This past year I’ve kind of laid off looking for PolitiFact Detractors—most of the time, I find short pieces which don’t amount to much (although here’s one I found recently that’s pretty good). PolitiFact Bias is often a source for me, because its authors are more focused on the greater amount of criticism directed at PolitiFact for being liberally biased.
A new wordpress blog published “anonymously” called counterirritant (lower case) does some “conservative” reviews of PolitiFact rulings from what appears to be the same venue as PolitiFact Bias; however, it’s the kind of criticism that should attract more readers because unlike PolitiFact Bias/Sublime Bloviations' often incoherent rhetorical excesses, counterirritant is more like a PolitiFact Bias for Dummies. At least so far, it hasn’t used questionable, self-aggrandizing logic. It just uses the facts as it sees them, with a simple and easy to read presentation, although one might not necessarily agree the facts are being used correctly. It’s only done three reviews of PolitiFact (it also reviews other fact-checkers).
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| "PolitiFact backing Smiley" as counterirritant claims doesn't go with the Half True ruling he received. |
However, thus far they don’t seem to bridge the gap in refuting PolitiFact’s ruling(s): for example, in his post called “Poverty Makes Men Ridiculous”--about a PolitiFact ruling on PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley who stated "one out of two Americans … are living either in or near poverty"-- he said that “PolitiFact backed Smiley’s use of the SPM number in the equation used for the traditional poverty threshold.”
Well, not quite: they made it very clear that they thought the number was slightly misleading:
So Smiley has support for his number from Census Bureau statistics. However, in the context of a fast-paced television interview, some nuance got lost.
The statistic has not been received neutrally, said Douglas Besharov, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland who specializes in children and poverty. He said that "liberals like" the SPM while "conservatives dislike" it.
Given the nature of the statistic as new and unofficial, economists we interviewed agreed that it would have been more appropriate if Smiley had specified that he was using an alternative measure. Otherwise, viewers would think he’s talking about official poverty statistics.
Basically “counterirritant” is showing its “conservative dislike.” If PolitiFact in fact supported this Census Bureau Statistic, it would have awarded Smiley a True or Mostly True. Half True indicates that they are not supporting it precisely in the context that counterirritant is complaining. Half True is a sort of “this is a bit misleading but we can’t make a determination” ruling. To say it was Mostly False or False would probably put this one in my Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style series, because what Smiley said has more than an element of truth: it is more like “partially true but leaves out important details.”
The suggestion from counterirritant that PolitiFact wasn’t checking all its sources is a bit absurd. It almost looks like counterirritant never looked at PolitiFact’s list of sources. It’s apparent that those writers Lou Jacobson communicated with in e-mail interviews (Michael Wiseman, Arlec Sherman, Andrew Biggs and Douglas Beharov) alerted him to the same thing that counterirritant is talking about, since it’s alluded to in the ruling.
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| Gasoline is an oil by-product; Gas is "a hydrocarbon gas consisting mostly of methane." |
Another ruling on Obama about a statement he made on the length of oil and gas pipelines contructed during his adminstration ruling offers the best contrast between Sublime Bloviations and counterirritant. In Facebook comments (and maybe on one of his blogs as well, I am not sure), Sublime Bloviations writer Bryan White almost indivisibly, incomprehensively parsed the time periods used for comparison with another ruling on Mitt Romney, basically saying they (the time periods) were “cherry picked” as to where they start by PolitiFact, in order to give Obama a True and Romney less than a True. In Romney's case, changing the dubious "pre-Obama" selection of a "start" date to unemployment stats drastically changed the results, while it didn't change anything for Obama.
But counterirritant’s approach was to claim that Obama was only talking about gasoline and not natural gas when he said that during his administration enough “gas and oil” pipeline had been laid to more than circle the earth. He (or she?) accomplished this by listing all the times Obama referred to the price of gasoline in the context of his statement, However, the subject of Obama’s remarks was energy policy in general. If he meant just gasoline he should have said "oil by-products" because gasoline would be included under that category, as there is not a specific number for length of “gasoline pipeline” constructed (I challenge the author of counterirritant to find where annual lengths of “gasoline pipeline” built in the U.S. is published on line.) In other words, the four categories of pipline are oil: (1) crude petroleum and (2) petroleum products (gasoline, etc.), and gas: (3) natural gas transmission and (4) natural gas distribution.
For example, in Obama’s statement on the Keystone XL Pipeline linked at the ruling it was said “Under my Administration, domestic oil and natural gas production is up, while imports of foreign oil are down. In the months ahead, we will continue to look for new ways to partner with the oil and gas industry to increase our energy security…” Here, oil and gas clearly does not mean “oil and gasoline” and I don’t think Obama would mix them up. In other words, “oil and gas” is an inclusive, generic term for “crude oil and natural gas.” While it could be misunderstood the way counterirritant purports, I think in terms of all of Obama’s remarks on energy policy referring to “oil and gas”, it would be disingenuous to infer otherwise.
The PolitiFact Bias blog is so captivated with counterirritant it has has placed a link to it under the heading “Contra PolitiFact” (formerly PolitiFact Detractors, I’m guessing because they wanted to distance themselves from another blog with the same label, or maybe because of White’s admiration for Ronald Reagan [ha ha]) as another PolitiFact-critical website. My estimation of counterirritant so far would defer to Eric Levine’s brilliant description of PolitiFact Bias: it’s an “anti-PolitiFact propaganda site” only without the Gish Gallop. More to follow.
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