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!

One Way PolitiFact Contends with "Selection Bias"

Coming from that exciting (ha ha ha) world of accounting, the audit or financial internal control function served to police those who kept the books, from committing fraud or gross accounting malpractice.  There were certain procedures that had to put into place:  one was not to let one person control too much of the process, and to transfer employees between jobs frequently--even to compel them to go on vacation because often when the employee was away, such fraud or malpractice would be discovered.

 

This analogy is of course not about "fraud" in relation to PolitiFact, but about how a journalist who in the same way might write all fact-checks for one person (on one topic) might encourage the potential for the selection bias that is so often cited by its many critics.  And in the course of my recording over 6,500 PolitiFact rulings I noticed a pattern in assignment of the fact-checks in that no one writer dominated covering any one person or subject.  I have previously posted that writer Lou Jacobson appeared to be the "economics" guy, but economics has a wide umbrella covering many subject areas, such as jobs, taxes and the federal budget, even healthcare.  For example, a selection of the 13 consecutive rulings on Obama under the subject of taxes, out of 121 total rulings on Obama in 2012, shows this alternating pattern of ruling assignment quite clearly:

Click to enlarge:  Note column for writers. 

Even in the PolitiFact states, alternating topics and who was assigned the fact-check seemed to be the norm.  Here's an example from the  fact-checks by PolitiFact Wisconsin of its most frequently checked person Governor Scott Walker, on one of its most frequently checked topics, the state budget:

Click to enlarge

On occasion where there was a speech or television interview with a lot of statements to check, we might see a concentration of fact-checks by one writer, sometimes as many as five, but this was rare.  Eventually another writer would take the reins.  After the election in some of the states, it appeared that a single writer took over until the new year; then it was back to alternating.

Of course, I can't say that this resolves the problem of selection bias.  The type of bias that they're being accused of having--which involves a liberal partisanship--would still be evident regardless of how and to whom a fact-check is assigned, if it could be proved.  But I would think it would be somewhat ameloriated through multiple journalists covering multiple topics, because not everyone has the same bias going in the same direction.

Confounded by Contextual Complications

It is our policy to make on-the-record email correspondence public where the content affects the context of a story.

Zebra Fact-check, January 7, 2013

 

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.

Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact", August, 2012

 

(For the second damn time, practice what you preach!)

 

 

Right wingers feel vindicated that Fiat/Chrysler has announced it will be building Jeeps in China, especially at those websites critical of PolitiFact. Instead of beating the same dead horse again and again, I'm going to take another look at this in the terms of the right-wing argument: that if any (even a very small) percentage of production at the Jeep plants in the United States is replaced by production in China, then Mr. Romney's statement (see above graphic) is true in all respects, and needs no further explanation.

 

The right-wing website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC) uses the word "context" in almost every one of its "fact-checks." It seems to feel that it's so important that  they even have a tile symbol for it. For example, in one of its more recent posts on Marco Rubio, it claims that " In effect, PolitiFact takes Rubio’s tweet out of context."

Zebra Factcheck's littered graphics has a white tile symbol for "Out of Context"

 On his review of Romney's "Jeeps to China" comment, anti-PolitiFact website(s) PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck writer Bryan White duly notes the "context" he feels is crucially important to Romney's claims.

That’s right. PolitiFact takes a preferred Obama campaign claim about its rescue of the auto industry and states it matter-of-factly in a fact check of Romney. No additional context needed, apparently.

The media treatment of the dispute between the campaigns misses the context while focusing on the particulars. Romney is not simply making statements about Obama’s role in the auto bailout. His campaign is answering the Obama campaign’s messaging and pointing out missing parts of its story.

The only context I can see that was missed (according to Zebra Factcheck) appears to be what was presented by one of Romney's spokespeople to the New York Times in response to Romney's ad:

The facts are clear: despite his false and misleading attacks, President Obama took the auto companies into bankruptcy,” said a spokeswoman, Amanda Henneberg. “His mismanagement of the process has exposed taxpayers to a $25 billion loss.”

Romney had proposed "letting Detroit go bankrupt" in opposition to what President George Bush decided to initiate with a bridge loan to GM and Chrysler in 2008. He said the government "should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing." But even Michigan's future (Republican) Governor Rick Snyder and (Republican) Congressman Fred Upton, acknowledged that "there was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government." The respected, not really liberal Economist had this to say:

PolitiFact 2012 Lie of the Year: Factual isn't the same as Honest

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.
-- Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact"

(Really? Then...practice what you preach!)

When I saw the finalists for the 2012 PolitiFact Lie of the Year, I knew that its focus this year had to be on a fact-check that reflected some sort of "defining moment in the 2012 presidential election". I commented at Facebook, however, that it might not be good to do one on Romney or  Obama from the standpoint it made PolitiFact look ever yet more biased.  PolitiFact very carefully (perhaps deliberately) divided the finalists evenly betweeen Democrats and Republicans, although Romney had more direct statements.  On the other hand, they should not let "objectivity" get in the way of their choice, which is what they supposedly did here when they chose the "Jeeps to China" campaign ad that Mitt Romney ran in a last ditch attempt to convert swing Ohio voters, as the PolitiFact 2012 Lie of the Year.

 

I did feel vindicated that one of my choices discussed last August was selected as a finalist; it also received the most votes in PolitiFact's own poll. But given the newsworthiness of the election, I was not surprised it picked the Jeep ad. And all I hear from the Republican side is that it's "factual." Now, I covered this in a post on this statement when it first came out: it was the implications, the premise of the ad; it was certainly not the "fact" it was superficially "factual."

 

As I reviewed the Facebook comments and read PolitiFact's review of e-mail feedback, it looked to be a far greater right-wing deluge of faux outrage this year ("#Benghazi" the most oft-repeated comment, as if somehow PolitiFact could turn back the clock); of course, this shouldn't have been the case last year since the 2011 Lie of the Year was one from the Democrats.. But even though all these commenters were basically "hating on" PolitiFact, I'm watching its "like" count continue to grow past 75,000, when you'd think it would lose fans with all the "hate". Of course, having commenters like "TheFamily BackEast" and "NoLonger Proud" plus several with the middle name of Benghazi, takes a bit away from whatever that count means, and also makes it look like a few people may have been multiplying their Facebook identities to make the "hate" look more popular than what it really was.

 

My conservative counterpart added a comment at the Politico website trying to debate another commenter (his usual modus operandi) who stated that this was "Mitt Romney's last-ditch advertisement asserting that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China." He asked "What part of the ad made that assertion?" as if this was not was what was implicitly meant if Romney didn't say it. Someone by the name of Jack Brockway replied:

The ad was dishonest... even Jeep thought so. Are you asserting otherwise? Careful here - factual isn't the same as honest.

(It appears no response was made as of December 14). While I pointed out a lot of other factors concerning car manufacture (which I am deeply familiar with) that show it's not the case that anyone in the U.S. is going to lose their job if the Chinese exports were built in China, expansion had already been planned beyond current production in the United States. What is likely being planned for both China and Italy is expansion as well: the models are entirely different from what we have here, designed specifically for those consumers. We will never see those models here. What we export there isn't enough to justify building a plant there in lieu of exporting...it's just not economically feasible.

 

And even if for the sake of argument I went along with the contention that the Jeep SUVs now exported to China would be built in China, it still does not refute the implication of Romney's ad as well as his remarks. The ad gave the impression that all Jeep production was being moved to China by the concluding statement, for which there is also little evidence ("Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.") It was such a strong impression that the union local was receiving phone calls from workers at the Jeep plant who thought their jobs were in jeopardy. The ad was fear-based and boiled down to: if you vote for Obama, you will lose your job. And as noted by the PolitiFact ruling " it presents the manufacture of Jeeps in China as a threat, rather than an opportunity to sell cars made in China to Chinese consumers." To say the statements were correct and Romney didn't mean anything else (so why would he need to fight for those jobs?) and that there is no premise, no implication, no "underlying argument," is sheer intellectual dishonesty.

Truth Index+ by PolitiFact National and States

The state by state Truth Index+ has held pretty consistently since I first started crunching the data last year (even using the PolitiFact calculation).  Now I can present it (with a great deal more accuracy) for all rulings since 2007 through the eve of the 2012 general election on November 6.

 

Click to enlarge

That trend holds overall with one exception: that the Truth Index+ for Democrats exceeds that of Republicans.  Overall the variance is 15.9%.  To express it appropriately, the statements selected for Democrats by PolitiFact National as well as all state PolitiFacts have been on average rated about 16% higher in terms of more True/Mostly True/Half True(s) and fewer Mostly Falses/False/Pants on Fire(s) on PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter.  Also, if you designate the Pants on Fire as equivalent to False instead of rating it lower (that is, remove the effect on the Truth Index score of Pants on Fire), this variance decreases to 13.9%.

 

At the state level, the Truth Index+ variance between Republicans and Democrats ranges from a nearly dead even 1.4% at PolitiFact Virginia, to 27.7% at PolitiFact Tennessee, although there it may be an anomaly due to the fact it had the lowest number of rulings measured (73 total) as the newest PolitiFact state franchise.  And the exception is PolitiFact Wisconsin at a "negative" 7.2%, that is, their Truth Index+ is the only one favoring the Republicans.

 

The anti-PolitiFact propaganda website PolitiFact Bias (PFB) recently posted its 2012 Pants on Fire factor (how much "more" it claims Pants on Fire are assigned to Republicans) by PolitiFact state.   And it has discovered via the results it shows, as I've reported before, some of the states actually assign more Pants on Fire to Democrats.

 

In its original research paper, we are told that the factor is adjusted for chain e-mail and "intra party" claims.   Because of the primaries this year, there were a lot of such "intra party claims", and due to that, although I go in the general direction of PFB's calculations of the factor, I was not able to match it.

Quantifying the PolitiFact Quants

There's certainly a lot of people out there scoring PolitiFact rulings... I'm finding more and more of them every day.  Presented and scored in different ways, in studies, articles and blogs, I think it may be time to add them as a special section to my PolitiFact Detractors page, though "detractors" are not quite what they are.

While I hope I'm one of the better ones, I do need to make the case.  I have probably looked at these rulings in the largest variety of ways, and have done so on an ongoing basis for quite a while (since 2010, when I started this blog).  I've looked at the score in terms of writer, topic, local versus national, by individual compared with other fact-checkers, etc.   I'm looking for patterns.  For example, if Republicans lie more, do they lie about every subject?  (No, there are some subjects for which they are more truthful than Democrats)  Are lies more ideologically based? (Yes)  Do some PolitiFact writers appear to favor one party over the other based on the Truth Index? (Yes) Most of the other PolitiFact quants have looked at them in terms of just the presidential contenders or Democrat versus Republican overall.  Some qualify their rulings as far as sampling/selection bias while others take the rulings at face value.

Straight Politi-Quant websites.  The website Who's More Full of Sh*t (authored by J. Kalgreen) graphically rates the same....with an ongoing feed from PolitiFact.  It uses a score heavily weighted to the negative rulings.  It also gives an overall Democrat versus Republican rating.  While it's a pure rating website, its website set up is quite sophisticated.  As noted by Benjamin "Brash Equilibrium" Chabot-Hanowell, "I seriously wish I could code CSS and PHP as well as J. Kalgreen [WMFoS author] can."

While a great site, Who's More Full of Sh*t might not be linked by PolitiFact because its name might offend some.

Instead of saying who's more "truthier" or "honest" it goes in the opposite direction--scoring zero for True down to 200% for Pants on Fire.  So if my conservative counterpart decided to try to troll-comment the site (which he can't because no comments are enabled) he'd have to complain that PolitiFact's selection bias is the cause for Democrats being less full of sh*t, or for Republicans to be more full of sh*t.  Because, you see, both are still full of sh*t.

Malark-o-Meter is more of the nerdy Nate Silver variety of  meta/probability analysis and in that respect is like no other PolitiFact quantifier.  A newer website based on (I'm guessing) Joe Biden's outburst at the vice presidential debate, author Benjamin "Brash Equilibrium" Chabot-Hanowell is interested in mathematically determining a possible "bias" factor as well as the probability of how much each claimant is prone to lie. He includes the Washington Post Factchecker rulings in his analysis as well.

"Serious" Studies.  I've posted about and often referred often to Eric Ostermeier's 2010 study of 511 PolitiFact rulings  where he concluded with the infamous selection bias statement.

The Center for Media and Public Affairs did a study of both PolitiFact and Washington Post Factchecker rulings but did not really reach any other conclusion ("[took] no position on their accuracy") as to why Republicans score as less truthful than Democrats.

And of course, the website PolitiFact Bias did a research paper on PolitiFacts False/Pants on Fire rulings, coming up with a percentage factor that I often use in my blog.    There are others who have looked at the Pants on Fire, some in a humorous way, or a lot like PolitiFact Bias.

Website Articles.  One of the very first to quantify PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter rulings was the pseudonymous "Cinematical" at the Daily Kos, back in 2009....and arrive at the conclusion as so many that would follow, that conservatives were less "honest" than liberals.  There's also been several scorings at the Daily Beast, as well as a nice quant review by the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight.com (Nate Silver's blog).

Blogs.  Anyone math-oriented knew the moment they saw the Truth-o-Meter that it begged to be measured.  I imagine there's a lot more than just those mentioned here. So (besides myself), here's three very good ones:

In 2011, I came across the blog Quibbling Potatoes authored by Steve, who had some great ideas for categorizations of the rulings that I now use for my data.  He also had a name for his score which he called...the Truth Index.  While I don't think PolitiFact took the name from Steve's site, one can certainly say Steve had a bit of clairvoyance.  It's obvious he put a lot of work into his charts and graphs and it would be nice to see him do it again.

Pandering Politicians is a blog (turned website like PolitiFact Bias) by someone who calls himself "PanderBear" and the Truth Index here is called the "Truth Quotient."  He has a lot of charts, especially time trendlines, and begs people not to even read chain e-mails because of their dismal "TQ."  And of course, in one of the comment sections we see the ubiquitous question from my conservative counterpart asking what he does about selection bias.  No answer from PanderBear.  At least as far as I could see.

Allen Allermann in a namesake blog entitled "Random Human Neural Firings" did a quantifying review about the same time as Steve called "Who do You Trust?"  He scored PolitiFact rulings in the opposite direction that many tend to do--he gave higher weight to the True and Mostly True instead of False and Pants on Fire.  He uses a "sports" analogy for what Brash Equilibrium terms the report cards of those rated by PolitiFact; he calls them "at bats."

So there we have, including my own, about a dozen attempts to quantify PolitiFact rulings.  Perhaps two qualifiers can be added: (1) None of these websites/studies/blogs are affiliated with or approved by PolitiFact (as far as I know) and (2) all numbers should be interpreted with caution.  And if you come across any websites/articles/blogs that quantify PolitiFact's Truth-o-Meter rulings, please let me know in the comment section.

Truth Index+: Adjusting for Pants on Fire

The Pants on Fire factor as developed by anti-PolitiFact propaganda website PolitiFact Bias (PFB) leaves much to be desired--specifically, it does not take the other four rulings (True through Mostly False) into account.  Their reason is the more "subjective" nature of the Pants on Fire ruling as defined by PolitiFact itself (not just inaccurate but "ridiculous").  Basically it measures how much more (or less) Pants on Fire is assigned to Republicans when a ruling is false.  But when the Pants on Fire are taken out completely (and are calculated as False), the rulings still favor the Democrats on average about 17% (for all 2012 rulings through election day) using PFB's own baseline methodology (adjusting for intra-party, chain e-mails, pundits, PACs and party boosters).  Regardless, the Pants on Fire effect is very minimal, as recently pointed out by Brash Equilibrium's Malark-o-Meter and in an earlier review I did in 2011.

A better method might measure the overall percentage change in the (newly formulated) Truth Index+ when the Pants on Fire are removed and categorized with the same score as False.  In the example data above, the Democrats' Truth Index+ is improved 1.4% by eliminating Pants on Fire, while the Republicans Truth Index+ is improved 3.5%.  This percentage could be called the Pants on Fire Bias factor.

One could then either take the remaining Republican to Democrat difference in the Pants on Fire adjusted Truth Index, which in this case is 16.8%, as what would be the undefined or non-subjective "bias" variance.  One could also measure the difference between the 1.4% and the 3.5% which would be about 2.5.  This is a Pants on Fire bias factor which incorporates the other rulings.

In other words, in terms of ALL rulings True through Pants on Fire, the Republican Truth Index is effected 2.5 times as much by Pants on Fire than is the Truth Index of the Democrats.  All because Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire about 74% more than Democrats when a ruling is false (to use the PFB factor).

It's ironic that I came out to 16.8% since Brash Equilibrium's statistical testing of a sample of PolitiFact rulings hypothesized there may be as much as 17% variance in the rulings due to bias.  But that is a qualified "as much as" so it doesn't really tell us anything.  More to follow as I apply this to all rulings through election day, 2012.

PFB Unskewed: Slipping Up on the Wage Gap

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) posted what it deemed to be an "outstanding" contradiction in PolitiFact rulings having to do with the gender wage gap in the United States. They declared they had received a post from an anonymous source which pointed out a "glaring" inconsistency between a ruling on Mitt Romney and one on Colorado Democrat Diana DeGette on just that subject.  Apparently they rushed to publish it in their partisan glee, while neglecting to see what they already had done.

Click to enlarge: This might be Grading PF Liberal Style's comparative ruling to prove
right-wing partisan leanings from PolitiFact, by same logic as PFB.

So let's see what PolitiFact has done before on these types of rulings. PolitiFact has awarded Mostly False to Obama and Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline for saying (back in June) that women earned 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same job.

 

On the other hand, Diana DeGette and Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine both get Mostly True because they make the distinction that it's 77 cents (or 79 cents in Virginia) on average or overall. So in four rulings on wage disparity, PolitiFact has shown itself to be consistent. The Romney statement, however, is not the same as any of the four cited above.

PolitiFact Bias, through its companion site Sublime Bloviations, has previously posted on the disparity in the case of Obama's statement. They appear to be saying that they believe Obama deserved a worse rating than Mostly False:

The Obama campaign made a claim about disparate pay for men and women doing the same work and tried to support it with a statistic that doesn't take into account the type of work done. That's a flatly wrong approach, perhaps even "pants on fire" if one believes in applying subjective judgments to rulings on matters of fact.

PolitiFact's conclusion suggests that the Obama campaign was trying oh-so-hard to simply convey that men and women are paid differently irrespective of the jobs they do and (oopsie!) just happened to get a little mixed up in the delivery. There's one way to keep the statistic from earning a "False" rating or worse: Find out the real number and determine whether the 77 cent figure is somewhat close.

So in this ruling on Mitt Romney that's precisely what PolitiFact did--find out the real number. The four rulings above were quite generic, but this one was about the wage gender gap working in the White House, so they could actually find out with some precision. And this access to precise data enabled them to do exactly what PFB lamented: breaking it down respectively by job and title.

 

So let's try and answer the question posed by PFB: " What was the difference that allowed DeGette to earn a Mostly True versus Romney's Half True?" In the two claims PFB tries to equate, PolitiFact matched the (general statistical) data on DeGette, and found it close to correct, while it found the (specific White House) data on Romney wasn't as close, so found him Half True.

Zebra Factcheck is the PolitiFact *Unskewed*

(OR "Fact-checking you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better"....)

If there's one thing to be learned from the elections, it's that creating one's own realities doesn't work. From Salon.com:

Conservatives will hear that Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie delivered the election to Obama, that Mitt Romney wasn’t a true conservative, and that mainstream media bias blinded Americans to the truth. A few voices may acknowledge that the state of polling science is actually pretty good, and the demographics of the U.S. have fundamentally changed, but don’t hold your breath for a widespread reappraisal of the dangers of listening only to what you want to hear. The right-wing echo chamber is built of stronger stuff than the left’s.

And along with "mainstream media bias," fact-checkers must be 100% liberally biased as well! And Zebra Factcheck will unblind you to "the truth"! But I digress.

Current TV's Cenk Ugyur reported how much 26 polls were off in predicting this past election, listed in terms of accuracy: it almost came as no surprise to me that one of those near the bottom was the conservative Rasmussen--while the top poll was the liberal Public Policy Polling and one from the Daily Kos.

 

There were a number of polling analysis outfits, the most prolific being Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, along with Real Clear Politics. But then a website called Unskewed Polls became well known, especially with Republicans, with over 25,000 fans on Facebook, as authored by Dean Chambers who was very highly critical of Nate Silver. It essentially based its election prognostications adjusting for what it believed was over-sampling of Democrats by the other polls (and under-sampling Republican enthusiasm)--because those polls were part of the "main stream media" and that by "showing results unrealistically favorable to Obama that they are leading to a perception among voters of the inevitability of Obama's victory in the election." 



Unskewed Polls electoral map Nov. 4: Romney to win 52% to 47%

And so, the weekend before the election up until election eve, Unskewed Polls was basically predicting a Romney sweep of 342 electoral college votes to 196 for Obama, as shown above  in a screen-snip from its website. Sometime Election Eve Monday Dean Chambers did some quick back-pedaling (strangely, with almost all the polling done) on his electoral map to make it look like he only failed to predict four states for Obama, changing the electoral counts to 275 for Romney and 263 for Obama. Meanwhile, people like Karl Rove and Dick Morris were making similar errors to Dean Chambers on Democratic over-sampling, in predicting a Romney landslide on Fox News. Everyone ended up eating a lot of crow failing to discern the voter suppression backlash and growing minority demographics.

 

So you can see where I am going with PolitiFact Bias (PFB) and its new "project" Zebra Factcheck. I believe the writers at PFB commit the same type of cognitively dissonant blunder, insisting that PolitiFact is "Democratically skewed" like Chambers claims all the polls are. And they think they are unskewering PolitiFact's rulings at their websites, just as Chambers says he does.

Giving ZFC a KO on CKDs

This first check of Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC) is also a postscript on something just posted as a response to PolitiFact Bias--on the misleading information in a late Mitt Romney campaign ad being used to rile autoworkers in Ohio.

ZFC writer Bryan White offers us this "these-are-jobs-in-China-from-the-U.S." citation from the Toledo Blade to back up the veracity of Romney's literal statement that Fiat/Chrysler is going to build Jeeps in China.

Jeep currently exports U.S.-made vehicles to China, which is Jeep’s largest market outside of North America. Last year, Jeep sold 22,294 vehicles in China. The company is expected to exceed that this year.

He then asks "If a Chinese Jeep plant takes over production of some or all of the more than 20,000 vehicles Jeeps sells in China then how does this not affect workers in the United States?"

Let's first start with the 22,294 vehicles from a relative perspective. One Detroit Jeep plant produces about 950 vehicles per day in 2 shifts. That means if the plant was working a normal 5-day work week, this would be roughly one month's production. Not very much, less than 10% of total annual production, and would be even less if the plant was at maximum production (3 shifts) or was working overtime. The Chinese production is what is called low volume. Even the 33,463 vehicles cited from the Business Standard fit the same definition: not enough for full production, not enough for a plant.

ZFC might counter that this could still be 10 percent of the workers being replaced....but that's not quite so black and white. If ZFC had been thorough in its fact-checking like it claims it is, it should have noted the paragraph at the bottom of the Toledo Blade article:

That commitment means Chrysler will not fully build and assemble Wranglers outside America. The automaker does currently ship low volumes of what the industry calls “knock-down kits” for final assembly in Egypt. Mr. Bragman said that's fairly common in the automotive industry, and the kits are not equitable to full-scale production plants. Parts would still have to be made and partially assembled elsewhere.

Knock-down kits (CKD = Complete Knock Down) contain "the parts needed to assemble a product" and are used when there is a low volume for export as "a method of supplying parts to a market, particularly in shipping to foreign nations, and serves as a way of counting or pricing." That is how Jeeps were produced in China up until 2009. The kits are assembled in the United States...and guess who does the assembly of the parts in those kits here for shipment to China? Now, if ZFC or counterirritant want to call Chrysler to find out if fewer workers are needed for CKD kit assembly than for full-scale assembly, they're more than welcome to find out. And, it is possible the kit assembly could be outsourced to a local supplier--but then, additional jobs would be created there to replace any auto plant jobs. 

So when Aaron Bragman, a senior automotive analyst at IHS Automotive, was quoted to say that the Chinese production "doesn't take any jobs away from anyone else" he was correct. Romney is not correct, and neither is ZFC nor counterirritant.

Finally, the original Bloomberg article said that Fiat was in "detailed conversations" about making Jeeps in China. It wasn't definite nor confirmed. So, what happens if the deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group doesn't materialize? I didn't mention this in my original criticism, but it is another large gray area on the Zebra. Because while Romney himself said the Italians ( I could do another post on that one as well) were "thinking" of moving the production to China, the ad (which was aired much more) said it was a sure thing...which it wasn't. That alone makes Romney's literal statement false.

But what else would one expect from right-wing fact-checkers.

Lil White Lies: Read It and Jeep

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) gleefully joins with the anti-PolitiFact blog counterirritant in misrepresenting a blatant misrepresentation by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney as we enter the last 100 hours of the 2012 presidential campaign.

PolitiFact awarded a Pants on Fire (and WaPo FactChecker and Factcheck.org agree in line with it) when the Romney campaign released an ad which said:

Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama. Fact checkers confirm that his attacks on Mitt Romney are false. The truth? Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry. He is supported by Lee Iacocca and the Detroit News. Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.

It basically was "piggy-backed" (Glenn Kessler's words) from a very similar statement Romney had made during an Ohio campaign stop: " “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America."

 

That's pretty much everything....so PFB and counterirritant decide that "building Jeeps in China" is technically true as parsed waaaaaaaay out of context, and the fact-checkers need to fact-check more, as the loud and clear, self-evident implication isn't enough. They need to actually verify that the Chinese production is replacing (at least some of) the American production. Counterirritant thinks he knows the fact of the matter, and he condescendingly tells us: "For those slow on the uptake: Jeep vehicles that will be produced in China by Chinese workers are currently produced in the U.S by U.S. workers."

 

Nope, not quite. Because when Chrysler or Fiat talk about this Chinese production, it's added production, not replacement. Chrysler built Jeeps in China--for the Chinese market--before Fiat acquired it in 2009. And Romney's fearmongering came on the heels of this report from the Detroit Free Press:

In fact, Chrysler is investing $500 million at its Toledo North Assembly Plant and plans to add 1,105 new workers by the third quarter of 2013 to build an all-new SUV that will replace the Jeep Liberty.

Production of the new SUV will begin next summer and the hiring process for the new workers, who are scheduled to start by the next fall, has begun, said Chrysler spokeswoman Jodi Tinson.

In other words, as noted succinctly by the New York Times: "Jeep is discussing increasing production in China for sales within China; it is not moving jobs out of Ohio or the United States, or building cars in China for export to the United States."

Lil White Lies Extra: PFB prefers the GOP

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) has recently posted on a comparison of rulings which it insists are very much alike, but totally inconsistent when it comes to the Truth-o-Meter grade, having to do with congressional pay raises. Its recent post states the supposed contrast:

If the PolitiFact Ohio rating is accurate [a False ruling on a Republican] then the PolitiFact Florida rating is wrong [a True ruling for a Democrat]. And if the PolitiFact Florida rating is accurate then the PolitiFact Ohio rating is wrong.

So let's take a look at these rulings, plus a few others, to see if PolitiFact, according to PFB, is really being (unfairly) inconsistent. It turns out, PolitiFact Bias may have selected the wrong rulings to compare....which isn't too unusual.

 

The difference is the specificity.

The PolitiFact Ohio "False" rating is on senatorial candidate Josh Mandel, who said that his opponent, Senator Sherrod Brown, "voted six times to raise own pay." Now, it needs to be mentioned that the Brown campaign responded to Mandel's accusation by stating that it was just the opposite, that Brown had instead voted against pay increases seven times...which turned out not to be quite the case, either, when PolitiFact Ohio checked it out. These votes, from 1997 through 2012, were part of "broad pieces of legislation...[not] focused purely on the pay raise issue."

 

The PolitiFact Florida "True" for the Florida Democratic Party (FDC) said that 2010 governor candidate Bill McCollum voted for a pay increase four times, by the specific amount of $51,000, as well as having a $75,000 pension. This was based on an ethics law passed in 1989, which put automatic pay raises into place, as well as the amount of the raise received at the time as specified in the ad ( actually $55,000) along with the congressional pension. All following raises were automatic unless freezes were put into the "broad pieces of legislation" mentioned above--and if the broader bill was voted against, it was deemed voting "for" a pay raise.

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: 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.

Liberal Proof of PolitiFact (Liberal) Bias: A Summary Thus Far

A better standard is needed for me to say something at PolitiFact (PF) looks like "liberal" bias than for me to be a Republican and just not like what they say like many of its detractors.   Or to pick something out of selected rulings that I think is "bad journalism" when it's just my opinion.  Let's review what I've come across so far that I have assigned to "Liberal Proof of PolitiFact Liberal Bias" because I honestly have to admit there isn't much way around explaining it otherwise:

(1)   Yes, there is some inconsistency on the application of tax rates in the rulings, especially what exactly an "effective tax rate" should consist of, as noted in this recent post.   A ruling from PF Ohio and one from PF Rhode Island are particularly suspect for not being as thorough as they could have been and as a result appearing to  jack up the Truth-o-Meter for Democrats.

(2)  The PolitiFact National writers do seem to assign a lot more Pants on Fire to Republicans than their stateside counterparts (as well as produce rulings which make the Republicans look less truthful overall), with two exceptions.

(3) The Republican Party of Virginia was correct in one part of their over-the-top study of PolitiFact Virginia this past July:  it did appear to "dump" positive Republican rulings in the weekend Richmond Times Dispatch; however, they may be wrong assuming most people only read the news on weekdays.

(4) For the first three months of 2012, a weekly trend analysis of the Democrat and Republican Truth Index  appeared to indicate that at the end of the month, ratings would "even up."  I haven't done any analysis since, but have it set up in my data to do it for the year 2012.  What this means--those with a conspiracy mindset might think this was a deliberate attempt by PolitiFact to periodically even up the Truth-o-Meter (or the Truth Index) between parties.  I'm not sure what it means, and it might not occur again.

(5) Pat Boone's advertisement about Obamacare's IPAB rationing care got doubled up in Pants on Fire from two relatively-leaning-left-based-on-Truth-Index writers, but when a Georgia congress person made a very similar statement calling the rationing "the power to deny care to seniors" it received a Half True from PF Georgia.

(6)  In my version of what was to become my conservative counterpart's Pants on Fire factor, a measure of how much "more" Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire rulings, I looked at the Pants on Fire for PolitiFact's first 5,000 rulings and then proportioned them to the percentage of rulings overall.  The Republicans had 2.5 times as many Pants on Fire as Democrats, not considering the percentages.

7)  I also looked at the Truth Index in terms of writers,  by occupation (officials versus PACs, etc.) and by what I judged to be "local" rulings, for the year 2011, with varying results, although for the most part, they would predominantly favor the Democrats.  The one exception I found for what I judged to be "local" rulings, done for the first time in the final quarter of 2011,  was totally reversed in the first quarter of 2012.

8)  PolitiFact's most egregious problem may be "cookie cutter" rulings, where rulings are duplicated and serve to amplify the Truth Index negatively,  although the claimant often goes without political affiliation even though it's obvious what that affiliation probably is.    A major one this year was the across-the-board claim by "bloggers" that all the Democrats in congress were card-carrying socialists,  where almost all the PF states with a Democrat Congress member accused of "carrying the card" decided to jump on board and basically copy/paste the same ruling, inflicting a lot of Pants on Fire on those bloggers who had to be Republicans.  It could also be a subject as seemingly innocuous as light bulbs, a popular one in mid-2011.    Now it's been turned on its head a bit with the doubled up-assignment of "True" to a Democrat. 

Now, there's a few rulings of the same genre where PolitiFact has not been kind to the Democrats, and an excellent case of what could be termed Republican bias by PolitiFact Wisconsin.  And it would not take a lot of analyses to refute a few of my findings.  It just needs to be neatly summarized and put out there.