seized upon a possible reason for its choice, on the other hand, it doesn’t always have to be the“granny off the cliff” lie that’s the most widespread.
But I digress. The list of complainants is extensive. I’ve already recorded a few of them above: Slate, Media Matters and Krugman at the New York Times. Many of the others have already been included in my page PolitiFact Detractors, although not linked to their latest PolitiFact “detraction.” Here they are in alphabetical order. There's probably many more, but these are some of the "best" ones.
Jamelle Bouie at the American Prospect calls PolitiFact’s award “bogus.” With the award, PolitiFact has “doubled down on its view that Democrats were misleading the public with their Medicare accusations.”
(The ) Center for Economic and Policy Research (Dean Baker) titled his criticism “PolitiFact Goes Post Modern” because it had “jumped into the world of language devoid of meaning in its selection of the ‘lie of the year.’”
FireDogLake’s David Dayen says “Paul Krugman’s going to go to the Politifact offices with a switchblade after this one” quoting Krugman’s memorial to PF and calling it a false equivalency.
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| Thom Hartmann setting PF's Pants on Fire. |
(The) Huffington Post’s Jason Linkins compares PF’s explanation to another fact-check done by PF Rhode Island found Mostly False, concluding that based on similarities between them, the Lie of the Year should have been found Mostly False as well.
Mediaite is a website published by ABC News Legal Analyst Dan Abrams. It had a number of articles about PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, one in particular by left-wing radio host Thom Hartmann, whose comparison of “Mediscare” (his term for it) to Medicare was like that of “pouring milk into a coke can and calling it a can of coke.”
More interestingly another Mediaite piece by Tommy Christopher made the claim that that Bill Adair lied when he talked about it in an interview on the CBS Morning Show.
But right in the midst of his backstopping of Politifact’s awful decision, Adair told an unmitigated, verifiable lie. He said the Ryan plan was trying to “change the plan and save money for people who were younger,” an assertion that’s belied by…Politifact.com:
The link in the quote above is the same as the article—to the PolitiFact ruling on the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) who was the original “owner” of the Lie of the Year. I’m not going to go into detail defending Adair, but I believe he meant that the total savings of this new plan would provide for those younger since right now the Medicare system will be insolvent for those younger if the changes Ryan proposes aren’t made.
Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum was one of the few writers that tried to look at both sides of the argument, but does ask (and answers) a very important question: “Should PolitiFact have chosen this as its Lie of the Year? Not a chance.”
Frank James at National Public Radio said PolitiFact’s ruling “put it on shaky ground of weighing interpretations…PolitiFact's decision apparently hinged on what the meaning of ‘end’ is which seems to be the source of the problem”.
The conservative National Review Online’s Robert VerBruggen appears to have sided a bit with the liberals. He concludes his short piece on PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year this way:
It’s true enough that Democratic ads are a bad place to go for a clear, unbiased account of what the Ryan plan would do. But I don’t think any of these examples rise to the level of “lie,” much less “Lie of the Year.”
Similarly to NPR, (The) New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, in a thoughtful article, says that PolitiFact doesn’t grasp the distinction between interpretation and fact. [Note: This is slightly out of order because of the similarity of the "interpretation" issue.]
(The) New Republic’s Jonathan Cohan called PolitiFact’s Politi-Choice the “Fact-Checking Fail of the Year”and basically agreed with Paul Krugman's analysis.
Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo wrote that the award to Democrats will “help the right and the GOP create their own reality as the future of the social safety net becomes a defining issue of the 2012 campaign.”
Think Progress is a pretty hard left website, but it did not speculate on why the statement was selected for Lie of the Year. It awarded it its own Pants on Fire to PF and re-iterated the standard too-drastic-to-not-be-ending argument, proclaiming “it’s 100 percent true!”
Wendell Potter , Center for Media and Democracy's Senior Fellow on Health Care, wrote quite a personalized piece for Truthout.org another leftie website. He wrote of its similarity to going from a defined benefit to defined contribution pension; it is a means for the corporation to “off-load risk” to the employees. In this case the government is off-loading risk. He closes “If backers of Ryan’s plan would drop the word “Medicare” and name it something with a bunch of numbers and a letter or two in parenthesis, that would be far more honest than calling it Medicare or anything similar.”
(The) Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen called PolitiFact’s Politi-Choice “poor, credibility killing” and “effectively a semantics argument.”
(The) Washington Post’s “Plum Line” blog (Greg Sargent) reported that the DCCC brushed off its Lie of the Year “award.” When asked to comment about it, spokesman Jesse Ferguson e-mailed the Post a statement whereby he “told PolitiFact’s ‘Lie of the Year’ two more times in just one statement.” So much for trying.
The conservative Weekly Standard had published a lengthy article by Mark Hemingway called “Lies, Damned Lies and Fact-Checking” just before PolitiFact made its announcement of Lie of the Year. So it doesn’t address the Lie of the Year; not that it would have helped. The subtitle of the article was “The liberal media’s attempt to control the discourse” and the assertion of selection bias again was raised along with “pushing tendentious arguments” which would make my conservative counterpart drool. It’s an interesting though skeptical article, and I would say it’s required reading for anyone intrigued by the rising prominence of fact-checking and its role in political discourse.
The 2011 PolitiFact Lie of the Year won't get its own page on this blog. But it will be the first choice, in big, highlighted font, on the tags/label list. The links above will *eventually* be separated between conservative and liberal for the PolitiFact Detractors page.
Finally, there’s also a lot of entertaining, informational websites and blogs that have gotten into the act with the Lie of the Year, like Addictinginfo.org, Time Magazine's Swampland, the New Civil Rights Movement, Stinque.com (“If it smells, we’re on it”), my favorite Rude Pundit, and the Motor City Liberal. But I think I’ve made my point. If Bill Adair was looking for a reaction, he got it.
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| And if the patient can't find a private insurer, his Medicare "ends"? |
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