Sidebar: FactCheck has a Vermeil Standard?

Bryan White has commented many times about the objectivity of FactCheck in its reporting; he calls it the "Gold Standard."  In fact, it seems he may be trying to discredit PolitiFact because he simply thinks it would be easier with what he sees as their inherent bias, and because of comments such as the above.

So....I attempted to rate FactCheck, to determine how it compared to PolitiFact, and perhaps come up with a similar average rating strategy (stay tuned for Politi-Score at Polit-Psychotics!). However, comparing to Factcheck is a bit apples to oranges. PolitiFact has rulings which allowed me quantitativeness, Factcheck does not. Factcheck also checks facts that may not necessarily be political while PolitiFact restricts itself to politics.

I looked at 71 of their political analyses of specific statements by political figures going back to January, 2010. I found they seem to prefer statements that they could more easily disqualify, in other words, about 90% of the statements they evaluated were either false or misleading. Very few were true without qualification. Of the 71, however, they rated far more Republicans (44 versus 27, or almost 63% more), and even though I found an equal number of True statements between them (4 each), it threw the overall “truthful” average in favor of the Democrats.

A straight true or false was used, even if the False was more like “misleading”, although I did break it down that way just to see how it looked. But the true and false rating eliminates the possibility of subjectivity or bias, because I had to judge in some cases by the words whether something was misleading or just flat out false. It was a bit labor intensive. I also threw a few ratings out because I could not determine how to rate them.

The 27 Democrat statements checked were Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Harry Reid, David Axelrod, Mark Critz, John Kerry and Chris Dodd. They had 14.8% True and 85.2% False or Misleading, (48.1% False, 37% Misleading).

The Republicans had 44 statements available to check; they were Haley Barbour, Bob McDonnell, Dick Cheney, John Kyl, Charlie Crist, Marc Rubio, John Boehner, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Mitch McConnell, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Bill McCollum, Karl Rove, Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Scott Brown, Tim Pawlenty, Jim DeMint, George Will and Richard Selby. They had 9.1% True and 90.9% False (50.0% False, and 40.9% Misleading).

I only had one “pundit” with a rating of False, and that was Bill Maher. For those of you who might claim Charlie Crist as an Independent, he had 2 ratings, one False and one Misleading. Removing him from the Republicans changed their averages to 9.5% True, 50.0% False and 40.5% Misleading.

As noted above, I have done a “grade average” system for the rulings on PolitiFact. I have input 1,010 rulings between the Democrats and Republicans, going to the links in their “People” page and including only politicians with at least five ratings. A score of 100 was given for True, 90 for Mostly True, on down to 50 points for Pants On Fire. Then I built formulas in a spreadsheet to calculate everyone’s average. I have not put it in a presentable form on Excel or done a “write up” but the statistics collected for PolitiFact show it about even between Democrats and Republicans, at the point in time I collected the numbers, the Republicans had approximately 7% more rulings than the Democrats. I did not do groups or emails or “flop-meter” ratings; I just went down through the list and included anyone of note who had 5 or more rulings (I almost got carpel tunnel clicking links!). I made two exceptions in the “Pundit” category which I separated out.

Looking at FactCheck, however, the number of checks would indicate that FactCheck checks more Republicans than does PolitiFact, 63% more Republicans than 7% more Republicans by PolitiFact. Not only that, FactCheck shows Democrats are more ahead in the “truthiness” category as well; the Democrats on a percentage basis were 62% more "truthier" than Republicans, although the rest of the numbers were a bit closer.  In other words, FactCheck looks more "partisan" than PolitiFact because checking their results indicates they are checking more Republicans, "much more".

I'm venturing a guess as to Bryan's response:  well, PolitiFact tracks who they are ruling on so they can keep the numbers even.  This just proves that FactCheck doesn't check and doesn't know just because they are non-partisan.  Maybe so, but if that's true, then what does that say about the "truthiness"-- because if he's defending FactCheck's objectivity, does that not make their finding of Democrats being more truthful, even more so?  Of course, if I checked it again in six months, and it went the opposite way, I might be in agreement with Bryan.  So, I might just do that!

So for Bryan to say that FactCheck “is the gold standard” for objectivity is not born out by the results he would like to see. They check a lot more Republicans, who seem to make more False statements.