2013: First Six Months' Fact-checking for the Big Three

PolitiFact has definitely "downsized" in the U.S. even with its recent international presence in Australia.  At least for the time being.

 

Since 2011, I've generally expected 475 to 500 rulings from PolitiFact for each quarter.  When 360 were produced for the first quarter of 2013, I attributed that to the writers taking a break after the 2012 elections.  But the second quarter was pretty much a mirror of the first, going from 361 to an almost equal number of 363 rulings.   The dropping of PolitiFact Tennessee and no rulings from PolitiFact New Hampshire would not be enough to make up the difference.  Basically PolitiFact has cut back 20 to 25 percent.

 

With fewer rulings to record, I thought I might try something different:  back in 2010 I took a look at FactCheck.Org in and of itself.  I've compared rulings on the same statements many times, and on an individual basis, I've looked at various politicos in terms of Politifact, Factcheck.Org (FCO) and the Washington Post FactChecker.

 

This time I decided to record all three of the most prominent political fact-checkers (PolitiFact, WaPo FactChecker and FactCheck.Org) for the first six months of 2013.  I also tried to make a comparison in terms of the Truth Index.  Between PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter categories and the Gepetto Checkmark to Four Pinnochios (a "whopper") used at the Washington Post, it wasn't too difficult there.    Factcheck.Org (FCO), however, does not rate fact-checks  with Truth-o-Meters or Pinnochios like the other two.

 

Just like it did when I reviewed it in 2010, I found that FCO generally did not fact-check "truthful" statements, as the great majority of its findings are negative: either misleading or false (It appears the Washington Post FactChecker leans that way as well, although not nearly as much).   It was a very subjective exercise for me to attempt to "rate" them as well, so the "Truth Index" I obtained, in my opinion, should not be construed as entirely accurate.

 

For the most part I based my FCO "ruling" on the same criteria as PolitiFact.  "Misleading" statements which contained an element of truth "but ignore[d] facts which would give a different impression" were categorized as "Mostly False" while statements which were "inaccurate," or incorrect (or when the FCO article called the statement a "false claim," which occurred fairly often) were categorized as False.    There were no "Pants on Fire" or "Whoppers" for FCO.

 

The results I obtained can be shown in the chart below.

The two "smaller" fact-checkers tend to concentrate on facts likely false based on the "Truth Index."

Even with PolitiFact's downsizing, it is still the dominant fact-checker of the "Big Three" with over 3/4 of all rulings for the first six months of 2013.    As noted, it checks a lot more statements which, as can be seen are (1) "True" and, due to its state operations, (2) statements by people with no political affiliation.

PolitiFact had a 57 percent higher overall Truth Index than the Washington Post FactChecker, and it was 82 percent higher than Factcheck.Org.

Politi-Scoring Romney Part 2: NOBama

Late last year I started including a brief description of the fact-check in my database. I wanted to make it easier to look for overlaps, contradictions, things that might be interesting to post, etc., and although it was a pain to do, it really helped, especially in this case, with Politi-Scoring Mitt Romney.

Mitt "Monty Burns"-style

There was one obviously repeating theme of topic throughout the fact-checks for all the presidential candidates, in particular front-runner Romney. PolitiFact often puts it under the subject of “Candidate Bio” (although not always) which is basically a statement about the “other” candidate they are running against. As I could see it unfold, I tried to make that subject the very first word (regardless of “subject”) so I could later filter them out: Obama.

Statements about Obama and his administration and policies comprised just over 30 percent of the Romney fact-checks. There were 56, of which half were PolitiFact rulings (so about 1 in 4 of the 125 PolitiFact Romney rulings dealt with statements about Obama).

The Romney Politi-Score for just “statements about Obama” was a negative 55.4, which almost triples to the downside his overall Politi-Score of negative 18.6. There were no Romney statements from any of the fact-checkers which could be ruled 100% True when it was about Obama; in fact, PolitiFact had no statement rulings True or Mostly True on Romney when Obama was the subject (their Truth Index in this category was a very “untruthful” negative 64.3). Most of the “Mostly Trues” were “1 Pinnochio” rulings coming from Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post Fact-Checker, some of them combination claims done on Romney speeches.

Some examples of “Mostly Trues”:

• Obama and “crony capitalism” (Washington Post)
• Did Obama say he ranked among top 4 U.S. Presidents? (Washington Post)
• Over 500,000 Californians have lost jobs since Obama became president. (FactCheck.Org)

Most of the “Half Trues” were numbers claims which were difficult to substantiate.  Two appeared to be duplications of each other by PolitiFacts National and Georgia on a statement from Romney about 25 million people out of work (I included this as an “Obama” claim because Romney is implicitly faulting Obama for so many unemployed).  One more looks as if it’s a Romney repeat very similar to the 25 million claim, but in that case it’s 20 million people, and was one of the three fact-checks from AZ (Arizona) FactCheck, done in July of 2011 (they found it “unsupported.”)  Other examples of statements found "Half True":

• Since Obama’s Stimulus over 1 million jobs were lost (PolitiFact Florida)
• Obama raised taxes 19 times (PolitiFact National)
• Obama added 135,000 bureaucrats to workforce (PolitiFact New Hampshire)

Play Mittsy for Me: Politi-Scoring Romney

Keep it under wraps, Mitt.

When I first became interested in politics as a teenager, I was particularly enamored with what was then called the Rockefeller Republicans. As I lived in the Midwest (Ohio) I was intrigued with Mitt Romney’s dad, George, who seemed to me to be one of those Republicans with a liberal streak, and at the time he was running for president, I thought he was just the guy America needed: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. But that was just me, and as it turned out, he didn't make it.

Mitt was probably a lot like his father at one time; but since then he has been too much of all things to all people. Right now I am looking for him to veer back left in his winding road to trying to win the presidency, and I believe his right turn may (partly) account for some of his down turn in truthiness as I will show in this Politi-Score review (although I discovered something more specific, but related to that right turn). In the mean time he needs to work on his “Tin Man” image, and there are certainly some good ways to do that.

In my last post I was looking forward to scoring 184 Mitt Romney statements but in cross-checking everything found I had missed one, so make that 185 Romney statements, a pretty big number considering the other reviews I’ve done. There were 125 by PolitiFact, 33 from FactCheck.Org, 24 from the Washington Post Fact-Checker, and an extra 3 I threw in from AZ (Arizona) Fact Check. PolitiFact may have an even higher count now; my cut off for their rulings was as of April 10.

For comparison purposes, Rick Santorum had 45 rulings (although his were only from PolitiFact); Newt Gingrich, my last full Politi-Score before Romney, had 76; Rick Perry was 37, Herman Cain 34, and Michele Bachmann was my first with 50 fact-checks and rulings. So all in all, Mitt has had more rulings and fact-checks than all the other presidential candidates I’ve done combined, excluding Gingrich. That being said, there will be another post comparing the Truth Indexes/Politi-Scores for all Republican candidates.

For FactCheck.Org, it is much more difficult to gather as well as decide the “score” on claims. They do not have any nice neat lists like PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact-Checker. I must go through a name search and then evaluate each article and subjectively decide where it goes as far as a Truth-o-Meter ruling. For most purposes there is no “Pants on Fire.” For FactCheck.Org I decided to go as far back as early 2011. And I must evaluate the rulings from WaPo as well; the page that shows accumulated rulings for each politician also includes statements made by their superPACs on their behalf which I did not include. So including inevitable new rulings since this post, my numbers are slightly different than what you may see at the respective fact-check websites.

Overall. Here’s how the “current” Politi-Score looked overall for Romney: he’s at a negative 18.6, a relatively good score compared to the other presidential candidates, but with a lot of caveats.

Click to enlarge:  Romney's Politi-Score on 185 fact-checks

Fact-Checker comparison. It might help to take a look at the score he received from each fact-checking source. To make it more apples to apples with the other fact-checkers, I separated Romney’s pre-2011 PolitiFact rulings from those since early 2011, as the other fact-checking scores were also mostly for this current period. I did not include a Politi-Score for AZ-FactCheck for the three rulings they did as that does not mean much. For the record, they had one True, one False, and one they called “Unsupported” which I counted as “Half True.” This puts AZ-FactCheck’s Politi-Score right at zero for the three rulings.

Click to enlarge: Romney's combined PolitiFact Truth Index for 125  rulings is -12.9, almost the same as Washington Post's.

Find THIS PolitiFact (FactCheck) Ruling: Rick Santorum

About the time I published a Truth Index on Rick Santorum, he decided to drop out of the presidential race. It seems so far I have been right there as the 15-minute presidential candidate fame light dimmed for Bachmann, Perry, Cain and Gingrich. Keeping that in mind, I’ve just completed a review of 184 Mitt Romney rulings from all of the fact-checkers….don’t think it will work this time, ha ha.

Ron Paul is not pictured as he is already on another planet; Santorum is headed for deep space as well.

This post will combine a “PolitiFact versus FactCheck Number 3” review on Santorum, plus a few “nothing to be seen here”—i.e, “Find THIS PolitiFact Ruling” fact-checks done on Santorum but not by PolitiFact (or even FactCheck.Org).

(Note:  Google Blogspot does not appear to take too kindly to tables.  Please excuse the spacing/font errors.)

Santorum Statement	FactCheck	PolitiFact
"The Obama administration prohibits people who work with at-risk youth from promoting marriage as a way to avoid poverty."  (January, 2012)	"Santorum was right about abstinence not being part of this particular program, but he was wrong about marriage.”	“The change under Obama…was about what could be taught regarding abstinence -- not marriage… Santorum simply got it wrong. His statement is False.”
"… a third of all the young people in America are not in America today because of abortion.” –Rick Santorum, during a Republican presidential debate (March 29, 2011).	“But Santorum was wrong when he said that a third of pregnancies end in abortion…”	False:  So we find Santorum is significantly overstating the frequency of abortions…”
"Barack Obama has raised a 'stop sign' on oil exploration."  (June 6, 2011)	“Santorum was wrong when he said the Obama administration is 'against any kind of exploration offshore or in Alaska.'  The administration has approved 296 new permits...”	False:  "Just because the pace isn't as fast as some would like doesn't mean that Obama 'has put (up) a stop sign.'"
"...there were requirements put on other states when they came into the union that English be the principal language…”  (following similar statement in Puerto Rico, March, 2012)	“Rick Santorum greatly overreached when he claimed that Congress required English be the principal language and that it be taught and spoken universally” in several Southwest territories, Oklahoma and Hawaii as preconditions for them attaining statehood."	NOT CHECKED by PolitiFact. Possible Half True or Mostly False, as they are not saying he is "wrong."
"I didn't vote for a steel bailout." ( February 26, 2012, on Meet The Press).	But in fact, the former Pennsylvania senator voted in 1999 for the Emergency Steel Loan Guarantee Program, which was dubbed a “bailout” by multiple news organizations at the time.	NOT CHECKED by PolitiFact. Possible Mostly False or False.  It was $400 million dollars of taxpayer money, not anything like the billions for the automakers (also loan guarantees) but a substantial sum nonetheless.
“The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Miss., on March 12, [2012]. He made similar comments in early February in Colorado Springs, Colo., saying that global warming was a “hoax” and that “man-made global warming” and proposed remedies were “bogus.”	"...how dangerous can carbon dioxide be? Too much is definitely a bad thing. …97 percent to 98 percent of climate researchers ‘most actively publishing in the field’ agreed that climate change was occurring.”	NOT CHECKED by PolitiFact. In fact, nothing listed at all (as of today) on Santorum's view of global warming.  Given other rulings it's done, however, it would probably merit a False.
"In the Netherlands people wear a different bracelet if you’re elderly and the bracelet is ‘do not euthanize me.’ Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year, and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands, half of those people are euthanized involuntarily at hospitals because they are older and sick." (February 3, 2012,  forum at Grace Bible Church in Columbia, Mo.)	This was a 3-part debunking:  (1) "Government statistics show euthanasia is climbing, but represented only 2.3 percent in 2010, according to the most recent data."  (2) "A representative of the Royal Dutch Medical Association said 'there are no forced cases of euthanasia.' " (3) "...the Dutch government and medical association say no such bracelets exist."	NOT CHECKED by PolitiFact. The multiple-lie voracity of this claim would have made a great Pants on Fire to hang on Santorum.  But they didn't....why not since they're supposedly so liberally biased?
"The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American Left who hates Christendom. ... –Rick Santorum, campaigning for president in South Carolina (February 2011)	NOT CHECKED by FactCheck.	NOT CHECKED by PolitiFact, even though it might be considered a candidate for one of those "push polls"-- "does the American Left hate Christendom?"  Definitely a good "False" ruling.
"I think the Democrats are actually worried he (Obama) may go to Indonesia and bow to more Muslims.” –Rick Santorum, Fox News interview (May 2010)	NOT CHECKED by FactCheck.	NOT CHECKED by PolitiFact.  This would have gone hand in hand with Romney's "Obama Worldwide Apology Tour" claim which garnered a Pants on Fire.



Truth Index: Rick Santorum

I incorrectly discounted Rick Santorum as a potential presidential candidate of standing when he started his campaign—I think a lot of others did as well (many of us had our money another Rick—Rick Perry, until he opened his mouth).

He sort of reminds me of a male Michele Bachmann with his religious inferences (it should be noted that so far in 2012, Bachmann has not been subjected to the Truth-o-Meter). While I have to give him some credit for standing up for what he believes in, there’s not enough voters who believe in what he believes in to get him elected, which is why it appears that many are starting to line up behind Mitt Romney. Not swaying is what could defeat him: if Santorum was nominated he would stick with his strong conservative ideals, while Mitt would sway left again for that necessary swing vote. (Marco Rubio might say the majority of Americans are conservative, but it’s mostly what they say and not what they do, and the Republican party is well aware of that..)

But enough of my political banter. After winning the state of Iowa (after being called for Mitt Romney) and his rising star of being the “true conservative’s choice” MUCH more attention, of course, has been given to him. And yes, as PolitiFact notes, Rick Santorum’s Truth Index has fallen since 2011.

Out of 23 Santorum statements earning our lowest ratings -- Mostly False, False and Pants on Fire -- 17 have occurred since the beginning of the year, nearly three-quarters.

In contrast, of 10 statements earning our highest ratings -- True and Mostly True -- only half have occurred since the beginning of the year.

But instead of looking at numbers of Trues and Mostly Trues versus Falses and Pants on Fire, let’s get into a little more of the nitty gritty. Up until March of 2011, Santorum had not been fact-checked at all by PolitiFact. By the end of 2011, he had 13 Truth-o-Meter rulings with a negative 19.2 Truth Index. So far in 2012 he’s had 32 more rulings, for a grand total of 45 through April 3, and his Truth Index for the 45 is a negative 31.1. This chart shows how Santorum’s Truth Index declined month to month as his number of rulings mounted.

Here’s what his chart looks like for 2012 only, which Truth index-wise at almost negative 34 is slightly worse than the cumulative above.

Click to enlarge: Mitt Romney's 2012 PF ruling count and Truth Index are almost identical, at 33 rulings and -31.8 Truth Index.

The most covered subject from rulings on Rick Santorum was healthcare, over 20 percent of them (ten) mostly about “Obamacare” and in attacking Romney, about the similarities to what he did in Massachussetts. However, that Truth Index of negative 15 is higher than his overall average. Here’s how he did on healthcare graphically:

The second part of this analysis compares claims with FactCheck.Org but should be more accurately categorized as “Find THIS PolitiFact Ruling” (“Nothing to See Here”) since many of them were not covered by PolitiFact. That post will follow shortly.

Politi-Scoring the "Newty Professor"

Because Newt Gingrich likes to refer to himself as a “professor” and “historian” I thought it might be interesting to take a look at his claims among the fact-checkers involving history just to see how “accurate” he is.

Newt the Professor often gets the cartoon treatment as part of our pop culture.

Selecting out those PolitiFact statements by Gingrich designated to the topic “History” in order to take a look at how truthful he is as an “historian” was not enough. Some statements didn’t seem “historical” enough in a contemporary context. Gingrich statements reviewed by the other two fact-checkers needed to be evaluated as relating to “history” as well. So I settled on a few caveats in selecting fact-checked statements with a “history” perspective: I left out Gingrich’s biographical history, and recent history, in particular, during the period of time in 1990’s in which he was Speaker of the House. In other words, I left out Gingrich’s personal history, the history he conveys about himself. I left out only one statement of the seven total which PolitiFact designated in the topic “history” for him. Many of the statements chosen were comparative, such as “there are more in the U.S. in poverty than at any time since the U.S. Census Bureau began keeping records” (i.e., in U.S. history—this was given a Half True by PolitiFact) or his only Pants on Fire “The U.S. spends less on defense today as a percent of GDP (than) since Pearl Harbor,” where PolitiFact Georgia writer M.B. Pell concludes thus:

A better way to compare defense spending, or any kind of government spending over a long period of time, is to use dollars adjusted for inflation, Adams said.

The United States spent $700 billion on defense in 2010, $300 billion more than the adjusted Cold War average, Adams said.

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project, said defense spending also does not include funding for other agencies that contribute to national defense such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the State Department.

"It’s a distorted way to think of it for the sole purpose to pimp for more money," Wheeler said.

Gingrich tweeted that the country now spends less on defense as a percentage of the GDP than at any time since the start of World War II. That’s a firm statement, but since the Cold War ended, and in a few other years as well, the percent of GDP used for defense has been consistently lower than current spending levels.

Further, experts say the concept is highly misleading.

Gingrich gets our lowest rating on this one. Pants on Fire.

It came down to 12 statements; here's how the PolitiFact app would look in "3D":

Click to enlarge:  No True, Lots of Half True and Mostly False. Compare History Politi-Score to Newt's overall -53.

Next, I'm going to display a portion of the Excel spreadsheet where I work the ratings to derive the above chart, to show the statements selected. Gingrich had only one rated Mostly True (that “[O]n the day of the New Hampshire primary in 1980, the top 13 people of Ronald Reagan’s staff quit.") out of the 12. Eight of the 12 statements were Mostly False or worse.

Politi-Scoring Newt Gingrich: Newt So Fast

So far, my blog has looked at Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain at approximately the peak point of their 15 minutes of presidential potential fame. I’m trying to “save the best for last” based on these peaks and valleys, although I never expected to see this happen with Newt Gingrich. From the looks of recent polls, I may even be doing Ron Paul as well!

The increase in statements being rated for Newt Gingrich were commensurate with his rise in the polls; as one Democratic advisor said he was climbing higher on the “pole” and more people could “see his butt” and where better to see it than with the fact-checkers.

Currently at PolitiFact (December 26) Newt Gingrich has a total of 39 statements rated which is an increase of 33 since the end of 2010, when he only had been ruled on six times. At that time, with only six rulings, he stood at a Truth Index of negative 50, with two of the six statements rated Pants on Fire. Today he’s added six more Pants on Fire, but his Truth Index has remained somewhat steady at a negative 52 (with a negative Politi-Score of -53 overall) a little worse than Mostly False on the Truth-o-Meter.

While a lot of PolitiFact followers think Michele Bachmann is the biggest liar, so far in 2011 she’s scoring more truthier than Gingrich and Herman Cain. Newt is the Number Two Liar to Number One Herman Cain (followed by Bachmann, with Perry in last place). If you preview the “See Them All” rulings for Gingrich on PolitiFact, you can see that lately, he’s been hard pressed to score higher than Half True.

There were 76 statements rated for Newt (as noted in the above Politi-Score graphic) between the three fact-checking organizations. There were seven statements which I term “re-covered”: that is, the same statement was covered as a fact-check by more than one fact-checker.

Balancing Act. Gingrich’s false claim that he balanced the budget for four straight years and had a $405 billion surplus was the most re-covered claim, showing up five times as a fact-check throughout 2011.  PolitiFact and FactCheck.Org actually covered it twice, because despite the fact-checks he kept repeating it.

"Wrong then, wrong now" indicates PolitiFact's second review of this oft-repeated, most-rated statement by Gingrich.

Even a fourth fact-checker, the “CNN Truth Squad”, not included in my Politi-Score numbers, got in on this one, giving it a “verdict” of false.

Politi-Score: Citizen Cain

Before we know the final outcome of the issues Herman Cain has been experiencing lately, and he is still a leading candidate, this may now be a good time to take a look at his Politi-Score.

Maybe there isn't very much to what
Herman Cain says he can deliver.

When candidate Bill Clinton experienced something somewhat similar back in 1992, he overcame it and went on to become president for two terms; unless things get far worse, Herman Cain can do the same. Although listening to some of the (Republican) pundits, it doesn’t look like he’ll be their nominee. While I hear people like Ann Coulter say that Democrats fear a Conservative Black more than anything, I haven’t seen any indication. If he was nominated, I think it would be great to see him run against Obama—it would really mark the progress of our country.

But to get back to Cain’s Politi-Score: It’s at the bottom of the barrel. It’s the lowest of all the current Republican candidates…even lower than perennial flame thrower Michele Bachmann. At the time I computed the Truth Index for the first 9 months of 2011, he was next to the bottom for all those with 10 PF rulings or more, only worsted by sometimes candidate Donald Trump, who got his pants set on fire with birther remarks until Obama released his long-form certificate earlier this year.

While some argue that FactCheck.Org has higher standards and perhaps less biased reporting than PolitiFact (PF), it recently published quite a derogatory article in which it basically fact-checked the course of Cain’s statements in regard to the sexual harassment accusations he has been facing. Those have not been included in my Politi-Score computations, of course. The article was entitled “Cain’s Pattern of Evasion and Misdirection -- The GOP candidate contradicts himself on abortion, 9-9-9 and now on allegations of sexual harassment.” Here are some choice excerpts:

Politico reported that two women accused him of inappropriate behavior while he served as head of the National Restaurant Association and that both women received financial payments from the trade group. Cain has denied the allegations. At first, Cain also denied that either woman received a settlement. But later the same day, he acknowledged that in at least one case “there was some sort of settlement or termination” worth “maybe three months’ salary.” The next day Cain said it was “in the vicinity of three to six months.” The New York Times reports it was a year’s salary….

In addition to this pattern of evasion and misdirection, Cain also has a proven ability to spread outrageously false information — such as accusing Planned Parenthood of “genocide” and concentrating abortion clinics in black neighborhoods…

Herman Cain… revels in being an unconventional candidate. His campaign is perhaps best exemplified by a viral Web ad of his cigarette-smoking chief of staff declaring that “America has never seen another candidate like Herman Cain,” and then taking a long drag on a cigarette and blowing smoke….

But as he rises in the polls, Cain has come under attack from rivals and has found himself being held to the same standards as conventional top-tier candidates. He’s finding out that even unconventional candidates cannot blow smoke and get away with it.

Spread outrageously false information….Blow smoke and get away with it? I think if I heard that coming from PF’s Lou Jacobson, my conservative counterpart would be having a cow with what he would call “editorializing versus fact-checking.”

Cain had 34 statements reviewed: 22 by PolitiFact, 6 by the Washington Post Fact Checker and 6 by FactCheck.Org. Here’s how he looked overall and with each checker using the PF Truth Index app format:

Politi-Score: Twinkle Twinkle Lil Lone Star

Read down for fine print of "Texas Miracle."

Rick Perry is one candidate who has a lot of foretelling qualities that make him the person that Obama might not beat. We’ve had a lot of presidents from the state of Texas; in my time, it suddenly started with a Democrat in Lyndon Baines Johnson when I was awakened to the potential tragedies of politics one cold early afternoon in November of 1963, when I was in grade school. Then there was the first centrist Republican George Bush, who was sort of semi-Texan, and then his "Compassionate Conservative" son for two terms, and now the distinctly right-wing Perry. But Perry also bears a resemblance to Ronald Reagan: a rugged, handsome former Democrat with a certain charisma, who’s going to run during a period of time which is much like the late 70’s-early 80’s, against a candidate who reminds me sometimes of Jimmy Carter. And then there’s something I call the “Rick” factor: Perry is not a business man like these two, but having lived in two states where the guy who recently became governor had the name Rick (Snyder in Michigan and Scott in Florida), my intuition says, maybe there’s another Rick on the horizon, in a much bigger way.

Rick Perry is not the “liar” that I’ve shown Michele Bachmann and Nancy Pelosi to be. He scores more toward the center, although I’d say somewhere below center. Thus far in 2011 he’s had 37 rulings, from PolitiFact (23), Washington Post Fact Checker (8) and FactCheck.org (6). His averages for all three are shown below, along with the Politi-Score (which averages all 37 together):

So Perry has a Politi-Score of -35, as compared to a -47 for Michele Bachmann and a -77 for Nancy Pelosi for similar time periods. As noted in the following PolitiFact Truth Index trend chart for Perry, he was getting better this year, until he started considering a run for the presidency, and then his cumulative Truth Index got worse, although not by a lot, because of the cumulative averaging effects of  his many previous rulings.

In July, Perry ranked Number 17 out of 25 individuals/groups (actually, 26 are ranked; chain e-mails are counted twice for affiliation) with 15 or more rulings ranked by the Truth Index, for all PolitiFact rulings through the end of June. He was Number 9 among 15 Republicans who made it to the list.

Politi-Score: The Six Million Meal Woman

S T R E T C H I N G
the truth more than her face!

 Nancy Pelosi is the subject of this next individual analysis of fact-check to fact-check comparisons with the Politi-Score. In a previous post I stated I was thinking about doing Joe Biden, but he has not had much this year in the way of rulings: Pelosi’s have gone down “a bit” since she lost her position as speaker, but I thought she would serve as a useful female Democratic comparison to Republican Michele Bachmann, who was my initial Politi-Score designee. Pelosi has not had as many rulings as Bachmann so I have to compile her scoring a bit differently: looking at her total rulings up to about a year ago, then comparing them to that year since, as well as to Bachmann.

There’s a total of 22 rulings from all sources: 11 from only PolitiFact up until one year ago (August 2010) and 11 for the period August 2010 to August 2011: from PolitiFact (6), Factcheck.org (4) plus a single one from the Washington Post Fact Checker. Although that single one proved to be a very crucial fact-check in terms of PolitiFact ruling accuracy and/or potential bias.

It turns out Pelosi has been going the way of Bachmann on the Politi-Score, or maybe even the opposite direction, since Bachmann’s PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index has technically improved from a year ago. Pelosi’s “truthiness” has gone down considerably, and her overall average of an almost “Mostly False” negative 41 was a vast drop from a close-to-Half-True negative 4 which was her Truth Index up until about a year ago. This was because in the last year she’s averaged a negative 75 on the PF Truth Index; her Politi-Score for the last year, the combination of all three fact-checkers as a measure, is a negative 77. That’s pretty bad. As my favorite Truth Indexer Steve at Quibbling Potatoes might prove, she’s way out of one standard deviation. In other words, her non-truthfulness is way off the norm.

There were two re-covered fact-checks. The first one was an employment numbers comment that Pelosi’s made frequently in different forms. In April, she said that more jobs were created in the first year of the Obama administration than all eight years of George W. Bush. PolitiFact and Factcheck.org both reviewed this statement. PolitiFact ruled it False while Factcheck.org called it misleading:

Nancy Pelosi accurately — but misleadingly — said more private jobs were created last year than under Bush. Her statement was true. But it's also true that there were still 2,065,000 fewer private jobs in May than there were when Obama took office.

At last year's pace of job creation, it would take until February 2017 just to regain the jobs lost since the high point reached under the previous administration. And it would still take until 2015 to regain all those jobs even under the faster pace of job growth during the last 15 months.

PolitiFact ruled Half True on a statement by Pelosi that “Under a House Republican appropriations bill, "6 million seniors are deprived of meals” concluding as follows:

In other words, Pelosi’s problem wasn’t her math; it was how she reported her math at the event. So ultimately, Pelosi is wrong, but we think she deserves credit for taking a cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers. On balance, we rate he claim Half True.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker, wasn’t nearly as magnanimous, giving Pelosi’s statement 4 Pinnochios, or the equivalent of a PolitiFact Pants on Fire:

In a city with overheated rhetoric, Pelosi’s statement ranks high on this year’s list of bloviated bluster. It’s bad enough that she repeatedly mixed up 6 million meals and 6 million people — and made no effort to correct the record after her statement was reported in the media. But the figure she used appears to have been invented itself, with little basis in fact.

So, we have PolitiFact saying she took a “cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers”, while the Washington Post Fact Checker titles Pelosi's figures “absurd math.”

Politi-Score: Wrapping Up Bachmann (Jumping the Snark Part 5)

Here’s the rest of the statements by Michele Bachmann which have been fact-checked at least two times.

Bachmann: "My husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm." (June 26)

PolitiFact (PF) ruled False, and there was this from FactCheck.org:

Bachmann falsely claimed that she and her husband "have never gotten a penny" from a family farm that received federal subsidies. But she reported income from the farm in 2006, 2008 and 2009 — the most recent year available — on her congressional financial disclosure statements.

Bachmann:  “The president released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve.” (June 26)

PolitiFact ruled False, while the Fact Checker included it as the "blended" Mostly False, expressed thus:

This is a huge overstatement. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has 727 million barrels of oil, and the Obama administration announced last week that the U.S. will release 30 million barrels of oil from the reserve. (Another 30 million barrels will be released by European countries.)

So she’s off by a factor of 25.

Bachmann:  “One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office.” (March 26)

PolitiFact gave this one a Pants on Fire, while FactCheck.org said “not even close”:

This claim is not even close to the truth. A query of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement’s online database shows 276 permits were approved for "new wells" — both developmental and exploratory — from the time Obama took office on Jan. 20, 2009 to the date of Bachmann’s speech.

Jumping the Snark AND Grading PF Liberal Style!

When I initially saw this result in my Excel “sort” I straight off dismissed it: Half True at PolitiFact versus False at FactCheck.org , for Michele Bachmann’s statement that “Obamacare” would require 16,500 new IRS agents to police it. After all, Half True can just as well mean Half False, and because the False could arguably just as well be a Mostly False at Factcheck since it’s subject to my own interpretation as to ranking, I didn’t think it was a candidate for a major post. But, just in case, I decided to first read FactCheck’s take on it. FactCheck was pretty emphatic (and a bit snarky, I might add) about the False:

Bachmann not only exaggerates but is flat-out wrong when she repeats the oft-stated false claim about the need to hire "16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama’s health care bill." As we reported previously, the figure of 16,500 originated from a House Republican report that relies on false assumptions and outright misrepresentation. The CBO estimated in March 2010 that the health care law would increase IRS administrative costs by $5 billion to $10 billion over 10 years. But that money will not be going for "16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing" health care mandates. The IRS is mostly responsible under the new law for administering tax credit programs, not collecting penalties.

When I looked at what PolitiFact had to say, I saw opportunity a-knocking for an excellent Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style piece. Because now I had another website verifying the same claim which was basically saying through its harsher “grade” that PolitiFact was going way too easy on Republicans/Conservatives. So,  here's the best of both worlds!

Bachmann made this statement in January when she followed up President Obama’s State of the Union message. In February, an actual estimate emerged as reported by U.S. News, of 1,054, besides the required systems changes to implement the law. So, compared to 16,500, we can safely say Bachmann’s claim is False to maybe Mostly False. But that conservatively biased (snark snark) PolitiFact just had to elevate it to an inconclusive Half True.

Politi-Score: Jumping the Snark (Part 3)

Michele Bachmann had one statement with what appeared to be “opposing” rulings on its veracity by PolitiFact (Mostly True) and the Washington Post Fact Checker (Mostly False). But closer examination revealed that they both treated the ruling similarly.



The statement in question as published in the Washington Post Fact Checker:

In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year.

He said, and I quote, ‘A year from now, I think people are going to see that we're starting to make some progress. If I don't have this done in three years, then there's going to be a one-term proposition.’ Well, Mr. President, your policies haven't worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn't worked. And so Mr. President, we take you at your word.”

According to Kessler, Bachman left some crucial words out of her Obama quote which “undercut her claim.”

However, this was again a case I’ve previously discussed in my Bachmann series: it was part of a “blended ruling” Kessler awarded Bachmann for eight statements combined. As Kessler noted in his “Pinnochio Test” conclusion: (emphasis added)

Bachmann’s announcement speech had relatively minor transgressions, fact wise, but she did worse in her pre-announcement interviews. We are pleased to see she has modified her language on the 800,000 jobs — though this stale talking point should be dropped altogether — but she erred badly on her assertion about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. She needs to figure out how to eliminate the use of hyperbole — such as “massive” or “all” — from her vocabulary.

On a blended basis, she is getting two Pinocchios, but that’s only because we do not use 1/2 Pinocchios.

In this “blended” ruling, Kessler’s toughest “grade” was levied on the 800,000 jobs Bachmann claimed would be lost under Obamacare and an assertion that Obama had released all the oil from the SPR. Other than that, the rest, including the statement that quoted Obama as saying he would turn the economy around in one to three years, he considered “relatively minor transgressions, fact-wise.” So I’m guessing the “turn the economy around” statement was the minor transgression, an improvement truth-wise over the other two, and would have garnered less than Two Pinnochios by itself—or maybe 1-1/2 if Kessler could award half Pinnochios....or even one, the Mostly True.

PolitiFact's banner:  "Not a major omission"...WaPo: "Relatively minor transgression."

PolitiFact used the same Bachmann quote in its analysis and several others which preceded it that, as writer Louis Jacobson indicated, expressed a similar “variation on the line” of Bachmann leaving out a not quite inconsequential part of what Obama actually said, which, to paraphrase Kessler, undercut her claim:

Politi-Score: Jumping the Snark (Part 2)

One of the many so-called “proofs” of liberal bias on the part of PolitiFact (PF) offered by my conservative counterpart was the “snark” it displayed with regard to Michele Bachmann in some of its initial rulings on her. I’ve noted since that if there was indeed snark, it has substantially slipped, but it may still be there today, only not on the part of PolitiFact.

The 50 “rulings” of four fact-checkers on Michele Bachmann, as I noted before, contained ten statements which had been fact-checked by more than one fact-checker, resulting in 16 duplicates. Let’s take a look at some of these.

The $105 billion hidden in Obamacare (March). Covered by all four fact-checkers, the rulings ranged from Mostly False (PF and FactCheck.org), False by the MPR PoliGraph, and a full Pants on Fire Four Pinnochios from Glenn Kessler’s The Fact Checker. A small bit of snark surfaced in his conclusion: (italics added)

There is no "bombshell" except Bachmann's bombast.

She is correct that Congress already has appropriated some spending in future years, but her claim that this money was "hidden" does not have credibility. The money for these programs was clearly described and analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office before the legislation was voted into law.

FactCheck.org said Bachmann was “wrong” on the $105 Billion, twice, first in the headline and then: (italics added)

Rep. Michele Bachmann’s claim…is way off base…Bachmann is just wrong to characterize the mandated appropriations in the health care law as "hidden." It was, as the saying goes, hidden in plain sight.

I assigned a Mostly False to this one, but it could have qualified for a “False.” The MPR PoliGraph gave it a False. PolitiFact’s ruling, on the other hand, was clearly minus the snark, and gave her the benefit of the doubt, awarding her a Mostly False.  So much for "liberal bias."

The 800,000-jobs-killing Obamacare (June). All four fact-checkers selected this statement as well, and in this case they all agreed on the ruling of Mostly False, since the CBO estimated there would be a “small impact.” That is, except for FactCheck.org who took it a little further calling it an outright “false claim,” so I classified it likewise. They were pretty clear on this, headlining the check “Repeating a Falsehood on Healthcare” along with a twist of snark, if you want to call it that:  (italics added)

Politi-Score: Jumping the Snark (Part 1)

Michele Bachmann will be my test baby for the first in a series of Politi-Psychotic pieces examining and analyzing the results of multiple fact-checkers on an individual politician’s statements.

Bachmann has been getting more reviews lately because of her presidential inclinations, and there are four fact-check sources to consider on her, and “consolidate” into one. A total of 50 Bachmann statements (all of which were made during 2011) are broken down as follows in parentheses: PolitiFact (15), FactCheck.org (15), the Washington Post Fact Checker (13), and the Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) PoliGraph (7).

After categorizing the statements into their levels of truthfulness, I realized I may have to revive the Politi-Score just retired in favor of PolitiFact’s Truth Index. It could be said that the Politi-Score has undergone a complete re-design and emerged as a comprehensive, “global” Truth Index, taking into account other fact-checkers. So, look for that tag soon.

I tried to keep the rules consistent to those used in my last post on the Fact-Checker: FactCheck.org was the tough one, because it does not grant rulings. So, there were basically four categories: True (which, like Glenn Kessler’s Fact Checker, are very rarely awarded); Inconclusive (I don’t think FactCheck.org would even publish those), which would rank a Half True; Misleading, which would get a Mostly False, and False, and this is where FactCheck.org uses the words “False” or “Inaccurate” (untrue, erroneous) somewhere in its review describing the statement at hand. If it does not use those words, it falls into the Misleading or Mostly False category. I did do one “Mostly True” however for FactCheck. This was a numbers claim which fell within the percentage “minimum” for Mostly True that’s been posted about before in a review of PolitiFact numbers claims. The MPR PoliGraph was handled similarly to the Washington Post Fact Checker-PolitiFact Truth Index in my previous post.

Of the 50 statements, one third, or 16 were duplicates (speaking of "selection bias"). That is, there were 10 statements which were also evaluated and ruled on by another fact-checker. There were two statements reviewed by all four fact-checkers (6 dupes). There were two statements reviewed by three of the fact-checkers (4 dupes). The other six were reviewed by two fact-checkers (6 dupes). Those I was most interested in examining were ones which could have (widely) divergent rulings. However, there were cases where the rulings had to be reconciled with the methods of the Fact-Checker and the context they said they examining, in other words, they may not be as divergent as thought.

Here is Bachmann’s Truth Index for each Fact-Checker, with the newly appointed “Politi-Score” at the end, which is the overall average:

I have to figure out a better way to present these graphs:  CLICK on graphic TO ENLARGE.

In my next post, I will take a look at some of the individual duplicated statements and the discrepancies between rulings between and among the fact-checkers.