Sidebar: Preconception Detection

It’s been proven in my blog to some degree that any sort of bias by PolitiFact (PF) in its rulings can’t be proven through “a preponderance of anecdotal evidence.” Because (1) some of that preponderance is clearly arguable, as I have shown in Lil White Lies, and (2) the evidence of bias can go both ways, as I have shown in Grading PF Liberal Style, as well as in my Guide to PF Detractors, which lists those alleging PF of bias on both sides of the aisle.

In my many searches for items to add to my Guide to PF Detractors, I occasionally look at comments, to see if someone has anything original to say (generally it’s run of the mill). Here were two, however, that really offer some different approaches to determine bias by PolitiFact.

They come from an article by David Brauer at MinnPost.com who was critiquing Bill Adair’s response to Eric Ostermeier’s study in which he suggests that PolitiFact writers may be using “selection bias” in choosing statements for review. (I reviewed Ostermeier’s numbers, comparing them to mine, and found that his Republican “negatives” were somewhat higher in his database of 512 rulings as compared to my database of 1,330 rulings on current and former office-holders.)

Here’s the first one written by Mark Gisleson: (emphasis added)

Politifact isn't biased by party, they're biased in an establishment way. That's why Bachmann does badly by them, but so do people like Alan Grayson who they often parsed to death.

They also cannot differentiate between politicians who skillfully dissemble, as opposed to politicians who equivocate themselves into gray areas.

They would do much better if they placed every politician's statements in the context of their party's political agenda. If a misstatement serves their agenda, it should be graded more harshly because it's fair to assume that lies that benefit the cause are deliberate. 

I’ve already noticed that my conservative counterpart might be aware of this, because, in his Grading PolitiFact critiques, he often seems to deliberately and assiduously avoid placing the argument in the context of the (Republican) party’s political agenda. An excellent case in point is a PF ruling on Ann Coulter reviewed earlier this year where, following the tsunami-nuclear reactor incident in Japan, she claimed to Bill O’Reilly that radiation was good for you. Bryan’s argument that she didn’t deserve a “False” from PF was that the context of Coulter’s argument was the media’s over-reaction to it, when the fact was, as I showed, they seemed to be under-reacting, if anything, and the real context was the Republican party’s promotion of nuclear energy, ergo, Coulter’s claims about radiation. Bryan didn’t say anything about the Republican advocacy of nuclear energy.

Lil White Lies: How Glow Can You Go

I have written before about that “cheap Chinese Food” feeling I get from Bryan White’s reasoning when he blogs criticisms of PolitiFact’s rulings, or his Facebook commentary: It seems tasty and filling at the time, but a short time later one is hungry and has a headache from all the MSG. In other words, it sounds good, but later you say to yourself, after thinking about it…"Hey, wait a minute….that isn’t quite right…” and you're feeling a bit empty and kind of sick (and not from radiation).

Initially, I concurred a bit with  his recent criticism of a PolitiFact (PF) ruling on Ann Coulter, who said that “There is a growing body of evidence that radiation in excess of what the government says are the minimum amounts you should be exposed to are actually good for you and reduce cases of cancer.” He explained in a rhetorical mish-mash that PF missed the context of Coulter’s remark and replaced it with its own:

In context, Coulter was making the point that the media are passing on a classic "man bites dog" story. In other words she's making a point about media coverage of Japanese radiation leaks rather than jumping on a pseudoscientific bandwagon. Coulter tried to emphasize the same point on O'Reilly's program but ended up having to instead deal with the host's skepticism about the evidence.

He made it more clear on Facebook under the topic of Coulter’s statement at the PolitiFact page, when he was able to suck one Jason Curtis into his relentless debate machine:

Contrary to PolitiFact's stated principles, Coulter's point was ignored. She was making the point that the media was helping fan concerns about mildly heightened levels of radiation. That was overwhelmingly the point of the column she wrote, the one that O'Reilly had her on his program to discuss. O'Reilly introduces Coulter by saying she's "not down on radiation poisoning." And Coulter responds with "It's not me (...)".

Later he added, in the same vein:

…Coulter was trying to counteract media scare tactics. And it was improper to omit that point from the story.

When I first heard about the situation with the Japanese nuclear reactors on television, I also heard that there was no radiation threat to the United States, including Hawaii. In fact, it seemed to me it was being played down. From “mainstream media” ABC News:

Lil White Lies: Mission Improbable

How much blame does Bill Clinton deserve for 9/11? “A lot. Jimmy Carter got the whole thing started, Bill Clinton let it build, build, build, build, build. He wouldn’t deal with it, because he had no credibility on deploying the military. He was a pot-smoking draft dodger, and so when he was presented with credible evidence that this or that country was behind a terrorist attack, he’d just have to look the other way: ‘No, don’t let me hear that. Call in Monica!’… Jimmy Carter gave Islamic craziness its first real foothold. There was no state-sponsored—they were just living in the dirt hating us until they had Iran. How did that happen? Because Americans forgot what it’s like to put a Democrat in charge of national security. Then we have eight years of Bill Clinton ignoring, ignoring, ignoring, ignoring—they’re ginning themselves up, Osama is saying, ‘You have six dead in Somalia and you pull out? We have boys lining up.’ Now this isn’t the Cold War, these aren’t sane but evil white men—these are crazy Islamists. This country—people are under the impression that it could never change, that this can be taken for granted, it can’t be taken away, and this is a terrifying time. I mean, it’s terrifying to think what could happen with a one-term Democrat, any of those Democrats.” --- Ann Coulter

The subject of this current Bryan White foray into flunking the fact-checkers at PolitiFact is the inimitable Ann Coulter, about whom I will treat like Bill Maher or Joy Behar…they seem to like her. I shock my more liberal friends (my conservative friends even more!) when I don’t turn the channel if she’s on Fox or anywhere else…there’s just something about her that I don’t think she’s as serious as she portrays herself to be.