Zebra Factcheck is the PolitiFact *Unskewed*

(OR "Fact-checking you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better"....)

If there's one thing to be learned from the elections, it's that creating one's own realities doesn't work. From Salon.com:

Conservatives will hear that Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie delivered the election to Obama, that Mitt Romney wasn’t a true conservative, and that mainstream media bias blinded Americans to the truth. A few voices may acknowledge that the state of polling science is actually pretty good, and the demographics of the U.S. have fundamentally changed, but don’t hold your breath for a widespread reappraisal of the dangers of listening only to what you want to hear. The right-wing echo chamber is built of stronger stuff than the left’s.

And along with "mainstream media bias," fact-checkers must be 100% liberally biased as well! And Zebra Factcheck will unblind you to "the truth"! But I digress.

Current TV's Cenk Ugyur reported how much 26 polls were off in predicting this past election, listed in terms of accuracy: it almost came as no surprise to me that one of those near the bottom was the conservative Rasmussen--while the top poll was the liberal Public Policy Polling and one from the Daily Kos.

 

There were a number of polling analysis outfits, the most prolific being Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, along with Real Clear Politics. But then a website called Unskewed Polls became well known, especially with Republicans, with over 25,000 fans on Facebook, as authored by Dean Chambers who was very highly critical of Nate Silver. It essentially based its election prognostications adjusting for what it believed was over-sampling of Democrats by the other polls (and under-sampling Republican enthusiasm)--because those polls were part of the "main stream media" and that by "showing results unrealistically favorable to Obama that they are leading to a perception among voters of the inevitability of Obama's victory in the election." 



Unskewed Polls electoral map Nov. 4: Romney to win 52% to 47%

And so, the weekend before the election up until election eve, Unskewed Polls was basically predicting a Romney sweep of 342 electoral college votes to 196 for Obama, as shown above  in a screen-snip from its website. Sometime Election Eve Monday Dean Chambers did some quick back-pedaling (strangely, with almost all the polling done) on his electoral map to make it look like he only failed to predict four states for Obama, changing the electoral counts to 275 for Romney and 263 for Obama. Meanwhile, people like Karl Rove and Dick Morris were making similar errors to Dean Chambers on Democratic over-sampling, in predicting a Romney landslide on Fox News. Everyone ended up eating a lot of crow failing to discern the voter suppression backlash and growing minority demographics.

 

So you can see where I am going with PolitiFact Bias (PFB) and its new "project" Zebra Factcheck. I believe the writers at PFB commit the same type of cognitively dissonant blunder, insisting that PolitiFact is "Democratically skewed" like Chambers claims all the polls are. And they think they are unskewering PolitiFact's rulings at their websites, just as Chambers says he does.

For example, I could envision PFB's Bryan White saying something like "But this year PolitiFact and the other fact-checkers have been far more biased than they have been in the past. To the degree that they are that biased, I'm not sure some of them can straighten up and fly right even if they want to. Either way, I'm watching them. And ready to expose them for cleaning up their act or still selling us the same biased bill of goods."

 

Just replace a few words and you get this from Dean Chambers:

But this year many of the polls are far more skewed than they have been in the past. To the degree that they are that skewed, I'm not sure some of these pollsters can straighten up and fly right even if they want to. Either way, I'm watching them. And ready to expose them for cleaning up their act or still selling us the same skewed bill of goods. We'll see what happens.

While I don't think PFB is making the kind of grave miscalculation Dean Chambers is, they are certainly taking information they don't like and spinning it to present it in the way right-wingers want to hear it--especially at the new Zebra Factcheck. "Over-sampling Democrats" in polling is like the over-reliance on the assumption that selection bias is used by liberal writers to make Democrats look more honest than Republicans. Republicans having more enthusiasm is like assuming ALL fact-checkers at PolitiFact and other fact-checking outfits are liberals.
 

Zebra Factcheck in the bubble.

The fact is that there is a strong possibility that Republicans are more factually deficient than Democrats, particularly since Obama was elected beginning in 2009. What was at stake was discrediting his policies, especially "Obamacare." The fact-checkers work to inform readers whether mud-raking, widely disseminated, repeated statements are true. They were doing their job. That is the reality.

 

So in the future I may be referring to PFB as PolitiFact Unskewed and Zebra Factcheck as Factchecks Unskewed just to make the point that they are probably about as "off" as Polls Unskewed. Or like some of the Unskewed Polls commenters told Dean Chambers he should just call his poll analysis "Fake Polls", a better name for Zebra Factcheck might be "Fake Factchecks." Unfortunately, there are no final vote results on "truth" to prove they are as poor at that as Polls Unskewed in its predictions. But the evidence that PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck are in a right-wing bubble is overwhelming.