Liberal Proof of PolitiFact (Liberal) Bias: Once is Enough

The Liberal Proof of PolitiFact Liberal Bias label began back in 2010 when I had enough data to look at the Truth Index in terms of the states.  I thought it might be interesting to look at the sponsoring newspapers' political endorsements and compare them to how the Truth Index was leaning.  I did get a slight correlation:  the "blue" papers tended to have the highest Democrat-favorable Truth Index, while the "red" and "purple" papers, while still favoring the Democrats, did so much less than the "blue."

No, not double vision or a computer glitch: it's the same statement rated twice in a row.

Then I come across things like this that magnify the overall Truth Index through duplication:  the same ruling shown over and over, whether False/Pants on Fire for a Republican, or True for a Democrat.  In this case, Julian Castro was ruled True twice in a row in a cut-and-paste job by PolitiFact Texas writer Sue Owen assisted by main writer J. Gardner Selby.  In the second ruling which came a little over a month after the first, Selby simply changed the first two paragraphs; everything else appears to be the same, including a graphic of a chart from the Milken Institute.  To add background:  Castro is mayor of San Antonio, Texas and touted its rating as the top "local performing economy" in the country by the Milken Institute.

As you can see by the side-by-side labels (above) from the PolitiFact rulings for Castro, they look like just a duplicate....and they are.  It's the same ruling for Castro who said it on two different occasions.  Now if someone were to say this was selection bias, here, I might be inclined to agree.  Although not party-related, more like easy or lazy-related.  I might ask writer Sue Owen:  do you mean to tell me you didn't have anything else to fact-check when Castro gave his speech at the Democratic National Convention, that you had to re-hash something you just did?

While I can see the necessity of occasionally repeating a fact-check on a repeated lie, I do not know why PolitiFact would want to take the same statement rated True and rate it True again, especially when the rulings were so close together.

PolitiFact detractor Sublime Blovations also covered the second statement by Castro, and disputed its veracity because Castro preceded the statement with a cause-and-effect where PolitiFact appeared to ignore the cause:  that the reason for it being a top performing economy was because  it was "investing in young minds today to be competitive in the global economy tomorrow."  Nowhere, it seems, did PolitiFact indicate evidence of how investing in young minds resulted in San Antonio's economic performance.  Writer Bryan White called it a "bias in story focus."

Both of Castro's speeches highlighted that the end result of  investments in education and infrastructure in the city of San Antonio were  a "return on investment" of the Milken rating at the end of 2011.  One of the sources cited by PolitiFact, an article from the Texas Tribune, says that in San Antonio "Training an educated workforce... may be a more daunting obstacle for a city that has long struggled with high dropout and low college completion rates."

In his first speech Castro spoke of efforts in boosting the number of children graduating from high school with programs such as "Cafe College" (one stop help for students in getting test prep and completing financial paperwork) as well as Service-SA (volunteer tutoring).

It obviously was important to Castro to emphasize how San Antonio was trying to improve graduation rates, and that he wanted to produce an educated workforce to serve businesses who were considering re-locating to San Antonio.  Whether there's a direct connection to its economic performance is hard to say, but based on the above there's more context there than White cares to show, and as he said himself, the raw statement is true.

But the repeat by Castro should never have been rated, so the one White graded is really irrelevant.  He should have noticed and reported the repetition first, and then done a two-for-one hatchet job.

Since I began this write-up, the secretly recorded Mitt Romney "47 percent pay no tax" claim has come up, and PolitiFact has rated it True.  Here, there's a lot of context that PolitiFact is not looking at--by White's very reasoning, PolitiFact's Molly Moorhead ignored that Romney said, in context, that these 47 percent are the people who Obama has "in the bag" and yet all the evidence says that many of them will NOT vote for Obama.  She only looked at the "raw statement."  But will White make this part of Grading PolitiFact by the same reasoning he used for Castro?  My guess is NOT--his personal bias will not permit him to downgrade a Republican for the same reasons he downgrades Democrats.

Next, since they're starting to add up a bit, a summarization of the series Liberal Proof of PF Liberal Bias.