Pants on Fire Factor: Obama-Fact

The addition of the state PolitiFacts began with the appearance of PolitiFact Florida in 2009, but really didn't really get in gear with publishing a substantive number of rulings until 2010.  In fact, in 2009, PolitiFact "Florida" published a grand total of 9 rulings, bringing in lead PolitiFact Florida writer Aaron Sharockman around October.  Then things took off in 2010 as Texas, Georgia, Rhode Island were added in the first half and then Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin and Virginia in the second half.

 

It would seem as if the states came along to fill in the gap of the Congressional Quarterly, whose writers worked with PolitiFact doing rulings from 2007 through 2008.  However, as I described in my original assessment of this group and what its "affects" may have been , the types of statements selected at that time were of a different nature:  in the case of Congressional Quarterly, they related to its area of expertise, congressional positions and votes (although they did do other types).  In the case of the PolitiFact states, however, many rulings had to do with matters of a local nature, for example, one of the first PolitiFact Florida rulings on  a statement by then-Governor Charlie Crist who was bragging up the reduced rates of a negotiated, un-subsidized Florida healthcare program called Cover Florida Healthcare (found False).

 

The "Pants on Fire factor" (PoF) as I call it, a measure of what is claimed to be PolitiFact's bias for rating a False ruling as Pants on Fire, is shown below as aggregated from 2007 to September of 2012.    It is a comparison of Democrats to Republicans, with a factor of 1.0 translating to mean that PolitiFact assigns Pants on Fire to Democrats at the same (or equal) rate it assigns Republicans.  Anything below the 1.0 means Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire less than Democrats, anything above the 1.0 means Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire more than the Democrats (as a percentage of False + Pants on Fire rulings).

 

 

The red line shows the growth of the factor from favoring the Republicans to favoring the Democrats (or growing ever more negative for Republicans) over PolitiFact National's six years of Truth-o-Meter rulings.  The chart begins in quarterly increments until the end of 2008 to show how the Congressional Quarterly scored for that period as well, displayed in the green line. Thereafter the increments are annual.

 

At the end of 2008, PolitiFact National (including the Congressional Quarterly) had a factor below 1.0, although as shown by the green line, the Congressional Quarterly (CQ) alone was assigning Pants on Fire to Republicans 42% more than to Democrats.  With CQ behind them, in 2009 the PoF factor made its biggest jump ever at PolitiFact National, from .90 to 1.60.    For the year 2009 alone, PolitiFact National's Pants on Fire factor was a whopping 5.06.

 

Accumulated through the end of September of 2012, it now stands at 1.94--in other words, in the course of its history, PolitiFact National assigned Pants on Fire almost twice as often for Republicans as it did for Democrats.

 

Combined with the state PolitiFacts, however, the chart takes a different slope, as shown by the purple line.  It starts at the same high point as in 2009 because of there being only 9 PolitiFact Florida rulings, but as they accumulated, the aggregate Pants on Fire factor for PolitiFact as a whole dropped, from the 1.60 in 2009 down to its current 1.33.  The states themselves, if they were separated from PolitiFact National, would now average 1.21.

 

So it is indeed true that once PolitiFact "dissolved its partnership" with Congressional Quarterly, it began to appear as though it was increasingly assigning Falses as Pants on Fire to Republicans.  But working with CQ may not be a cause even with such a correlation, given that its own writers' assignment of Pants on Fire to Republicans were far more (58% more) than that of what PolitiFact National was doing at the end of 2008.  Were there other possible reasons?  What happened in 2009?

 

For just the year 2009, PolitiFact National produced 418 rulings, 229 rulings on Republicans, and 167 on Democrats (the rest being of unknown or non-partisan affiliation).  Of those 418 rulings, a little over half were done by two writers:  Robert Farley, now a writer for FactCheck.Org, and Angie Drobnic Holan, who is now the Editor at PolitiFact Florida.  Farley did the most at 125 rulings, of which 85, or over two thirds, were on Republicans.  He found 45 claims False, of which 13 earned the Pants on Fire--ALL of which went to Republicans.  Holans' rulings were much more evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans in terms of the total number of rulings she did; Holan had 31 Falses of which she deemed 10 Pants on Fire, only two of which went to Democrats.

 

Angie Drobnic Holan also seemed to be the "Obamacare person" as her rulings predominantly dealt with statements relating to healthcare reform. Of the 50 Republican rulings she did, 24 related to Obamacare.   It was Holan who wrote the Sarah Palin "death panel" ruling in July of 2009 which became PolitiFact's first "Lie of the Year."   The rulings done by Robert Farley, however, ran the gamut from birtherism to terrorism, with most of his focus on economic issues:  taxes, the federal budget and the stimulus.

 

Angie Drobnic Holan along with Catherine Richert, another PolitiFact writer who ultimately became a fact-checker with Minnesota Public Radio, are probably the next most guilty party collectively following Farley when it came to the Pants on Fire factor.  While they wrote 41% of all rulings for 2009, they did 55% (20 out of 36) Pants on Fires, and they both averaged about 2.6 for the Pants on Fire factor.

 

Obamacare, however, was the leading PolitiFact ruling topic in 2009: healthcare was the subject of over 30% of the rulings with about 27% relating to healthcare reform, and made up over 1/3 of the Pants on Fire.   With the majority coming from Republicans, this was for the most part what drove up the Pants on Fire factor against them.    Among the "ridiculous" were things like a ruling on the House Republican Conference which said that Obamacare was imposing a "light-switch" tax that would cost households up to $3,128 a year or Rush Limbaugh who said it would mandate circumcision or Glenn Beck who said it included insurance for dogs.    Crazy claims came fast and furious (pun not intended) from the right-wing spin machine.

 

In 2008, the start up of PolitiFact and the presidential campaigns made for a different source of fact-checking material as opposed to what it became in 2009 as President Obama set his policies and goals.  And it is clear that the fight from the Republicans against his administration led to an upsweep in negative rulings.  After 2009, the yearly average Pants on Fire factor (2010 to now) computes to 2.18.  The early rulings pre-Obama 2008 election have kept the total PolitiFact National average under 2, while the state PolitiFacts with their emphasis on less ideological/local subjects keep the overall average lower.   Whatever supposed selection bias there is claimed to be, there are some good reasons why this factor may have become less favorable to Republicans.