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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
What's also important is that the Congressional Quarterly writers only did a single ruling out of 42 total rulings on chain e-mails (having to do with the number of bills sponsored in congress by Hillary as compared to Obama, as I noted above). Seventy percent of the chain e-mails were deemed False or Pants on Fire. Although the majority of the Pants on Fire were designated of unknown affiliation, the Republicans still were attributed with more falsities than the Democrats, mainly because of the impugning of Obama's patriotism and religion, the William Ayers association, and the birther movement. Removing the chain e-mails improves the Republican Truth Index by 67 percent to a negative 7, even though it is still below that of the Democrats.
The Pants on Fire Indicator. This indicator as calculated--a comparison of the percentage of Pants on Fire in terms of the False+Pants on Fire--gave results in a way that is contrary to what PolitiFact Bias may be trying to prove. The CQ team designated Falses as Pants on Fire for Republicans at a factor of 1.34, in other words, it gave Republicans Pants on Fire 34% more than Democrats. The PolitiFact team, on the other hand, designated False to Pants on Fire almost 18 percent less to Republicans, or 18 percent more to Democrats. However, if you remove the chain e-mails on the PolitiFact side, the indicator moves to 1.05 against Republicans, which is sort of "within the margin of error" of being equal between the parties.
Conclusions. At PolitiFact National, both parties have shown a steady decline in the Truth Index since its beginnings in 2007. The Congressional Quarterly rulings have followed similarly. I believe many of the rulings they did were based on their expertise (votes in congress) which by their nature were less subject to the "ridicule" of the Pants on Fire designation. So their Truth Index would generally be a bit higher and not as volatile as that of PolitiFact. PolitiFact may have indeed intensified its use of the Pants on Fire, but there is no indication that this has anything to do with the Congressional Quarterly. It was more related to PolitiFact's "selection" of more sensational or controversial claims (such as the chain e-mail rulings almost 100% dominated by the PolitiFact staff) as opposed to the non-remarkable, votes-and-positions-in-congress claims that were assigned to CQ, as shown in the above example of Joe Biden.
The overall trend seems to show as well for both PolitiFact and CQ: favoring the Democrats. When you look at the True and Mostly True categories combined, CQ assigned a close percentage between Democrats and Republicans (49% for Democrats, 46% for Republicans), while PolitiFact had more divergence (47% for Democrats but 37% for Republicans). While I'm still trying to find an explanation for this, I can say at this point that it can't be explained by the Congressional Quarterly's published rulings.
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