Response: “Oral.”
So many things we say are subject to interpretation, and in a way, my conservative counterpart’s entire blog relies the most heavily on that: how PolitiFact (PF), interprets a statement it selects for fact-checking, compared to how he believes it should be interpreted. He even goes so far as to claim the statement they checked was never even made, as he does in this PolitiFact ruling on a statement Laura Ingraham made on the Bill O’Reilly Show, where she frequently appears and usually hosts on Friday evenings. Bryan White’s conclusion as to the misinterpretation:
PolitiFact assumed Ingraham was talking about the program's popularity in Massachusetts. But that doesn't fit the context. Romney's concern is RomneyCare's popularity with Republican primary voters. If Romney doesn't win the Republican nomination then he has no realistic shot at the presidency, period.
Not only did PolitiFact fail to figure that out from the context, PolitiFact has failed to respond to the call to revisit the issue.
It isn't a close[d] issue. Does the need to protect the brand from admissions of error so easily supersede the desire to tell the truth? Or is ideological bias the better explanation for the reluctance to correct or clarify?
(Incidentally, PolitiFact does make corrections to its rulings despite Bryan’s claims of “the need to protect the brand from admissions of error.”)
Here’s Bryan White’s letter to Bill Adair and Lou Jacobson, imploring them to consider his interpretation as the only correct one, and theirs as a “failure”:
Dear Misters Adair and Jacobson,
The story on Laura Ingraham published on May 16 contains a substantial hole and a likely error.
The hole comes from the story's failure to provide context or background material sufficient to judge the context of Ingraham's statement. In other words, there is absolutely nothing in the quotation of Ingraham that would indicate she was talking about RomneyCare's popularity in Massachusetts. As such the presentation of the story conflicts with PolitiFact's aim of providing readers the tools to determine whether to agree with the "Truth-O-Meter" rating or not…
I say “failure” because Bryan uses this word repeatedly. It communicates negligence, it is intended to humiliate. So, what exactly did Ingraham say? Here it is straight from Bryan White’s own blog:
