Sidebar: Night of the Living Fact-Check

Rachel Maddow of MSNBC brought PolitiFact up again in her weekday show (I think she termed PolitiFact as a “zombie that won’t go away” since she previously had declared them “dead”; hence the title of this post) recently because of a fact-check on the National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) which basically distorted the “fine print” of a Whitehouse visitor policy. And yes, they distorted it in a ridiculous way. But it doesn't appear to qualify for a Pants on Fire, or even a False.

It contains an “element of truth”: the Whitehouse does recognize babies before they are born in order to “count” babies after they are born, for the purpose of pre-registration for White House visits.

For me, what it was exactly that the NRLC was trying to make a point about was mystifying. So what if the Whitehouse “recognizes” unborn babies, how does that make its stance on abortion rights hypocritical? Are they not supposed to recognize an unborn child because it’s a women’s decision to make, even if her decision the majority of the time is to keep it? Do they think that on arrival at the Whitehouse they’re going to give all pregnant women (or in this case, women with babies) a lecture or pamphlet on how they can have/could have had an abortion? The NRLC could play this both ways as well. They could use the “Whitehouse recognition of the unborn” as evidence of “personhood.” They could lament how the Whitehouse is pro-“killing” because they even recognize babies in utero as people. That’s probably what they’ll do the next time.

Here was the NRLC Facebook explanation (at PolitiFact's Facebook page) of its “point”, followed by a quote from an article in “ProLife News” which published a similar claim:

We didn't say that the White House Visitors office counted a pregnant visitor as two people, but rather, made the point that the White House recognizes the "baby" as a family member prior to birth, "for purposes of providing security within the White House," but not for purposes of establishing abortion policy for the District of Columbia, an exclusively federal jurisdiction. Moorhead apparently went to all of that re-write work as part of a studied effort to miss our point. I wonder why?

...Notably, the newsletter provides no guidance on what the staff should do if an unborn baby is first registered for security purposes, but then aborted,” Johnson added. “On May 17, the House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee plans to hold a hearing on the District of Columbia Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act (H.R. 3803), which would generally prohibit abortion in the sixth month and later in the District. If the President wants to provide for the security of the unborn child immediately outside of the White House gates, as well as inside, he should endorse this bill.”

The congress has a quasi-jurisdiction over the District of Columbia (not the president). So the NLRC would be better off targeting the Republican-dominated congress, but it (hypocritically) doesn’t do so here. They don’t need the president’s endorsement.  This was basically a political move to criticize Democrat Obama in a public way for not being pro-life.

It also seems this is a fetus-obsessive tactic of the pro-life crowd: comparing abortion to anything, anything, which promotes “life”…even the preservation of wildlife, as a way of saying why is this life protected but not that of the unborn.

The Whitehouse, however, simply wants to do a proper headcount and this has nothing to do with whether there is a miscarriage or abortion. The NRLC was clearly “fishing.”

The day following the ruling PolitiFact published a letter from a Rachel Maddow fan who agreed with PolitiFact’s ruling. Here is the heart of their letter, providing an excellent rebuttal:

It simply cannot be argued, Ms. Maddow, that the White House does not recognize unborn children: by asking potential visitors whether they are pregnant, so as to account for a possible additional attendee in the future, the White House IS ACKNOWLEDGING unborn children at that moment. There is no getting around this; it is pure logic. But, as Politifact then argues, the White House does not recognize the unborn children as the NRLC implies; the NRLC's suggestion is indeed "wildly misconstrued." Hence, the IMPLICATION is terribly misleading and IS FALSE, but the STATEMENT is, BY ITSELF, technically true. Politifact, as they often acknowledge, have the difficult task of rating STATEMENTS while also factoring in the veracity of the statement's IMPLICATION.

Rachel Maddow tends to very narrowly focus on what she believes is “False” and doesn’t look at what was said in its entirety, the context, the implicit meanings or what my conservative counterpart might call “the underlying argument”—she doesn’t seem to have a good understanding of PolitiFact’s principles in the methods it uses for the statements it scores.  It also seems to me she hasn’t really looked at how PolitiFact defines Mostly False: "The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression." PolitiFact has a responsibility to look at those critical facts in accordance with those principles.

Maddow seems to be a knee-jerk True-or-False-and-nothing-in-between kind of fact-finder. She looked at the last fact-check in which she declared PolitiFact dead the same way. She crammed her analysis into the last minute of her show as if meeting the time deadline was more important than presenting the whole story, and if she doesn’t try to see the whole story, I guess she’s going to be haunted by the PolitiFact zombies forever.  And she may never know what it takes to get a False.