Lil White Lies Extra: The Unbearable Rightness of Bryan

My conservative counterpart recently offered up a 1,500-word tome essentially doing a finger-pointing “shame on you” to PolitiFact for “caving to the pressure” of its left-wing readers in its “flim-flam” ruling on Marco Rubio who stated that the majority of Americans are conservatives (from Mostly True to Half True).

He went into a diatribe on what appeared to be PolitiFact’s reliance on further polling numbers which he translated into this:

PolitiFact repented of its original ruling in advance of and regardless of new reporting, refused to admit any error in reaching the original conclusion and subsequently used the new reporting as a deliberate pretense to unveil a new ruling motivated by criticism from the left.

This is one of the best examples of the paranoid, conspiratorial thinking of conservatives I have ever encountered. PolitiFact’s change of the rulings is in and of itself admitting an error. On the top of that, if it was in fact motivated by criticism from the left to “cave” why did they not do it on the “2011 Lie of the Year” which created an outcry from the left of Biblical proportions? Maybe that would be too much to back down from, but there are many other rulings that PolitiFact has re-examined and left the same,  like here and here (and there have been Democrats downgraded as well).  What PolitiFact did here was realize—and admit--that with polls, the answer was not certain. As noted by Jonathan Bernstein of Washington Monthly:

One could look at it another way, which is to get beyond self-identification to go to whether people believe in conservative concepts or not. But then it gets very tricky, as can be seen easily in from the speech Politifact was fact-checking

This may be the best fit for Rubio's statement.

The Minnesota MPR PoliGraph is done by a former PolitiFact writer, Catherine Richert. It employs a category called “Inconclusive” which seems to correlate to the Half True rating.

PolitiFact might want to add something to its definitions which allude to the “inconclusive” nature of the Half True designation. It often uses the expression “on balance” in its “Our Ruling” finale. This would be a case of “on balance” we are at a “zero”—the negatives equal the positives. It’s sort of like something I’ve seen in legal responses that “PolitiFact can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this claim based on the 'facts.' "

But caving into liberal readers? PolitiFact occasionally caves to both sides. Sometimes it won’t cave. It’s the nature of the beast. Nobody’s perfect (unlike Bryan). But to accuse it of caving as some sort of proof of its left-wing bias is beyond the pale, and is not supported by the evidence of its corrections and updates.

And as I noted in my original "Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style" post on this ruling, this was more than about Rubio’s statement about conservatives: it was about the context of his remark. It was about all the other statements (most blatantly false) included with this that PolitiFact could have fact-checked, but chose not to, which my conservative counterpart chose to cherry-pickingly ignore as well—or I should say, as “nothing to see here” featured in his new blog series.  Except you won't see it in his series since it's  unseen fact-checks found false for a Republican.