Lil White Lies Extra: Less Than Positively Pointless

Recently I discovered that PolitiFact had linked to my blog (Thank you!) in its website, in an article by Bill Adair where he’s now decided to compare Truth-o-Meter rating charts ("report cards"). I don’t know if he’s going to display a computation of the Truth Index, that might be a bit politically dicey. My feeling was he was looking for a nice high “magic” number of rulings before he would start this feature, which was 5,000.

PolitiFact Bias (which some call the “Gish Gallop of anti-PolitiFact Propaganda”) and co-blog Sublime Bloviations caught the link at PolitiFact and immediately posted (my blog was linked at the word "commentary"):

The other link ("commentary") was the sort of pointless statistical exercise that simply elaborates on the results of PolitiFact's fundamentally flawed process (the former link I gave a positive review, the latter author I've given a less-than-positive review).

I guess if I didn’t have a professed liberal bias by disagreeing, and I was someone especially important, I might get more positive reviews.  Because one can be important, but ideological disagreement makes one an idiot.

But the less than positive reviews have nothing whatsoever to do with my Truth Index analysis. Brad’s Terribly Bad Blog, or whatever it’s called, never looked at my Truth Index. It only looked at my Grading PolitiFact Review series at the time I first started it, which were attacked with almost the same intensity as PolitiFact's rulings. So for that, the Politi-Psy Truth-o-Meter on their claim gets a FALSE (I don’t use Pants on Fire, that belongs to PolitiFact). And I know the “selection bias” is just as pointless, as noted by Eric Levine:

They [PolitiFact Bias] just compiled a list of articles on Politifact over the course of a year and came to the conclusion that, since the worst ratings tend to favor republicans more than democrats, they must be biased in their selection in favor of the left. The problem with this is that their conclusion simply does not follow. Their are other possible reasons for this kind of result that have nothing specifically to do with Politifact being biased.

I encourage you to read the rest of Eric Levine’s analysis.