Sidebar: I just *donut* believe this PF ruling!

As March approaches, I decided it might be time to start gathering PolitiFact (PF) rulings for the first quarter of 2012. And along with that, more refinements to the database to enable me to glean ever more stats. This year I decided to use the specific date of the fact-check—before, I had only input the month/year. I added gender and a second subject line, so that I could fine-tune the subject breakdown.

And since I am now adding the tag line of the fact-check, which I started in the last quarter of 2011, I’m now compelled to more closely examine the ruling itself. As I’ve gone along I’ve realized that there might be a need for a “Bad Fact-Check” series on my blog. By bad fact check, I don’t mean those that are disputed as permeated with the inherent bias of the reviewer, like recently by Rachel Maddow.

With the first 100 rulings recorded (between PolitiFacts National and Florida) I’ve noticed a few things for January: due to the Republican primaries, the vast majority of rulings have been the Republican candidates. In January, almost 85% of the fact-checks were Republicans, confined mostly to Romney, Santorum and Gingrich and their SuperPACs, which were 77% of the Republican fact-checks.

In addition, I noticed that PolitiFact New Hampshire appears to no longer be publishing rulings with the PF New Hampshire heading and topic categorization, and that Angie Drobnic-Holan has become one of the main writers for PolitiFact Florida, and no longer writes for PolitiFact National. Of course, the two PolitiFacts are inexorably connected, and that is more about the internal operations of PolitiFact as a business. For all I know, Bill Adair may have already published something about New Hampshire’s role.

Whoever selected this ruling needs to have their sugar levels checked.

But this post is more about a ruling I came across which I thought my conservative counterpart would find pretty…sweet for his blog. This was a statement by Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott in his State of the State address on January 10: that he had worked in a doughnut shop (called Nicola’s) earlier that day and that they had sold out of doughnuts, 240 dozen, by 8:30 a.m.. PolitiFact Florida determined that it was closer to 80 dozen, and so rated the claim Mostly False.

So here we have another statement from that “vast ocean” that PolitiFact can select from, and yet they choose this? Doughnut counts? Is this a joke?  I feel like I just got fried.

Shortly after Scott’s speech, Waatti spoke to David DeCamp of the Tampa Bay Times. She said the 240-dozen figure includes all of the doughnuts sold at both Nicola’s locations throughout the entire day Scott worked at the bakery. But she also reconfirmed that the shop Scott worked at sold about 80 dozen while he was there.

At PolitiFact Florida, we’re almost as serious about our doughnuts as we are our fact-checks. We rate Scott’s "240 dozen" claim Mostly False.

Now can somebody pass a maple glazed?

So Scott gets a Mostly False because he wasn’t exactly truthful about the number of doughnuts, using the number for all locations instead of just the location where he “worked”. The problem I have with this satire of a ruling is that it puts a big Mostly False on a Republican, for a fact check on something that’s like a doughnut in that it has a lot of calories (counts on the Truth-o-Meter) yet there’s no nutritional value.

It makes me not just want to glaze over, but pass a nutty one to PolitiFact. This one gets my first nomination for the Top Ten List of bad fact-checks by PolitiFact. I’m guessing there may be more, and hope they’re not all on Republicans, because this may end up inadvertently doing all those Politifact-bashers a favor.