Lil White Lies Extra: The Unbearable Rightness of Bryan

My conservative counterpart recently offered up a 1,500-word tome essentially doing a finger-pointing “shame on you” to PolitiFact for “caving to the pressure” of its left-wing readers in its “flim-flam” ruling on Marco Rubio who stated that the majority of Americans are conservatives (from Mostly True to Half True).

He went into a diatribe on what appeared to be PolitiFact’s reliance on further polling numbers which he translated into this:

PolitiFact repented of its original ruling in advance of and regardless of new reporting, refused to admit any error in reaching the original conclusion and subsequently used the new reporting as a deliberate pretense to unveil a new ruling motivated by criticism from the left.

This is one of the best examples of the paranoid, conspiratorial thinking of conservatives I have ever encountered. PolitiFact’s change of the rulings is in and of itself admitting an error. On the top of that, if it was in fact motivated by criticism from the left to “cave” why did they not do it on the “2011 Lie of the Year” which created an outcry from the left of Biblical proportions? Maybe that would be too much to back down from, but there are many other rulings that PolitiFact has re-examined and left the same,  like here and here (and there have been Democrats downgraded as well).  What PolitiFact did here was realize—and admit--that with polls, the answer was not certain. As noted by Jonathan Bernstein of Washington Monthly:

One could look at it another way, which is to get beyond self-identification to go to whether people believe in conservative concepts or not. But then it gets very tricky, as can be seen easily in from the speech Politifact was fact-checking

This may be the best fit for Rubio's statement.

The Minnesota MPR PoliGraph is done by a former PolitiFact writer, Catherine Richert. It employs a category called “Inconclusive” which seems to correlate to the Half True rating.

PolitiFact might want to add something to its definitions which allude to the “inconclusive” nature of the Half True designation. It often uses the expression “on balance” in its “Our Ruling” finale. This would be a case of “on balance” we are at a “zero”—the negatives equal the positives. It’s sort of like something I’ve seen in legal responses that “PolitiFact can neither confirm nor deny the truth of this claim based on the 'facts.' "

But caving into liberal readers? PolitiFact occasionally caves to both sides. Sometimes it won’t cave. It’s the nature of the beast. Nobody’s perfect (unlike Bryan). But to accuse it of caving as some sort of proof of its left-wing bias is beyond the pale, and is not supported by the evidence of its corrections and updates.

And as I noted in my original "Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style" post on this ruling, this was more than about Rubio’s statement about conservatives: it was about the context of his remark. It was about all the other statements (most blatantly false) included with this that PolitiFact could have fact-checked, but chose not to, which my conservative counterpart chose to cherry-pickingly ignore as well—or I should say, as “nothing to see here” featured in his new blog series.  Except you won't see it in his series since it's  unseen fact-checks found false for a Republican.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: The Unadmitted Majority

NOTE:  About a week after this "Mostly True" ruling was published, PolitiFact revised it to Half True:  "After it appeared, we heard from many readers who argued that our rating of Mostly True was the wrong call....Upon further discussion, and bolstered by more reporting, we have decided to change this ruling to Half True."

The last time I ran with a PolitiFact ruling that Rachel Maddow had “graded” as perhaps conservatively biased for purposes of Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style, I caught a bit of flack. It had to do with the context of the statement and perhaps the implied intentions of the statement-maker (in that case, Obama). I thought I had better check such statements a bit more carefully in the future instead of trusting Maddow; however, we now have another Maddow fact-check of the fact checkers with a lot more to it than just the statement.

I often try to note when my conservative counterpart covers these, whether in one of his blogs or in Facebook commentary, because when the bias goes the other way he tends to ignore them. In this case, however, he was all over on this one, and it gave me a fine way to showcase his dishonesty, particularly in the area of “selection bias.”

Republican Florida senator Marco Rubio made the fact-checked statement in a speech he gave at the 2012 CPAC conference. He actually said it twice, that “this” is a movement of conservatives, or what I call the majority of Americans…” and then after a few words about “how he knew” because “liberals” never admit they’re liberals and instead using the term “progressives” he said “The majority of Americans are conservatives — they believe in things like the Constitution. I know that’s weird to some people…”

PolitiFact (PF) Florida obviously concentrated on the first statement. If they had concentrated on the re-affirmation, they would have had to deal with the caveat that it’s (only) conservatives who believe in things like the Constitution, which would make that statement blatantly false, or a lot less than Mostly True.

PolitiFact Florida used a twenty-year Gallup Poll to “support” Rubio’s claim:

For 2011, Gallup found that the largest group of Americans identify as conservative, at 40 percent. Another 35 percent identify as moderate, while 21 percent identify as liberal.

That means a plurality of Americans identify as conservative, not a majority. Then PF writer Angie Drobnic-Holan compares this to the Democrat/Republican/Independent labels, where an equal 40 percent plurality are self-indentified as Independent. Ultimately she finds that no matter how you shake it, no matter how charitable she is with the statistics, the majority is not conservative. But because conservatives and those who “lean Republican” are higher than everyone else, this justifies a ruling of Mostly True.

My conservative counterpart does his usual routine of reading into the statement and authoritatively reaching his own conclusions:

So, was Rubio correct that the majority of Americans are conservative? That depends on his argument. Rubio didn't cite surveys about self-identification. He used a method concerned with attitudes toward the respective labels. One can argue with the method or the application of the method, but using an inappropriate benchmark doesn't cut it.

Just because Rubio “used a method concerned with attitudes” doesn’t mean he was correct. In fact, Rubio’s explanation that liberals never admit they’re liberals doesn’t cut it either. If a person won’t admit they are liberal, they are still NOT conservative. There is no way to measure whether the majority of Americans are conservative by basically backing it with an anecdotal observation that liberals won’t admit they’re liberal—some other method must be employed. Bryan White uses this “attitudes” measure as a way to excuse Rubio’s point and find fault with PolitiFact’s efforts to determine whether the majority of Americans are conservative.

As usual, this provides a way for Bryan White to assert his superiority to those who disagree with him, a calculated way to set up an argument from authority:

Maddow is supposed to be ultra smart. So how come she can't figure out that Rubio's statement isn't properly measured against self-identification numbers?

(Translated: Bryan White is even more than ultra smart?). We never find out what the proper measurement is, because there is no quantifying method when “attitudes” is used.  There is no way to verify such "context." The most accurate and reasonable would be self-identification polls. Again, Rubio made the statement twice, the second time, without the “how come” that Bryan latched onto. In other words, Bryan’s complaint is sheer over-reach along with a bit of equivocation.

In the Facebook PolitiFact page comments, a poster by the name of Brian Varley made the best case as to Rubio’s statement being far less than Mostly True, by many, many different measures, in this case, widespread support for public programs and social issues which conservatives are by policy against: