PolitiFact Detractors: WatchDog? More Like Watch-Mutt!

The latest in PolitiFact detracting, in this case  PolitiFact Ohio detracting, comes from something called Watchdog.Org which is part of “The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity.” Of course, my conservative counterpart starts out his post with the Franklin Center’s honorable-sounding name as the sentence subject to give his post some false stature even though the Watchdog.Org website includes this disclaimer:

The Franklin Center is not responsible for the information that appears on the watchdog sites. The organization serves as a capacity builder and networking agent for independent, state-based journalists and organizations…”

Most of the PolitiFact-is-opinion-parading-as-fact series they’ve done, by two “journalists” Jon Cassidy and Will Swaim, consist of some very narrow interpretations of the ruling along with a lot of condescension toward PolitiFact….about adding numbers, understanding economics, finance, etc., as if the authors were some sort of experts themselves, for which there was pretty scant evidence. Usually only one link, to the PolitiFact ruling, was included in their “article.”

PolitiFact Bias, however, takes no notice of the excessive snark (their own name for it) and does their usual cheer leading routine: “Jon Cassidy blasts PolitiFact Ohio….” in one and “absolutely clobbers” them in another. I guess snark is okay by writers for the “Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity” when talking about PolitiFact, but a slight implication of it from PolitiFact is a seering indictment of bias.

In some of them, Swaim or Cassidy argue the difference between True and Mostly True. Now, to find something categorically false, or to argue the degree of falsity, is one thing, but the True to Mostly True or vice versa is sort of like arguing which horse is the best horse in the glue factory. I’m only going to cover a few of their criticisms here, but will include links to all of them. I liken some of the writing to my own: I consider myself an amateur at “journalism” because I have no education or training in it. In other words, Cassidy and Swaim aren’t very professional….well maybe professional hacks, you never know. They all start with the identical copy and paste intro:

PolitiFact Ohio practices opinion journalism under the guise of fact-checking. They often get things wrong — particularly, we’ve noticed, in their coverage of U.S. senate candidates Sherrod Brown (Democrat) and Josh Mandel (Republican). So we bring you PolitiFact or Fiction, a semi-regular review of pronouncements issued by PolitiFact Ohio, a blog run by staff at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and supported by Politifact.com.

They hit the ground running with their penchant for snark in the very first critique by Jon Cassidy, comparing two statements related to the same subject by Josh Mandel, a Republican candidate (State of Ohio Treasurer) running against Democrat Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, with “Does anyone at Cleveland Plain Dealer understand finance?”   It's in the flimsyTrue-or-Mostly-True venue first mentioned.

In the No. 2 part of the series, writer Will Swaim expounds on the uselessness of a PolitiFact ruling regarding Sherrod Brown’s comparison of baseball teams and big business, and then makes known his own hyperbolic opinion with regard to Brown or Liberals in general, translating his comment about the power of big business  to “for-profit companies that invent and sell crucial products for low prices are evil.” First off, pharmaceutical companies don’t sell crucial products for low prices. They sell crucial patented products at artificial, extremely high prices to work off the research and development costs. Or they copy-cat patented products at high prices because it’s easier and more profitable (example: Cialis over Viagra). Once they become generic, they generally let someone else make them. They’re not in business to sell crucial products at low prices: all products are sold at the highest price the market will bear, or artificially higher in the case of those products for which they have an active patent. Secondly, Sherrod Brown is not against big business. He’s for businesses operating ethically.

So when Brown says “Rooting for the Red Sox is like rooting for the drug companies” and Swaim says oh noooooooo, it has to be ONE company like the quote Brown was emulating (Rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel)…..but that’s not what Brown said. So which will it be? I’m guessing if writer Tom Feran had used Eli Lilly, Swaim would be bitching that it should be drug companies in general. Yes this was a dumb statement to rate. But Swaim’s reading into what he thinks Sherrod Brown is thinking—that he hates for-profit business, only because he’s a Democrat—is downright inane, and obviously a partial opinion. It’s the type of opinion that greatly outweighs whatever opinion they claim PolitiFact to have in terms of making Truth-o-Meter rulings.

Number 3 in the series was also written by Will Swaim, called Sherrod Brown’s problem with numbers. PolitiFact at first rated “True” a statement by Brown that “the average Ohio student graduates from a four-year college or university with nearly $27,000 in tuition debt.”

It later recognized its error in this one by changing it to Half True, a rating used when there’s some factor of inconclusiveness present. Part of this inconclusiveness was that it was not known what ALL student debt was because for-profit colleges are not required to report it. It also said that not all is reported:

The actual debt level is probably higher, the Project on Student Debt noted, because the data is voluntarily reported by colleges and not available for all of them.

As for for-profit colleges:

Students at for-profit colleges carry the heaviest loan load: 53 percent of degree recipients had school debt of $30,500 or more, compared with 24 percent at private, nonprofit colleges and 12 percent at public schools, according to a 2010 report by the College Board using the most recent federal data available.

On top of that a recent review by a Tom Blumer (who sounds like another right-wing pundit) at their very own WatchDog.Org website writes about parents going “into hock” quoting an Akron Beacon Journal (when I lived there it was affectionately known as the Akron Leakin’ Urinal) article which said ““the use of undergraduate parent loans has exploded … growing by 1,200 percent over the last decade and by 50 percent in the last year alone.”

So, might the students who don’t take on as much debt have a reason? Should that family debt be considered in this equation? Could there be situations where the parents took it on instead of the children and perhaps some of those children are paying their parents back?

So Swaim gave us a pretty simple calculation as to how Sherrod was wrong; how does this new information on for-profit colleges and parental debt figure into it? He must have some sort of formula since it’s SO easy to figure out. But as we can see, it’s not as easy as he says, so to say it’s just false is totally disingenuous and short sighted. We know college students are burdened with debt, their families may be burdened with debt, so a “False” reading, even as far off as Swaim says it is, doesn’t change the fact of the debt. Swaim gets a “Mostly False” for his too-simple too-easy calculating.

In Part 4 of its series, Will Swaim denigrates a statement checked on Sherrod Brown that “Eighty-seven percent of private insurance plans currently include (abortion) coverage.” He claims the statement is irrelevant--

PolitiFact is supposed to be about fact-checking — it says so right in the name — but it frequently weighs matters of principle or facts that are irrelevant. The results show the organization’s liberal bias.

Besides providing no real explanation for how the facts are irrelevant or how exactly they show liberal bias, Swaim precipitously weighs down the scale with his own irrelevancies. He goes on to quote Eric Ostermeier’s 2010 study of PolitiFact rulings as his proof of “PolitiFact Bias” instead of talking about the subject at hand, insurance and abortion coverage. It’s already been found that the Ostermeier study and its conclusions are flawed, and another similar study contradicts it. My own studies—of the whole population of PolitiFact rulings, not just one period in 2010 like Ostermeier—suggests Ostermeier’s data is exaggerated compared to the population.

But I digress. Swaim then says that “PolitiFact doesn’t seem to know what an insurance policy is” and claims that the percentages between covered workers and the employer plans should be the same. A link in the PolitiFact ruling to the Guttmacher Institute’s explanation of the difference shows that not only are they not the same comparison, but reiterates that MOST policies cover abortion. Time Magazine, not exactly noted for its liberal slant, published this:

…Nearly 90% of insurers cover abortion procedures, according to a 2002 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization whose statistics are relied upon by both sides of the abortion debate.”

Ninety percent? Perhaps Swaim should do a piece on Time’s gross error, an error that even exceeds Brown’s. And if PolitiFact doesn’t know what an insurance policy is, Swaim doesn’t seem to understand how the insurance business operates, which can be very simply explained: they make money by NOT paying claims….and by keeping costs down. Since it’s cheaper to have an abortion rather than pay for pre-natal care, childbirth, etc., insurance companies prefer abortion. That’s why nearly 90 percent of them pay for it.

The PolitiFact or Fiction link at WatchDog Ohio takes you to this...a bad link.

Swaim makes his own prejudice too obvious in this one. So we go on and on, with the same sort of thing in Part 5 (on this PolitiFact ruling) and Part 6, disparaging a Mostly True with another "counting" routine, (on this PolitiFact ruling) ad infinitum...or maybe not, maybe they'll get bored and go on to something else, as well they should.

Swaim and Cassidy practice the same sort of knee-jerk, absolutist, reactive interpretation that their nemesis Rachel Maddow often does, if it’s true it’s true, if it’s false, it’s false, with no consideration for nuance or context. If there is context it’s the context they’ve cherry-picked. The superciliousness is unbecoming to a site such as this, if it indeed practices its namesake of "public integrity."

Swaim and Cassidy end all the pieces with the same statement: “The fact-checkers may come to a different opinion, but that’s all it is.” It’s as if this absolves them from their allegations. But it’s just that: it’s their opinion that the fact-checks are “opinions.” That’s all it is.

I see a future for Swaim and Cassidy: propaganda specialists at Fox News or one of Brietbart’s websites. They’re obviously not really succeeding at trying to be objective.

Postscript (7/15/2012):  The "Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity", which recaps on its About page that its mission is to get “voters need real information to make informed decisions about their government,”  makes NO mention of political affiliation...but the President of the "Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity" is one Jason Stverak, who according to Wikipedia has been the Executive Director of the North Dakota Republican Party the last six years, along with a variety of Republican positions prior to that. But more important, he’s been an “op-ed contributor to publications such as the Washington Examiner[18], Online Journalism Review[19], Washington Times and the Daily Caller.[20]” Ah, right-wing rag writer. What a surprise.