Adieu to Adair: A Parody

Or:  Getting It Right with the White Knight

Recently it was announced that Bill Adair would be leaving PolitiFact to be a "Knight Professor":

This summer we say goodbye to Bill Adair, founding editor of PolitiFact.

Adair, who helped create the Tampa Bay Times' prize-winning fact-checking site, will join Duke University as the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, Times Editor Neil Brown announced Thursday. .

A national search for the next PolitiFact editor will begin soon, Brown said. Adair will continue a relationship with PolitiFact as a contributing editor.

I will miss Mr. Adair as he was very nice to me.  He featured my blog once in a PolitiFact article and sent me an e-mail letting me know he actually read it on occasion.  I hope all my data and charts didn't make him too dizzy.  I believe he worked very hard to make PolitiFact an objective fact-checker, even with all the nay-sayers.

 

On the light side, we certainly have a "White Knight" to replace Adair: Who better than my conservative counterpart, Bryan White! He really needs to apply for Adair's job, if he hasn't already done so! He has a journalism background/education, is already doing fact-checks, as well as a multitude of meta-fact-checks. Who better to understand the needs of the PolitiFact brand that someone who has been trolling its fact-checks and its Facebook page since 2008!

In fact, here's the un-cut, unedited list of things he might do as PolitiFact's chief editor:

(1) Have a little "cardboard Obama effigy" fire event to represent starting anew, to emphasize who should have really received ALL the Pants on Fire awards. It will be replaced with a giant framed official portrait of Ronald Reagan. It's like replacing Satan with Jesus!

Burn that Obama cut-out down!
His presidential pants are on fire now!

(2) Fire release Louis Jacobson, so he can move onto better things and blacklist him. After all, he was hired over White, and that's only fair considering that (IMO) no one would want his shoddy work, and his extreme bias must be prevented from infecting other news organizations.

(3) Offer Erick Erickson, one of the most unbiased right-wing journalists of the internet, the opportunity a huge salary increase and bonus to come down to Tampa to replace Jacobson. If he is unavailable, PolitiFact Bias co-founder and brilliant, prolific blogger (of "BewzNewzandVewz") Jeff Dyberg will be offered the position. Also make Tom Kertscher (of PolitiFact Wisconsin) a PolitiFact National Associate editor second to White, since he was the only writer who did truly fair fact-checks favoring Republicans.

 

(4) Eliminate certain PolitiFact states for cost saving/productivity improvements for favoring Democrats. Consolidate Miami (PolitiFact Florida) to Tampa (and demote the very biased Angie Drobnic-Holan to researcher status), plus shut down New Hampshire, Oregon and Rhode Island because their low output is not cost effective they have too many Democrats and are too liberal. Put PolitiFact Ohio on warning that their franchise will be terminated unless they substantially improve their performance Republican Truth Index to exceed the Democrats. Preferable PolitiFact states which should exemplify fairness and truthfulness in reporting would include but are not limited to: Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana and South Carolina.

 

(5) Institute a PolitiFact across-the-board policy in which any ruling will go through White for final approval.    In order to eliminate selection bias, White will select all statements as well.  It will totally eliminate selection bias by replacing it with selection bias favoring Republicans.

 

(6) Erick Erickson (or Jeff Dyberg, if he is available) will be responsible for enforcing instilling within PolitiFact the very best journalistic methodology as practiced by both he and Bryan: There may be instances where one party Republicans would have significant underlying arguments that make most of their statements true, or their statement at face value, if true, is to be ruled on at face value. Or that party Democrat might have statements that should have significant underlying arguments that make their statements false (unless the statement at face value is false). Since White and Erickson (and Dyberg) want only Politi-FACTS fact-checks favoring Republicans and denigrating Democrats, not opinion.

 

(7) If Jeff Dyberg is hired, require force on threat of their job that all PolitiFact project employees to read and carry a copy of inspirational readings/expressions to assist in their journalistic efforts Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

 

(8) "Lie of the Year" will be eliminated. Instead a vote will be conducted from the "Most Honest Republican Person of the Month" (see final point Number 11--"Most Honest Republican Person of the Month" replaces Pants on Fire). And instead of the vote being indiscriminately over-ridden by the PolitiFact management for its own choice, our "Most Honest Person of the Year" will be the voters' choice of the 12 "Most Honest Republican Person(s) of the Month", which will be a much more popular, fair option.

 

(9) To further PolitiFact's popularity and its new fair and balanced approach to fact-checking, it will be regularly featured on cable network news shows Fox News and the Blaze.

 

(10) And a message to Bill Adair in his new role: we don't need your stinkin' editorial contributions! Just joking!  We will certainly take a look at them flush them down the toilet.

(11) MOST IMPORTANT: The Truth-o-Meter category Pants on Fire, due to its inherently subjective determination as uncovered in White's impartial, fair-minded and unbiased studies , will be eliminated. An exhaustive review will be performed on the Pants on Fire already awarded to determine their legitimacy so that those claims indiscriminately awarded to Republicans can be removed with Democrat Pants on Fire kept in, since Democrats are much bigger liars than Republicans.

 

Instead, there will be a renewed emphasis on telling the truth which Republicans, like Bryan White, as everyone knows, have a monopoly on, as opposed to egregious lying. So a "Most Honest Republican Person of the Month" (also see Number 8) will be featured for being honest, forthright and adhering to the best of patriotic and conservative principles.

 

This should assure that PolitiFact becomes a much improved, unbiased publication that readers can enjoy without the defects of "Pants on Fire" or the flawed, logical-fallacy riddled and liberally biased fact-checks of some of its former writers. This should greatly balance and increase the readership base. Another Pulitzer prize here we come!

PolitiFact Detractors: Prediction Fulfilled (Part 1?)

About 1:21 p.m. yesterday, PolitiFact Bias published the same photo of Bill Adair in his office from the Nieman Journalism Lab article as written by Andrew Phelps, and yes, he did just as predicted in my last post (posted 10:32 a.m., or about 3 hours earlier) although patting himself on the back not in the way I had thought (although he left the door open to do so).

PolitiFact Bias’ Bryan White felt the insufficient exchange Phelps included between Amy Hollyfield, Bill Adair and Lou Jacobson was enough evidence to prove the “lack of objectivity” in deciding a Pants on Fire, as “hypothesized” in his “initial research study.” A highly limited conversation, with no other context, on ONE SINGLE ruling, to conclude an institutionalized dynamic liberal bias was afoot.

In terms of “objectivity” the review by Lou Jacobson which suggested a methodical, objective approach to determining the final ruling was totally ignored by White: 

• Is the claim literally true?
• Is the claim open to interpretation? Is there another way to read the claim?
• Does the speaker prove the claim to be true?
• Did we check to see how we handled similar claims in the past?

More than that, for all we know, the PolitiFact crew may have other objective point-by-point lists to guide them as to how to classify a ruling—and it could be when the claim does not meet all points, a meeting is called to decide; otherwise, it’s a no-brainer. And it’s more than possible Phelps didn’t get into that detail because it was “too much information” for his article.

That’s why I said in my first post on this that Bill Adair was setting White up. He thought it would be amusing to feed White’s false narrative, and White ate it all up:

Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab recently sat in on PolitiFact's formerly private deliberations and produces much the picture I have come to expect (pun not intended) during my years of increasing skepticism….The fact checkers doubtless assure themselves of their neutrality as nearby two-dimensional cardboard Obamas smile approvingly at their work….All credit to Jeff for spotting the President Obama cardboard figure in Adair's office that turns the statement about staffers' voting history into an absolute howler….But don't get the idea that Adair is biased or anything. 

White is also implying that, by saying “Obamas” (plural), all the PolitiFact crew have his image smiling at their work as part of his spin. I’m assuming this one was in Adair’s Washington office. So, does he know if Angie Drobnic-Holan has one down in Miami, or Lou and Amy have one in Tampa?

One of the concluding paragraphs of the Neiman article is very telling:

Unlike The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who awards Pinocchios for lies, or PolitiFact, which rates claims on a Truth-O-Meter, Jackson’s FactCheck.org doesn’t reduce its findings to a simple measurement. “I think you are telling people we can tell the difference between something that is 45 percent true and 57 percent true — and some negative number,” he said, referring to Pants on Fire. “There isn’t any scientific objective way to measure the degree of mendacity to any particular statement.”

So, White has his answer right there. Maybe the real problem is he knows there’s no scientific, objective way to measure it—that’s why he pretends to demand it. Just as he pretends to demand that PolitiFact find a way to control for selection bias, knowing there’s no way for professional journalists in an environment where the demand is for “newsworthiness” can do it. He even demands they publish their bias as a disclaimer, as if they were begging for the cardboard Obama's approval. He demands the impossible so he can falsely claim failure on the part of PolitiFact.

The only part of my prophecy “fulfilled” was that PolitiFact Bias would make a lot of hay from the cut-out of Obama; as PolitiFact Bias “mines” this article as it says it’s going to, I expect some of my other points will be repeated. More to come.

PolitiFact Detractors: So Simply Irresistably Predictable!

When PolitiFact posted an article from the Neiman Journalism Lab, a report on a sort of PolitiFact 2-Day Reality Show, it included the photo below, I couldn’t help but see what my conservative counterpart might do with it. Here’s my prediction: Bryan White now “thinks” he has some new evidence on which to base his claim that Bill Adair, the head of PolitiFact, must be liberally biased. Here’s my educated guess:

Yep, Adair's liberally biased!

That photo of Adair (right ) has an Obama cardboard likeness behind him, so Adair must therefore support Obama. Plus it appears Adair has given him a swag PolitiFact baseball cap. Not slung over Obama's head misshapenly, but to represent a "gift" from PolitiFact.

In the interview Adair says part of his inspiration to create PolitiFact came from when former Senator (formerly Democratic) Zell Miller “turned on” John Kerry at the Republican National Convention in 2004 and presented a highly misleading message of Kerry’s Viet Nam service—“...I didn't do anything about it,” said Adair. So, he wants to help the Democrats, then!

And this entire matter of  "adding more structure" to discerning a Pants on Fire in response to criticisms—it must be that Adair either read White's pseudo-research paper…or it relates to that PolitiFact Virginia debacle. Either way, White’s blog must surely be making Adair nervous.

To which I say—I think Adair is setting White up. (LOL)

The reality is that cardboard cutout tells us nothing about Adair’s political affiliation or “voting history.”  This is reasoning akin to saying those journalists who attend the annual Whitehouse Correspondence Dinner are Democrats because Obama is there--many of the same people were in attendance when Bush was president, does that mean they were Republicans back then?  Obama has been president almost four years,  so I’m guessing someone gave the cut-out to him as a joke. The cap slung over it shows the humor of it.

Note:  I composed the above on Tuesday, August 21. Unfortunately, I did not post it in time to prove my prediction correct, because White had this post on Facebook the morning of August 22:

Really?  Fellow conspiracy theorist Dyberg had to point that out?  Yea, right.  We'll wait and see what he does on one of this blogs.

Yes, Virginia, PolitiFact isn't a Bunch of Social Scientists

Still No Real Proof of PolitiFact Bias from PolitiFact Bias

Well, I guess all the relentless pressure worked (ha ha!). After six months of nothing on PolitiFact Bias’ Research page, we finally have that all-encompassing, definitive, proof-positive, documented study to end all studies, that gives us evidence beyond a shadow of a doubt, and even includes a measure, of PolitiFact’s liberal bias.

That's all just sarcasm, of course,  because after downloading and reading the 6-page report, it reminded me of another “study” which was posted last month, a fact-check by PolitiFact New Jersey, about a liberal blog called Uppity Wisconsin which had added up all the Trues and Mostly Trues of several governors and concluded that that since there were less for Republicans compared to Democrats, Republicans must lie more (which made it all the way to a claim using the data by a New Jersey state representative, which was then picked up by PolitiFact New Jersey).

But PolitiFact Bias’ methodology was a bit more sophisticated, and went the other way on the Truth-o-Meter. It added up all the Falses and Pants on Fire from PolitiFact’s beginning through the end of 2011, then took a percentage of the Pants on Fire of the False + Pants on Fire, then compared that percentage between Democrats and Republicans as a way to show how many more Pants on Fire are given to Republicans. It appears that PolitiFact Bias’ Bryan White may have gotten the idea from Eric Ostermeier’s much lauded study where he also took a look at a similar percentage (and probably Uppity Wisconsin did as well, in terms of True and Mostly True).

Overall results pointed to a marked liberal bias from PolitiFact’s start in 2007 through the end of 2011. The percentages for groups A and B varied only slightly. For group A, Republicans found making false statements received a “Pants on Fire” rating 28.57% of the time and Democrats 16.42 . For group B the percentages were 28.23% and 15.88%, respectively--a very close match. Group C reflected the expected distortion from unreliable chain email claims. Though neutral judgment ought to result in approximately equal proportions of unfair “Pants on Fire” ratings, Republicans drew that designation about 74% more often than Democrats. The numbers show a clear bias against Republicans and conservatives.

For further study and comparison I will use the percentage of one party’s “Pants on Fire” ratings divided by the percentage of the other party’s “Pants on Fire” ratings as the “PoF Bias” number. For Group A from 2007 through the end of 2011 Republicans suffered with a 1.74 PoF Bias number.

I’m not sure how he could place such confidence or reliance in such a number as being “a clear bias against Republicans” or how in the world could he expect that “neutral judgment ought to result in approximately equal proportions of unfair Pants on Fire ratings.”

To repeat PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair’s own words from the PolitiFact New Jersey fact-check:

PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair called suggestions that a governor is "in the top five" for falsehoods "inaccurate -- and meaningless.” ….

"It's fine if people want to use our report cards to compare the records of people we fact-check. But it's important to be accurate about what those report cards say and what they don't," Adair said. "The report cards provide a tally of the claims we chose to check. But it's not accurate to say the report cards indicate who ‘told the most lies.’ We are journalists who choose our fact-checks based on what is newsworthy. We are not social scientists and are not using any kind of random sample to select statements to check."

Adair re-iterated his “selection bias”—what is newsworthy—but according to him, tallying up the rulings to make comparisons of truthfulness is “inaccurate – and meaningless.” I would venture Adair would say the same thing even with tallying up claims at a macro level as done by White.

While I’ve taken a lot of guesses—it could be liberal bias, it could be Republicans lie more, it could be the rise of Fox News or the Tea Party, it could be a lot of things—but I don’t think just adding up the Pants on Fire as a percent of all claims found false validates any conclusion of liberal bias.   There's no  PolitiFact "Achilles' Heel" here as White wants his readers to believe.

So, since I had the same database, I decided to see if I could first come close to confirming White’s results….and I did, only my number was a bit higher at 1.79 (his was 1.74). This was for all PolitiFact National claims through the end of 2011. A lot of minor things could have caused the variance, in particular the classification of political affiliation for chain e-mails, many of which were False and Pants on Fire. White also delineated conservatives from Republicans, which could be a very subjective process. I never separated conservatives from Republicans just as I never separated liberals from Democrats. Nevertheless, it was very close.

But the PolitiFact (PF) states, one would surmise, should be pretty close to that of National; after all, they were likely “trained” in the process of fact-check by PF National, they rate national figures (Eric Cantor by PF Virginia and John Boehner by PF Ohio, for example), and PF Florida is basically a clone of PF National (read: Angie Drobnic Holan). They exceed PF National in number, comprising 53% of all rulings. Plus, we have the office holder distinction as used by Eric Ostermeier: it “adjusts” out the “expected distortion of chain email claims” as well as media pundits, advocacy groups, PACs and websites.

Next, I thought I should include the Truth Index for the identical data which created the “PoF bias” factor, which takes into account the other Truth-o-Meter categories, to see if there was any correlation. After all, if there’s more Falses and Pants on Fire, it should follow there are fewer Trues and Mostly Trues, since it’s basically a zero sum game. I did two forms of three scenarios, marked A, B and C.

Truth Index: Have Fact-Check, Will Travel

Note: The original post from July 24 has been deleted and this is a revision. In review I was not happy with my wordy diary of how I tallied the gun rulings. This post skips all that.

With the tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, PolitiFact has looked at its database on the now news worthy subject of guns and gun control. PolitiFact's Bill Adair writes in a recent article that they’ve “checked 74 claims on the subject of guns.”

His write-up looked at it in terms of the less positive rulings over the history of PolitiFact. Here’s a different look at it: more recent claims, both sides, and the full Truth Index for that period.

I came up with 40 “gun” rulings since 2011. That’s roughly the “second half” of PolitiFact’s “guns” database . Here is the Truth Index and breakdown for those 40:

Click to enlarge:  More recently "rulings on guns" have improved slightly, with only 30%  less than Half True.

As can be seen overall, however, 45% (compared to Adair’s 42%) of the rulings were True and Mostly True, and the overall Truth Index was an almost zero, but still in positive territory, 1.25. A Truth Index close to zero is the equivalent of an equal number of rulings in all categories except Pants on Fire. Accounting for the heavier weight of the negative rulings, it’s “above average.”

Democrats can be attributed for 18 of the rulings and had a Truth Index of +19.4 while Republicans made up 21 of the rulings with a Truth Index of -14.3 (the remaining ruling was a statement by the Police Chief of Milwaukee found Half True, for whom I could not find an affiliation). The divergence between Democrats and Republicans is comparable to the average divergence for the top ten most popular subjects, and is similar to that for rulings on the economy, elections issues, and the deficit (post forthcoming).

PolitiFact (Bill Adair) reported on the worst of the worst, most of the PolitiFact rulings which signified “Falsehoods and Half Truths” as in the title, along with the ubiquitous Pants on Fire. But it seems to me this inadvertently makes the National Rifle Association (NRA) look bad by emphasizing its negative rulings. The other problem here is that, of the 12 rulings mentioned in the article, two were by Democrats (Obama and Biden) and the rest were by people/groups for which most were not assigned a particular affiliation, although one would know by the statement what their affiliation most likely is. While Ted Nugent is shown as “Republican from Texas” (sure glad it isn’t Michigan), the National Rifle Association is only described as “An advocacy group that fights restrictions on the right to bear arms.”   For obvious reasons, it was assigned a Republican affiliation for the purpose of this Truth Index calculation, as was its executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.

From the aspect that some people who may be pro-gun will likely accuse PolitiFact of liberal bias on reading this article, it needs to be pointed out that there have been some truthful claims made with regard to guns that PolitiFact has checked out. For example, PolitiFact Texas ruled True a statement by (Republican) state senator Jeff Wentworth in February, 2011, that only 2 percent of Texas' 25 million residents has a concealed handgun license. PolitiFact New Jersey ruled True a statement by (Democrat) Senator Frank Lautenberg in April that a “loophole allows individuals convicted of domestic violence to purchase guns.”

The National Rifle Association isn’t always fibbing: recently PolitiFact found True a statement about Obama “trying to slash funding for the Armed Pilots Program designed to prevent terror attacks." It was awarded a Mostly True by PolitiFact Wisconsin for an alert it published that said “Wisconsin’s concealed-carry permit rules require more proof than other states.”

So, Adair gets Mostly True on this one. His article “is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.” The Republican nature of the NRA was not clarified in their file; and while discussions about gun control may be filled with half truths and falsehoods, there’s also a large portion of mostly true and truthhoods that should be recognized as well.

Lil White Lies Extra: Less Than Positively Pointless

Recently I discovered that PolitiFact had linked to my blog (Thank you!) in its website, in an article by Bill Adair where he’s now decided to compare Truth-o-Meter rating charts ("report cards"). I don’t know if he’s going to display a computation of the Truth Index, that might be a bit politically dicey. My feeling was he was looking for a nice high “magic” number of rulings before he would start this feature, which was 5,000.

PolitiFact Bias (which some call the “Gish Gallop of anti-PolitiFact Propaganda”) and co-blog Sublime Bloviations caught the link at PolitiFact and immediately posted (my blog was linked at the word "commentary"):

The other link ("commentary") was the sort of pointless statistical exercise that simply elaborates on the results of PolitiFact's fundamentally flawed process (the former link I gave a positive review, the latter author I've given a less-than-positive review).

I guess if I didn’t have a professed liberal bias by disagreeing, and I was someone especially important, I might get more positive reviews.  Because one can be important, but ideological disagreement makes one an idiot.

But the less than positive reviews have nothing whatsoever to do with my Truth Index analysis. Brad’s Terribly Bad Blog, or whatever it’s called, never looked at my Truth Index. It only looked at my Grading PolitiFact Review series at the time I first started it, which were attacked with almost the same intensity as PolitiFact's rulings. So for that, the Politi-Psy Truth-o-Meter on their claim gets a FALSE (I don’t use Pants on Fire, that belongs to PolitiFact). And I know the “selection bias” is just as pointless, as noted by Eric Levine:

They [PolitiFact Bias] just compiled a list of articles on Politifact over the course of a year and came to the conclusion that, since the worst ratings tend to favor republicans more than democrats, they must be biased in their selection in favor of the left. The problem with this is that their conclusion simply does not follow. Their are other possible reasons for this kind of result that have nothing specifically to do with Politifact being biased.

I encourage you to read the rest of Eric Levine’s analysis.

PolitiFact's Politi-Choice, Part 2

The number of PolitiFact (PF) detractors who yelled “foul” at its choice for 2011 Lie of the Year could make a whole new blog page, there were so many. In Part 1 of this post, there’s displayed a cartoon someone even created about it.

In the course of my research, I found what is believed to be the first “claim” that Medicare was ending, before the Democrats decided to really publicize it. It was from the Wall Street Journal in an article by Naftali Bendavid: (emphasis added)

…The plan would essentially end Medicare, which now pays most of the health-care bills for 48 million elderly and disabled Americans, as a program that directly pays those bills. Mr. Ryan and other conservatives say this is necessary because of the program's soaring costs. Medicare cost $396.5 billion in 2010 and is projected to rise to $502.8 billion in 2016. At that pace, spending on the program would have doubled between 2002 and 2016.

Then there were some (like Dave Weigel at Slate), as noted by PolitiFact, who believed the choice of PLOTY was because of the lobbying efforts of Paul Ryan, who upon learning of the nominees, posted a YouTube video asking viewers to vote for the Ryancare ending Medicare claim in PF’s poll. It seems he might not have known that it was the PF editors who make the final selection, not the winner of the poll. But we don’t know that he may have called PF’s Washington Bureau, or asked constituents to call, or made other lobby efforts behind the scenes.

Along with Weigel, Matt Ygelsias at Slate had a pretty good review called “PolitiFact lies about lying.”

It seems the most “noticed” and quoted PolitiFact detractor was Paul Krugman at the New York Times, who stated that this choice was “awful” in a memorial obit entitled “RIP PolitiFact.” Without much ado, he hit upon the real reason:

The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

Well, perhaps useless and irrelevant to Paul Krugman until the next time they make a Democrat statement Lie of the Year? Or call a blatant Pants on Fire on whoever the Republican candidate is next year as he campaigns against Obama? Because to dismiss PolitiFact on the basis of this one ruling is vastly under-rating it, however one may agree with Krugman’s assessment.

Media Matters published quite an extensive response to PolitiFact’s Lie of the Year, lending support to my contention that the Stimulus creating zero jobs claim should have been the winner, by not just pointing out the other PolitiFact rulings on it as uttered by others, but linking an additional ten examples, such as the publications Washington Times (9/7/11) and Washington Examiner (8/22/11), and well-known conservative pundits like Sean Hannity (video 7/13/11), Laura Ingraham (video 2/4/11) and Charles Krauthammer (video 5/31/11).  From the Media Matters article:

When asked about his explanation about the "zero jobs" lie by Media Matters' Joe Strupp, Adair said that the Lie of the Year "is a subjective decision of Politifact editors. ... [I]t's not based on data points."

Given how often the lies about the stimulus and the Obama apology tour were repeated by conservatives, it may have been helpful for Politifact to look at "data points" rather than just their editors' "subjective" sense of how widespread the lie was.

Data points? How does one determine how “widespread” a lie is without data points? I discussed data points in terms of the number of rulings in my previous post. The number of rulings that PolitiFact does relating to the economy, such as jobs, taxes, budgets, the deficit, far exceed those about healthcare and Medicare. I suppose the judgment of how “widespread” a lie is has to do with what might be termed its “urban mythology”—how it seems to have made an impact culturally, how much it has become accepted as a common belief. The first Lie of the Year, Sarah Palin’s death panel claim, is definitely in that genre.

But how does the public get informed in order for a myth to get rooted? I’m thinking it’s perhaps an “image” that the claim conjures up in peoples’ minds. The “image” makes the claim compelling, gives the claim a unique “brand”. In 2009, it was this board of faceless people having a meeting and saying who would live and who would die. In 2010, it was the incompetent socialist government taking over, bullying doctors and allowing the patient no choices. In 2011, it was…grandma getting thrown over the cliff. The “stimulus creating zero jobs” does not have any memorably associated image except maybe a Democrat congress and Obama throwing money down a toilet, but that’s not unique in that it could be associated with the debt ceiling or the deficit as well. So maybe I’ve seized upon a possible reason for its choice, on the other hand, it doesn’t always have to be the“granny off the cliff” lie that’s the most widespread.

But I digress. The list of complainants is extensive. I’ve already recorded a few of them above: Slate, Media Matters and Krugman at the New York Times. Many of the others have already been included in my page PolitiFact Detractors, although not linked to their latest PolitiFact “detraction.” Here they are in alphabetical order.  There's probably many more, but these are some of the "best" ones.

Sidebar: Barely True...or Mostly False? Part 2

In my "Part 2" of Bill Adair’s breakin’ out the Truth-o-meter on the June 28th edition of  MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, he mentions to host Chuck Todd that he is thinking of changing the “Barely True” category to “Mostly False.” At first I got all excited and thought maybe he read something I posted about six weeks ago which was headlined with precisely this suggestion. My ego eventually deflated, however, as I realized there could be other factors: I believe I saw some commentary at the Facebook page to that effect, but, more significantly, there was a ruling on a statement made around June 1 by the National Republican Congressional Committee where they essentially interpreted Barely True as True, which shows what can happen when you say something that’s mostly false is “Barely True.”

This is what NRCC spokesperson Tory Mazzola told PolitiFact (PF) in response to their inquiry as to why Mazzola claimed a PolitiFact-confirmed “True” for “Barely True”:

We [PF] sent him [Mazzola] an e-mail this morning (June 1) noting our puzzlement, and he replied. "By ruling it ‘true,’ albeit barely, you determined that the Democrats' responses were not believable, not credible, or false at least a degree more than ours were true," he said.

So, it all depends on interpretation…and a “Mostly False” ruling would likely have resolved this. As I said in my previous post, I do not like the words “Barely True” because the word True is somewhat misleading as it conveys the “True” or truth of the ruling more strongly than the False, even though it's more "False" than "True". And that’s exactly what was "conveyed" to Troy Mazzola and the Republican National Campaign Committee.

Politi-Score: Fact-checking Bill Adair

“…only chain e-mails score lower on the Truth-o-Meter than Michele Bachmann...”

PolitiFact’s Bill Adair has a recurring fact-checking role on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” hosted by Chuck Todd. I think yesterday’s (June 28) was the first one I’ve watched; while Adair does a pretty good job vocalizing the reasons for the rulings, he did say something (actually two things, one of which I’ll address in my next post) that merited this post.

Adair stated that only chain emails beat out Michele Bachmann as the “least truthful”. I wrinkled my nose at that statement (as something someone looking for a statement to fact-check might do) and said to myself, I don’t think that’s true. I recalled that the e-mails were all lumped together on PolitiFact’s “Personalities” page, regardless of political affiliation. There were 89 through the end of 2010, and to get a more accurate read on the Politi-Score, it we necessary for me to categorize them as to whether they were from Democrats, Republicans, or they were “unknown”. As it turned out, almost half (44) were in that “unknown” category.

Bachmann and chain e-mail total PF rulings and scores at the end of 2010.

Above is a screen-print of my filtered Excel spreadsheet reflecting Bachmann’s and the separated chain e-mail Politi-Scores at the end of 2010. The second to last column reflects the Politi-Score (the last column "DB Score" is the Daily Beast score, discussed below). Bachmann was way ahead of the chain e-mails because at that time she had 7 Falses and 6 Pants on Fire. In the Politi-Scoring methodology that means she didn’t even make a positive score, because False is assigned a zero and Pants on Fire is assigned a -25. Because among the chain e-mails there were 21 scoring from True to Barely True, only the e-mails of “unknown” affiliation scored a negative, although the negative wasn’t as high as Bachmann’s.  

Current Bachmann and chain e-mail total PF rulings and scores.

Politi-Score: Suddenly PF is number-crunching

After I wrote that email to PolitiFact, they had a self-congratulatory third anniversary article where PF (Bill Adair) decided for some unknown reason to do a little number crunching. Well, maybe he did it when they hit two years or on their first anniversary, so I should just stop speculating.

And in reading my email to them, I did not send them my spreadsheet, nor did I say anything about the percentage of each “Ruling” category. Although I had done that right from the beginning, because it just seemed logical. Here is how my numbers compared to theirs. Apparently, the better-known and more rated politicians and pundits are a little more honest than organizations and emails, because the most noticeable percentage variances are between the True and False/Pants on Fire categories.