Truth Index: CQ Tips

When PolitiFact first began its operations in 2007, it was a "joint venture" with the Congressional Quarterly (CQ), which until 2009, was owned by the same company as the Tampa Bay Times. This may be the reason why, at the end of 2008, the partnership with CQ was dissolved.

 

A claim by PolitiFact Bias in its "research" necessitated my review and update of 2007-10 statistics collected (which I had not dated or listed the writer) to determine what the CQ "input" might be:

When PolitiFact first launched, it existed as a joint venture between the St. Petersburg Times newspaper and the Congressional Quarterly magazine, both owned at the time by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. The numbers for 2007 and to a lesser extent for 2008 demonstrate tendencies not present in later years. Some of the differences may stem from the vigorous Democratic primary season or from the removal of input from CQ staff when the partnership was dissolved after the 2008 presidential election. Simply put, PolitiFact’s bias against Republicans as measured by its use of the “Pants on Fire” rating has intensified since the separation from CQ. Republicans during the more recent era receive a “Pants on Fire” rating 143% more often than Democrats (see Fig. 2).

At this point I have reviewed enough data to have completely recorded all rulings for 2007-08, the period of time that CQ participated. CQ has a large staff and spread out PolitiFact rulings among many of their writers and researchers, but because the Congressional Quarterly itself was considered the primary publication for the CQ staff, it would appear that there were a only a few people assigned to PolitiFact full time. That being said, during the time they worked with PolitiFact, they published 170 rulings out of about 800 total, about 20 percent.

 

A point needs to be made with regard to the rulings in that, because the Congressional Quarterly's area of expertise seemed to be what was happening in Congress, the majority of its rulings appear to relate to that as shown in the graphic below on Joe Biden: votes and positions in Congress. This may serve to also assure that "Pants on Fire" is not as much an option.

Click to enlarge:  These are all rulings authored by CQ staff members--"bills".

So let's take a look at the period from the third quarter of 2007, about when PolitiFact began to get established and enough rulings accumulated, and compare its Truth Index without the Congressional Quarterly rulings to that of just the Congressional Quarterly rulings. What we might expect is more "neutrality" to show--perhaps even a Truth Index favoring the Republicans, or at least very even, along with the crucial Pants on Fire indicator designed by PolitiFact Bias, to be around 1.0, or I'd say at least 5 percentage points within it, meaning a fair assignment of Pants on Fire. As I finish the dating for 2009 and 2010 data (I am 80% complete at this point) a chart can be built to see just how the Pants on Fire have "intensified" on a timeline.

 

The accumulated timeline for Democrats and Republicans is shown below, with the CQ Truth Index showing in the dashed lines. In the beginning, it seems we get a hint of PolitiFact's so-called liberal bias, with a 44 Democrat Truth Index, although the number of rulings is not significant enough--CQ at this point had only contributed 21. By the end of 2007, however, the Truth Indexes converged a bit, with the CQ Republican Index in the lead for "truthiness."

 

By the second quarter of 2008 the CQ Democratic Truth Index surpassed that of the Republicans, ending at a positive 9.1 for the Democrats and a positive 4.6 for the Republicans. The PolitiFact-team -only rulings, however, showed the Democrat-favorable variance it shows to this day at negative 11.9 for the Republicans and positive 13.6 Democrats. For all PolitiFact rulings accumulated through the first half of 2012, this compares today to a near-zero +.3 overall for the Democrats and a negative 23.5 for the Republicans. In other words, while the Truth Index still favors the Democrats today, both parties have been eroding steadily since 2007.

Click to enlarge:  This is a graph showing the Truth Index as accumulated.

Chain e-mails.  The last column of the chart is titled "No chains" because of the large number of chain e-mails PolitiFact started investigating and reporting on. In this last column the Truth Index is adjusted to show what it would be without those rulings. Before I had separated the e-mails for affiliation based on a cursory review of the ruling; this time I made it much more than cursory to try to make the affiliation as accurate as possible.

Truth Index: Yes I know, Get A Life!

It was late in 2010 when I first thought about doing my own database of PolitiFact rulings.  So between Christmas and New Years of that year, when there was a brief stand-still in publishing due to the holidays, I went through PolitiFact's personality page, linking to each person or group on the list and then recording the count.  So each record reflected the name and political affiliation, along with a total by True, Mostly True, etc.

 

In 2011, I started a more detailed analysis.  Each record was one ruling:  I also included the date of the ruling, subject and writer.  Late in 2011, I decided to include a brief description of the ruling.

 

In doing so I realized an historical account of PolitiFact was needed--the "up to 2010" rulings should be recorded in the same way, as one by one rulings instead of by person/group.  Recently my conservative counterpart made allegations with regard to Congressional Quarterly (CQ), which was PolitiFact's partner in 2007 and 2008.  The only way I could test their theory--that CQ mitigated PolitiFact's alleged left wing bias--was to record those rulings in this way, so that a complete timeline could be created, and the CQ rulings could be filtered out for analysis.

 

Luckily, PolitiFact doesn't delete "old" rulings.  So I've been spending a lot of time in a somewhat tedious process, although it's been interesting reading some of the claims made back then, as well as seeing how PolitiFact grew and progressed as a fact-checker, which I will post about soon.

 

Between other things going on in September (personally) and doing this, I've not done a whole lot of posting.  It should be picking up soon, however, as we look at PolitiFact with an historical perspective.

 

Truth Index: Obama-Romney 6 Weeks To Go

And a Peak at the Congressional Quarterly

For reasons to follow in this post, I thought it might be a good idea in this update on Obama and Romney's running PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index, to get a better look at what happened before 2010. So I haven't been posting as much, because it meant I had to go through 272 rulings for Obama and 44 rulings for Romney to date all the rulings...and do a few other things. 

Click to enlarge:  Until Romney veered way right, he had an admirable Truth Index

This latest chart shows the accumulated Truth Index for Obama and Romney quarter to quarter starting at the end of the third quarter of 2007, when the PolitiFact operation was really gearing up, since at that time as Obama fought for the Democratic presidential nomination, Romney also tried unsuccessfully to do likewise as a Republican. A note on the chart (brackets indicating the flat trend line) indicates the result at PolitiFact once John McCain became the presumptive 2008 Republican presidential nominee: from the end of the first quarter of 2008 until early in 2010, Romney was not subjected to the Truth-o-Meter at all. In early 2010, he was interviewed as the Affordable Care Act was being signed into law by Obama (perhaps because of his "Massachusetts" knowledge), which instigated a few rulings, and here it was that Romney perhaps hinted at one his future campaign talking points when he stated that he thought Obama was too soft (full of "apologies") in his foreign policy. He disappeared from PolitiFact's prying Truth-o-Meter until early 2011, and from then on he was a fairly regular PolitiFact fact-check target until his nomination put the fact-checks on (maybe temporary) steroids. He now has 174 rulings, which I believe is the second highest for PolitiFact.

 

But the trend shows, just as my last post with monthly trends showed, that Romney's Truth Index fell off considerably once he announced his candidacy for the second time in 2011. Of seven Falses awarded Romney between April and September, six of them were bad enough to be made Pants on Fire. He had only one True ruling during that time. By 2012, his average leveled off somewhat around negative 15.

 

Obama's Truth Index has been pretty steady in the positive 12 area (with 416 rulings as of this post), although the pre-2010 trend indicates he got off to a rocky start. He started with a very respectable 30 and then plummeted in the very next quarter to a negative 11. His Truth Index for that quarter only was a negative 62.5, with four Falses, with not one True nor one Mostly True. Must have been that the PF honeymoon with Obama was over.

 

The CQ Connection: A theory set forth in a PolitiFact Pants on Fire analysis by my conservative counterpart was that the Congressional Quarterly had influenced a less biased approach to the rulings, that PolitiFact had gone wild with Pants on Fire once the CQ partnership "was dissolved" at the end of 2008:

When PolitiFact first launched, it existed as a joint venture between the St. Petersburg Times newspaper and the Congressional Quarterly magazine, both owned at the time by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. The numbers for 2007 and to a lesser extent for 2008 demonstrate tendencies not present in later years. Some of the differences may stem from the vigorous Democratic primary season or from the removal of input from CQ staff when the partnership was dissolved after the 2008 presidential election. Simply put, PolitiFact’s bias against Republicans as measured by its use of the “Pants on Fire” rating has intensified since the separation from CQ. Republicans during the more recent era receive a “Pants on Fire” rating 143% more often than Democrats (see Fig. 2).

Part of my effort is not just in dating the PolitiFact rulings, but determining which ones were written by a Congressional Quarterly writer. My interest was to see how the writers treated Democrats and Republicans in terms of the Truth Index, to see if there's any correlation to support PF Bias writer Bryan White's claims. But to do so is an enormously tedious exercise, because PolitiFact National has roughly 1,780 rulings to go through for almost a four year period.

 

So to start I did Obama and Romney (for purposes of this post), with John McCain in my sites to next do a "presidential candidate trend" comparison; but at this point I've only done less than 20 percent of the rulings, so it will be a while. That being said, a few points about the Congressional Quarterly (CQ): between Obama and Romney CQ writers wrote about 15 percent of the rulings: 39 for Obama and 9 for Romney. The Truth Index as computed for only the Congressional Quarterly writers was within half a point: a positive 5.1 for Obama and a positive 5.6 for Romney. The Pants on Fires seem to defy White's contentions, however: Romney received only one from a CQ writer, while the three Pants on Fires Obama received were all from PolitiFact writers.