Truth Index+: Office Holder Breakdown

The final post for 2012 will be an office holder breakdown from all PolitiFact rulings through the eve of the 2012 election (November 5, 2012).  The majority (about 53%, or 3,450) of statements put to the Truth-o-Meter at PolitiFact for fact-checking are from those in office:  from the president to senators and representatives, all the way down to local elected officials, such as mayors and city council members.   Here is how the official "pie" is cut:

Click to enlarge

Office holders as a group have consistently held a significantly higher Truth Index (14.7% higher overall) than that of those who were not in office.  For example, they had 43% more statements rated True, and 28% more statements rated True and Mostly True.  In the "subjectively rated" Pants on Fire category, office holders received just 45 percent of the Pants on Fire ratings percentage of those who did not hold office (5.4% versus 12.1%).

The reasons for this difference may be that a large portion of those "not in office" were advocacy groups and PACs, those without a "name" only seeking to promote a cause, and would not lose their voice in losing an election.  Pundits and chain e-mails, mostly in a position of "playing to the choir" could risk making ridiculous statements.

For Democrats versus Republicans, there's no Truth Index comparison for president/vice president: for most of PolitiFact's existence, the office of president has been held by a Democrat.  George W. Bush was only rated once prior to the election of 2008; PolitiFact preferred to concentrate on candidates Obama (168 rulings) and McCain (155 rulings) in 2007 and 2008.  So the chart below does not show any office of president comparison.

Click to enlarge:  Closest party to party Truth Index+ average was governors.

The (raw) Pants on Fire factor, a measure of how much more often a party is assigned a Pants on Fire when a statement rated by PolitiFact is determined False, shows a slight advantage for the Republicans overall and specifically in the categories of both houses of congress, governors and local governments.  The red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) bars are all the same--they all equal a one, with the "fire" bar a measure of how much more that party is assigned the Pants on Fire when they get a False.

Since there was no comparison for president (as I explained above), I decided to compare Obama to Romney for this chart, although Romney, since he was not in office, was not included in the 3,450 rulings.  It does show, however, quite a substantial variance between the two:  Obama has kept a very low percentage (2 percent overall) of Pants on Fire.  It may be a reflection of his very careful speech or maybe something to do with PolitiFact. 

More 2012 in Review: Gangnam Style

2012 in Review: JibJab

Truth Index+: By Occupation

Early in 2012, using PolitiFact's own Truth Index calculation method, I published a Truth Index by occupation for the year 2011.  That was for 1,919 PolitiFact rulings. This time it will be for ALL rulings through the 2012 election, that is, 6,535 rulings.  The result is somewhat similar to that for the 2011 analysis.  Here is how they break down by category:  

Click to enlarge:  Each proportional slice of the pie gives the number of rulings

 This time I am using the Truth Index+ method to calculate the results as applied to the 6,535 rulings, which equally measures (starting at zero for Pants on Fire to 100 for True) all Truth-o-Meter categories.  Office holders, of course, compose the largest group of PolitiFact "rulees" comprising over half.  This time, however, I've decided to separate out the "candidates" who were not in office at the time they made their fact-checked statements.  This greatly reduces the "Other" category which is where they would have gone.  The majority of candidates in this category were Republican: for example, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and from 2008, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.   In fact, there were only 22 statements in this category attributed to Democrats, which means any comparison between Democrats and Republicans in terms of the Truth Index means very little.

 

The Truth Index+ for those categories shows the disparity between Republicans and Democrats attributed by some to "bias."  Every category except one (PACs and Super PACs) had an index favoring the Democrats.  In the case of media (pundits, chain e-mails, blogs, etc.), the variance was quite large, at almost 40 percent, compared to the overall average variance of 16 percent, or 15 percent for those holding office.

 

Click to enlarge:  Media (chain e-mails, pundits, celebrities) was by far the least truthful.

Finally, here's the raw "Pants on Fire" factor graphed for the same occupation categories.  This factor is a measure of how much more often a party is assigned a Pants on Fire when a statement is determined False by PolitiFact.  The red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) bars are all the same--they all equal a one, with the "fire" bar a measure of how much more that party is assigned the Pants on Fire when they get a False.    Even with the Democrat dominance of a favorable Truth Index, this factor does not correlate that well with it, except in the case of the media.  The "presidential candidate" factor is not a good one, either, because as noted above there were so few Democrat rulings (of the 467 rulings, 22 were on Democrats.)  And it gets even more out of kilter when the "in office" number is broken down further by position, up next.

Click to enlarge:  While media had worst Truth Index, advocacy groups (Republican) told most "whoppers."

 

Tchotchkes: Tequila Sunrise!

Origins of Republican Gun Control Solutions

A joke from the 1970's  appears to be in the form of a sad reality today in our country:

The U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population, but accounts for half of all firearms world-wide and 80 percent of gun deaths in the 23 richest countries.

 

Last year, handguns killed 48 people in Japan, 8 in Great Britain, 34 in Switzerland, 52 in Canada, 58 in Israel, 21 in Sweden, 42 in Germany....and

 

10,728 IN THE UNITED STATES.

 

"Guns don't kill people....people kill people."

 

Well, then....

 

There should be mandatory gun safety courses for people, not guns.

 

There should be more thorough background checks of people, not guns.

 

There should be stricter negligence penalties imposed on people, not guns.

 

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+: The Top Ten PolitiFact Writers

There are ten PolitiFact (PF) writers who have produced just about half of PolitiFact's rulings, from its beginnings in 2007 up until I ended my compilation on Election Eve, 2012.  Another roughly 160 writers composed the rest of them, many serving multiple functions of writer, researcher and editor.  There were 47 writers who wrote just one to two rulings each.

 

The highest producer by far is Lou Jacobson, whose 676 fact-checks (some done in association with other writers at PolitiFact) make up a bit over 10% of PolitiFact's total output.  Number 2 is Angie Drobnic Holan, now the Editor at PolitiFact Florida, at 571.

 

Below is the Truth Index+  for the Top Ten, with scores for Republican versus Democrat.  The best way to look at these averages in terms of "bias" or "lean" would be the percent variance in the Truth Index+ between party for each writer.  Lou Jacobson, Angie Drobnic Holan, Robert Farley and PF Georgia's Willoughby Mariano have about a 22% variance leaning toward the Democrats, only to be exceeded by Number One C. Eugene Emery of PolitiFact Rhode Island, who has a whopping 38% Democrat lean.   Tom Kertscher at PolitiFact Wisconsin swings 22% in the opposite direction; the remainder go from 3% in favor of the Republicans to around 10% in favor of the Democrats.

 

Click to enlarge:  NA in parentheses = PF National; then number of rulings written.

So, what can we learn from the Truth Index+ for each writer?  I decided to take a closer look at the top four writers and an "outlier" in terms of some of the items I had keyed in:  party, titles, people, subjects.

 

Lou Jacobson, for example, was No. 5 in "lean" variance as noted above, although other than Emery he was in a virtual tie with four others.  But he had a few features in his 676 rulings that stood out:  he is definitely "the economics guy" on the PolitiFact team.   The subject of about 40% of his rulings was a fiscal one: economy, federal budget, stimulus, taxes etc..  This was a far larger percentage than any other writer.  Healthcare was the subject of 25% of his rulings.    In terms of "occupation" his being on PolitiFact National's team meant that about 30% of his rulings were on the president and vice president and the presidential/vice presidential candidates (in 2008 and 2012).

 

A check on names revealed a notable person who seems one of Jacobson's "fact-check favorites"--Michele Bachmann.  He did almost a third (17) of her 54 rulings, and gave her 5 of her 12 Pants on Fire awards, as well as five Falses (in other words, when a claim was found False for Bachmann, Jacobson determined it was Pants on Fire half of the time.)  In comparison, Angie Drobnic Holan only gave Bachmann one Pants on Fire out of five rulings found False.

Grading ZFC: More Republican Math!

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) writer Bryan White, via his conservatively skewed website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC), has committed a very similar error it pointed out in a recent PolitiFact Georgia fact-check on Cato Institute's Michael Cannon's statement concerning Obamacare "exchanges" being outlawed in Georgia. And I have to admit they both had a point: Cannon was talking about Obamacare exchanges in Georgia and in context he said--right at the beginning--that "by default" the feds would do their own exchanges in response. PolitiFact seemed to ignore this part of Cannon's claim and conflated it into something that should not have been called false. Yes, score one for PFB and Michael Cannon.

 

The error in this case is one which ZFC's writer Bryan White might call, if I had done the same thing, a logical "Red herring" or "Straw man." He does this in his fact-check of a statement by the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)--that "Across the board tax rate cuts are regressive because a 20 percent tax cut for a millionaire – even as a share of income – amounts to a far greater benefit than a 20 percent cut for a hardworking low income American.” Instead of examining the premise of the statement he goes into a multifaceted dissertation on "effective tax rates" complete with pretty graphs, on how the overall rates were truly progressive up until seven years ago, and why poor Mitt Romney pays a lot more than Joe the Plumber.

 

He did not even try to actually calculate in numerical terms  whether there was a disproportional benefit to the rich of the across the board tax cut in and of itself. He even had something in his fact-check on how to "get there", quoting the IRS: “A tax that takes a larger percentage of income from low-income groups than from high-income groups.” So I will "get there", using two hypothetical progressive tax rates very close to what we have today, utilizing the 20% across the board factor.

 

Click to enlarge:  The 3rd thru 7th columns only needed formulas.

In the example above, we are using a 10% rate for a person with taxable income of $25,000 and a 25% rate for someone with income of $250,000, the current taxes paid using those rates, then re-calculated for a uniform across the board tax rate reduction of 20 percent. All other factors--excise taxes, corporate taxes--would be ignored because we are only concerned with the income tax cut itself and its effect on after-tax income (as that is the premise of the CPC statement). As shown in the last, highlighted bright yellow column, as a percent of after-tax income, the $250K earner has three times the additional income than that of the $25K earner. Now, you might say that it's because of the difference in tax rates, but even if you factor that in, the $250K earner still has 20% more after-tax income. THAT is the "far greater benefit" the CPC is talking about. The (yes, liberal) Center for Budget and Policy Priorities explains this "concept" as well in a website article. They chart the "regression" by income category.

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.

Tchotchkes: Mr. Burns Explains the Fiscal Cliff

Fox News Fake War on Xmas 2012?