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: Double Bain Dead

A post at Sublime Bloviations says this PolitiFact fact-check is ”a joke” and not relevant, and its "inflammatory" partner anti-factchecker blog counterirritant chimes along, adding Limbaugh “didn’t try to make [the] argument” to support PolitiFact’s ruling of Pants on Fire.

Let’s start by taking a look at what Limbaugh initially said, from the PolitiFact ruling:

"This evil villain in the new Batman movie is named Bane. And there's now a discussion out there as to whether or not this is purposeful and whether or not it will influence voters. It's gonna have a lot of people. This movie, the audience is gonna be huge. A lot of people are gonna see the movie, and it's a lot of brain-dead people, entertainment, the pop culture crowd, and they're gonna hear Bane in the movie and they're gonna associate Bain. The thought is that when they start paying attention to the campaign later in the year, and Obama and the Democrats keep talking about Bain, Romney and Bain, that these people will think back to the Batman movie, ‘Oh, yeah, I know who that is.’ There are some people who think it'll work. Others think you're really underestimating the American people to think that will work."

He wrapped up:

"You may think it's ridiculous, I'm just telling you this is the kind of stuff the Obama team is lining up. The kind of people who would draw this comparison are the kind of people that they are campaigning to. These are the kind of people that they are attempting to appeal to."

But wait, there’s more! The implication from Sublime Bloviations' Bryan White was that since Limbaugh could not be taken seriously, it was not worth fact-checking (even though even PolitiFact admitted it was a  “pop culture diversion" ). But it gets seriously expanded the following day, as scripted at the Rush Limbaugh website, and serves to further contradict counterirritant’s claims:

So I'm in the library last night, and I'm doing what I always do. I'm doing show prep. And I get a text message from Kathryn who's in with the dogs in the kitchen. She says, "Are you in this Batman movie and you didn't tell me? Is this Batman movie about you?" I said, "What now?" She says, "I can't go anywhere without reading about you and this Batman movie." And I finally, in that moment, folks, I finally figured out what's going on. I outed them. Forget the creator. I don't care that the creator created the character Bane in the Batman movie back in the '90s. It doesn't matter. The Democrats clearly were going to try to link this villain to Mitt Romney. And I outed 'em. They've even got a couple Democrats admitting they were gonna, Chris Leheinous and Jon Stewart. And they're still trying to do it.

You know, independently of the producers and the actors and all the people associated with the movie, they saw it, they were gonna try to make the linkage, and now I'm out there basically accusing them of that, so they've got their backs up. They're acting like I'm some sort of conspiracy creep. But I outed 'em. I have shined the light of truth, as it were.

Counterirritant says Limbaugh never advanced the idea “ that the villain Bane was named in reference to Bain Capital.” Yes he did—he advanced it by being the first one to say “there was a discussion out there whether or not this was purposeful” and associating Bane to Bain and the Democrats in the next few sentences. In other words, if he didn’t advance the idea, what was it then that Limbaugh was “outing” the Democrats for? What precisely was that “light of truth”? Counterirritant debates like White, in that he tries to ignore the obvious.

So, the next issue becomes whether PolitiFact should rightfully consider Limbaugh's claims "a joke."  In 2008, Limbaugh was thought to have “caused mischief” in the Democratic primaries. According to one article, the Indiana primary “may be the first vote in which his influence [was] measured in qualitative terms.” He called it “Operation Chaos.” And more recently, his calling Sandra Fluke a “slut” was taken so seriously, many of his sponsors dropped him.

Grading WaPo Liberal Style: 3+3, Six or Half Dozen

In an initial review of the blog counterirritant it was found that it doesn’t just review PolitiFact rulings, it looks at other fact-checkers. It recently did a review that’s sort of cut short on Glenn Kessler’s Washington Post FactChecker, of Mitt Romney’s statement that a normal economic recovery consists of about 500,000 jobs created per month (i.e., Romney really thinks people will believe that’s what he can do?)

Click to enlarge:  Crucial descriptors ignored by counterirritant (and PF Bias) circled.

Kessler looked at employment stats in the course of Romney’s lifetime, so counterirritant’s first complaint is this is not a “logical” period of measure.  Kessler was most likely using this period in terms of Romney's experience.  Maybe Kessler should have said “post World War 2” when the United States achieved its greatest manufacturing boom--and a period where those types of job creation numbers may most likely be if they were anywhere in the course of America's economic history.  In other words, using this period would be the most advantageous to Romney.

He (or she) then disputed Kessler’s “methodology” of counting every time in Romney’s lifetime the monthly number was near or exceeded 500,000, even counting those numbers as much as 10 percent below it (another very "charitable" accommodation). Since it very rarely exceeded this number, it proved that Romney was greatly exaggerating.

Counterirritant’s methodology consists of determining the median in monthly job creation numbers, that is, the number at which half the monthly job creation numbers are above, and half the numbers are below, for Romney’s lifetime, which he determined to be 146,000 per month. He then quotes liberal economist Paul Krugman who says this number (or even 200,000) is not adequate. But that’s where he stops. In other words, according to counterirritant, since 500,000 is a lot more than 146,000, Romney must be correct, unless there's something I'm misunderstanding.

But counterirritant never says anything about what a normal “recovery” number should be, since that was what Romney was talking about—a recovery. For example, if it was 325,000, then 500,000 is a gross exaggeration. We know it’s likely to be a number like 325,000 or 350,000 just because of the few times it’s approached 500,000.

Another method would be to look at the average for all recovery periods (beyond the period Kessler looked at) and then compare Romney’s 500,000 to that. You could just as well look at the median for all recovery periods, but in counterirritant’s case, this would make Romney probably look more like the liar because those might be lower than the average (so we have another "charitable interpretation" from Kessler).

PolitiFact Detractors: Irritable Fact-Checker Syndrome

This past year I’ve kind of laid off looking for PolitiFact Detractors—most of the time, I find short pieces which don’t amount to much (although here’s one I found recently that’s pretty good). PolitiFact Bias is often a source for me, because its authors are more focused on the greater amount of criticism directed at PolitiFact for being liberally biased.

A new wordpress blog published “anonymously” called counterirritant (lower case) does some “conservative” reviews of PolitiFact rulings from what appears to be the same venue as PolitiFact Bias; however, it’s the kind of criticism that should attract more readers because unlike PolitiFact Bias/Sublime Bloviations' often incoherent rhetorical excesses, counterirritant is more like a PolitiFact Bias for Dummies. At least so far, it hasn’t used questionable, self-aggrandizing logic. It just uses the facts as it sees them, with a simple and easy to read presentation, although one might not necessarily agree the facts are being used correctly. It’s only done three reviews of PolitiFact (it also reviews other fact-checkers).

"PolitiFact backing Smiley" as counterirritant claims doesn't go with the Half True ruling he received.

However, thus far they don’t seem to bridge the gap in refuting PolitiFact’s ruling(s): for example, in his post called “Poverty Makes Men Ridiculous”--about a PolitiFact ruling on PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley who stated "one out of two Americans … are living either in or near poverty"-- he said that “PolitiFact backed Smiley’s use of the SPM number in the equation used for the traditional poverty threshold.”

Well, not quite: they made it very clear that they thought the number was slightly misleading:

So Smiley has support for his number from Census Bureau statistics. However, in the context of a fast-paced television interview, some nuance got lost.

The statistic has not been received neutrally, said Douglas Besharov, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland who specializes in children and poverty. He said that "liberals like" the SPM while "conservatives dislike" it.

Given the nature of the statistic as new and unofficial, economists we interviewed agreed that it would have been more appropriate if Smiley had specified that he was using an alternative measure. Otherwise, viewers would think he’s talking about official poverty statistics.

Basically “counterirritant” is showing its “conservative dislike.” If PolitiFact in fact supported this Census Bureau Statistic, it would have awarded Smiley a True or Mostly True. Half True indicates that they are not supporting it precisely in the context that counterirritant is complaining. Half True is a sort of “this is a bit misleading but we can’t make a determination” ruling. To say it was Mostly False or False would probably put this one in my Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style series, because what Smiley said has more than an element of truth: it is more like “partially true but leaves out important details.”

The suggestion from counterirritant that PolitiFact wasn’t checking all its sources is a bit absurd. It almost looks like counterirritant never looked at PolitiFact’s list of sources. It’s apparent that those writers Lou Jacobson communicated with in e-mail interviews (Michael Wiseman, Arlec Sherman, Andrew Biggs and Douglas Beharov) alerted him to the same thing that counterirritant is talking about, since it’s alluded to in the ruling.