Prophecy Fulfilled...Ha ha!

Well, I guess they did it, as I predicted about a month ago.  I watched Angie Drobnic-Holan talk about it on Jake Tapper's Show on CNN (above pic is a snippet).  Now, I must say, if she's going to say previous rulings on Obama saying the same thing should  "both be Pants on Fire" I suppose she could go back and change the previous Half True to Pants on Fire so my conservative counterpart doesn't have a cow?  She explained it as a progression from an inconclusive to a verifiable, just as I did in my post. 

 

Anyway, this year it seemed pretty obvious and now I kind of see how they pick them:  notoriety associated with the claim seems to hold more importance than prevalence of fact-checking the claim; that is, even if it's repeated quite a bit (as well as fact-checked), if there's a lot of publicity surrounding it, or I suppose you might call it, getting a lot of Lexis-Nexis results may matter more.

 

But Obama's had a bad year in 2013, and perhaps PolitiFact wanted to give it some credence.

PolitiFact 2013 Lie of the Year?

As the end of the year approaches, I've started thinking about PolitiFact's 2013 Lie of the Year. Are they even going to do it again this year? Was it Bill Adair's "thing" and not Angie Drobnic-Holan's? Well, if they do, it seems to me there's one very, very strong candidate. That's Obama's repeated statement that under Obamacare, "if you like your current insurance plan, you can keep it"....conveniently changed to... "you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed." Making it Pants on Fire.

Let's look at the history of how PolitiFact rated the "if you like your current insurance plan, you can keep it" statement from Obama:

During Obama's campaign in 2008, he was actually given a True: but at that time, his vision of that which came to be known as Obamacare was much different than what it turned out to be. Things were a bit different at the fledgling PolitiFact as well, as this True ruling was a brief 267 words. The important paragraph which shows how things had changed was this one:

Obama has said he would like his plan to be universal, in that everyone has health care coverage. But currently it includes a mandate only for children. Obama has said that he did not include a mandate for adults so as not to penalize people with modest incomes.

This was a far cry from what it developed into after he was elected president.  "The mandate for adults" was practically the heart of the healthcare proposal which survived to the law itself, meaning that, at the time,"keeping your healthcare plan" was more likely than not. 

In 2009, before the ACA was even passed, and oops, Obama said it again. But now there was a mandate for adults  This was when there was a lot of debate in congress over adding a "public option", a sort of Medicare for those under age 65, and the details had still not been finalized.  This time the Truth-o-Meter throttled down half way on Obama:

Until the legislation gets closer to a final stage, it's difficult to say how many employers will likely opt to change coverage. But clearly some change is coming. It's not realistic for Obama to make blanket statements that "you" will be able to "keep your health care plan." It seems like rhetoric intended to soothe people that health care reform will not be overly disruptive. But one of the points of reform is to change the way health care works right now. So we rate Obama's statement Half True.

Fast forwarding to 2013, as the reality of Obamacare rolled out, he was prudently advised he had better "tweak" it and put some caveats on it...like, if your insurance has the coverages the ACA requires, you can keep it.  If your insurance company won't upgrade it, then you might get cancelled...or your rates adjusted accordingly. Obama chose to back peddle, however: "What we said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn't changed since the law passed."

So it went from let's give Obama the benefit of the doubt (True), to we don't have enough information (Half True) to "oh no you don't!" (Pants on Fire).

The qualifiers having made it a Pants on Fire lie, and with PolitiFact in a special report including a compilation of 37 recorded occasions where Obama said it without the qualifier, what we now have is a pretty humongous lie. Along with the start-up failures of the healthcare.gov website we have quite a Lie of the Year combustible combination.

Last year, a Republican got the honor, and it was for something that was capturing the public's attention at the height of the presidential campaign. But this year, the Democrats are over due, and it might be okay to go back to the subject of healthcare, since that's dominated the Lie of the Year position since PolitiFact created the award. 

 

The announcement is right around the corner, and the timing could not be better. So it's my prediction. We'll see in a few weeks.

I Brake for Pants on Fire (in 2013)

Since its debut in 2007 through the end of 2012, the PolitiFact team (including its states) decided that 1,915 statements it fact-checked out of the 6,658 total it had done deserved a false.  And of these statements found false, 29.6 percent, or 566, were deserving of its now famous Pants on Fire designation.  While I'm not going to discuss the somewhat subjective exercise of how it's assigned, it may be worth unpacking it and seeing what's inside.

 

If those 566 Pants on Fire rulings, 137 or 24% went to Democrats, 369 or 65% went to Republicans; the rest (60) were non-partisan or unknown as to a party affiliation.  This is what "alarms" to some degree the PolitiFact detractors who are mostly Republican: on a "raw" ruling basis, Republicans (in general) were 2.71 times more likely to be assigned the Pants on Fire than the Democrats.    The Republican theories as to the reason for this have been sampling or selection bias, although there are other compelling ones which I've posted about before:  the loss of the Whitehouse in 2008, and the enacting of "Obamacare."

 

One particular categorizing that was first done by the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier in a study of 511 PolitiFact rulings in 2010 was "official versus non-official"; it took into account those who were in office.  Only 190, or about one third, of the Pants on Fire rulings were awarded to people who were in office; of the other 376 who were not in office, half were organizations and the on-line media.  If we look at party affiliation of those in office who were assigned the Pants on Fire, we have 60 Democrats (32 percent) and 128 Republicans (67 percent).  This means Republicans in office were 2.1 times more likely to be awarded the Pants on Fire than were Democrats in office, still more than double but about 25 percent less than the 2.71 overall.

 

The media--which includes celebrities, pundits, blogs, websites and chain e-mails--received the largest percentage (24%) of Pants on Fire claims, followed by governors and state government officials (19%).

 

Sixty-eight rulings receiving the Pants on Fire related to Obamacare, the vast majority from Republicans.  Claims on the subject of healthcare generated the most Pants on Fire rulings, with over 80 percent of them about Obamacare, or 14 percent of the Pants on Fire claims.   Obamacare overlapped to the subjects of Medicare, housing and abortion as well.  As a general topic, however, fiscal subjects (deficit, economy, federal/state budgets, stimulus and taxes) took up about 20 percent of the Pants on Fire claims.

 

As the number of fact-checks has grown year to year, however, the percentage of Pants on Fire claims in terms of the total has been gradually dropping year to year since "peaking" in 2009 as shown here.

Click to enlarge:  Number of rulings shown in parentheses after year

Finally, below are the same numbers which show the Republican/Democrat breakdown each year. What this appears to show is that while the percentage of Pants on Fire overall has gone down, the percentage of those Pants on Fire assigned to Republicans has gone up.  Non-official candidates--which include Mitt Romney and the other Republican presidential candidates like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum--comprise the third highest category in terms of candidate occupation for Pants on Fire rulings, which may have contributed to this high percentage in 2011 and 2012.  So, we may see a drop in this high Republican percentage in 2013.  Stay tuned.

Click to enlarge: Years (2010-12) of most Pants on Fire were dominated by Republicans

 

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. 

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."

 

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.

Truth Index+: The PolitiFact Saga on Obamacare

In the history of PolitiFact rulings, from its beginnings in 2007 to the election of 2012, the most covered subject was healthcare. PolitiFact currently has 42 pages of rulings related to healthcare. While there's a lot of overlap with other subjects (particularly fiscal ones) as designated in every ruling, my counts for 6,535 PolitiFact rulings show healthcare and Medicare were the "main" subject(s) for over 10 percent of them.

 

In 2007, the very first characterization of a Democrat national healthcare reform plan as "socialized medicine" which earned a False was from budding 2008 presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani. PolitiFact called it "pure hyperbole."   In early 2008, eventual 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney was the first person fact-checked for what would become the PolitiFact 2010 Lie of the Year--that "Obamacare" (the meme not yet invented for healthcare reform) was a "government take over" of the healthcare system.

Click to enlarge:  Low number of Democrat rulings caused larger swings

There were very few fact-checks (12) evenly divided between party on healthcare reform as it related to Obama's proposals in 2007 and 2008, compared to what happened after he became president. So the Truth Index+ at that time did not tell us much. Indeed, as I noted in a previous post on what caused the big increase in Pants on Fire assignments to Republicans, the year 2009 was a very big ruling year when it came to healthcare reform and Obamacare. In that year, over 1/4 of PolitiFact rulings related to that topic.

Obamacare, however, was the leading PolitiFact ruling topic in 2009: healthcare was the subject of over 30% of the rulings with about 27% relating to healthcare reform, and made up over 1/3 of the Pants on Fire. With the majority coming from Republicans, this was for the most part what drove up the Pants on Fire factor against them.

The year 2010 was not as important in terms of PolitiFact's concentration on Obamacare; it was a pivotal year, however, in terms of the Republicans doubling down on attacking it. Republicans dominated on dubious healthcare claims as 64 fact-checks brought their Obamacare Truth Index+ down to under 34. It continued into 2011 and worsened in 2012. The number of Obamacare-related rulings doubled from 2011 to 2012, when it seemed as if the Republicans thought the public dislike of it would get them the same type of election results as in 2010.

Truth Index+: Adjusting for Pants on Fire

The Pants on Fire factor as developed by anti-PolitiFact propaganda website PolitiFact Bias (PFB) leaves much to be desired--specifically, it does not take the other four rulings (True through Mostly False) into account.  Their reason is the more "subjective" nature of the Pants on Fire ruling as defined by PolitiFact itself (not just inaccurate but "ridiculous").  Basically it measures how much more (or less) Pants on Fire is assigned to Republicans when a ruling is false.  But when the Pants on Fire are taken out completely (and are calculated as False), the rulings still favor the Democrats on average about 17% (for all 2012 rulings through election day) using PFB's own baseline methodology (adjusting for intra-party, chain e-mails, pundits, PACs and party boosters).  Regardless, the Pants on Fire effect is very minimal, as recently pointed out by Brash Equilibrium's Malark-o-Meter and in an earlier review I did in 2011.

A better method might measure the overall percentage change in the (newly formulated) Truth Index+ when the Pants on Fire are removed and categorized with the same score as False.  In the example data above, the Democrats' Truth Index+ is improved 1.4% by eliminating Pants on Fire, while the Republicans Truth Index+ is improved 3.5%.  This percentage could be called the Pants on Fire Bias factor.

One could then either take the remaining Republican to Democrat difference in the Pants on Fire adjusted Truth Index, which in this case is 16.8%, as what would be the undefined or non-subjective "bias" variance.  One could also measure the difference between the 1.4% and the 3.5% which would be about 2.5.  This is a Pants on Fire bias factor which incorporates the other rulings.

In other words, in terms of ALL rulings True through Pants on Fire, the Republican Truth Index is effected 2.5 times as much by Pants on Fire than is the Truth Index of the Democrats.  All because Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire about 74% more than Democrats when a ruling is false (to use the PFB factor).

It's ironic that I came out to 16.8% since Brash Equilibrium's statistical testing of a sample of PolitiFact rulings hypothesized there may be as much as 17% variance in the rulings due to bias.  But that is a qualified "as much as" so it doesn't really tell us anything.  More to follow as I apply this to all rulings through election day, 2012.

Pants on Fire Factor: Obama-Fact

The addition of the state PolitiFacts began with the appearance of PolitiFact Florida in 2009, but really didn't really get in gear with publishing a substantive number of rulings until 2010.  In fact, in 2009, PolitiFact "Florida" published a grand total of 9 rulings, bringing in lead PolitiFact Florida writer Aaron Sharockman around October.  Then things took off in 2010 as Texas, Georgia, Rhode Island were added in the first half and then Ohio, Oregon, Wisconsin and Virginia in the second half.

 

It would seem as if the states came along to fill in the gap of the Congressional Quarterly, whose writers worked with PolitiFact doing rulings from 2007 through 2008.  However, as I described in my original assessment of this group and what its "affects" may have been , the types of statements selected at that time were of a different nature:  in the case of Congressional Quarterly, they related to its area of expertise, congressional positions and votes (although they did do other types).  In the case of the PolitiFact states, however, many rulings had to do with matters of a local nature, for example, one of the first PolitiFact Florida rulings on  a statement by then-Governor Charlie Crist who was bragging up the reduced rates of a negotiated, un-subsidized Florida healthcare program called Cover Florida Healthcare (found False).

 

The "Pants on Fire factor" (PoF) as I call it, a measure of what is claimed to be PolitiFact's bias for rating a False ruling as Pants on Fire, is shown below as aggregated from 2007 to September of 2012.    It is a comparison of Democrats to Republicans, with a factor of 1.0 translating to mean that PolitiFact assigns Pants on Fire to Democrats at the same (or equal) rate it assigns Republicans.  Anything below the 1.0 means Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire less than Democrats, anything above the 1.0 means Republicans are assigned Pants on Fire more than the Democrats (as a percentage of False + Pants on Fire rulings).

 

 

The red line shows the growth of the factor from favoring the Republicans to favoring the Democrats (or growing ever more negative for Republicans) over PolitiFact National's six years of Truth-o-Meter rulings.  The chart begins in quarterly increments until the end of 2008 to show how the Congressional Quarterly scored for that period as well, displayed in the green line. Thereafter the increments are annual.

 

At the end of 2008, PolitiFact National (including the Congressional Quarterly) had a factor below 1.0, although as shown by the green line, the Congressional Quarterly (CQ) alone was assigning Pants on Fire to Republicans 42% more than to Democrats.  With CQ behind them, in 2009 the PoF factor made its biggest jump ever at PolitiFact National, from .90 to 1.60.    For the year 2009 alone, PolitiFact National's Pants on Fire factor was a whopping 5.06.

 

Accumulated through the end of September of 2012, it now stands at 1.94--in other words, in the course of its history, PolitiFact National assigned Pants on Fire almost twice as often for Republicans as it did for Democrats.

 

Combined with the state PolitiFacts, however, the chart takes a different slope, as shown by the purple line.  It starts at the same high point as in 2009 because of there being only 9 PolitiFact Florida rulings, but as they accumulated, the aggregate Pants on Fire factor for PolitiFact as a whole dropped, from the 1.60 in 2009 down to its current 1.33.  The states themselves, if they were separated from PolitiFact National, would now average 1.21.

 

So it is indeed true that once PolitiFact "dissolved its partnership" with Congressional Quarterly, it began to appear as though it was increasingly assigning Falses as Pants on Fire to Republicans.  But working with CQ may not be a cause even with such a correlation, given that its own writers' assignment of Pants on Fire to Republicans were far more (58% more) than that of what PolitiFact National was doing at the end of 2008.  Were there other possible reasons?  What happened in 2009?

Truth Index: Obama-Romney 6 Weeks To Go

And a Peak at the Congressional Quarterly

For reasons to follow in this post, I thought it might be a good idea in this update on Obama and Romney's running PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index, to get a better look at what happened before 2010. So I haven't been posting as much, because it meant I had to go through 272 rulings for Obama and 44 rulings for Romney to date all the rulings...and do a few other things. 

Click to enlarge:  Until Romney veered way right, he had an admirable Truth Index

This latest chart shows the accumulated Truth Index for Obama and Romney quarter to quarter starting at the end of the third quarter of 2007, when the PolitiFact operation was really gearing up, since at that time as Obama fought for the Democratic presidential nomination, Romney also tried unsuccessfully to do likewise as a Republican. A note on the chart (brackets indicating the flat trend line) indicates the result at PolitiFact once John McCain became the presumptive 2008 Republican presidential nominee: from the end of the first quarter of 2008 until early in 2010, Romney was not subjected to the Truth-o-Meter at all. In early 2010, he was interviewed as the Affordable Care Act was being signed into law by Obama (perhaps because of his "Massachusetts" knowledge), which instigated a few rulings, and here it was that Romney perhaps hinted at one his future campaign talking points when he stated that he thought Obama was too soft (full of "apologies") in his foreign policy. He disappeared from PolitiFact's prying Truth-o-Meter until early 2011, and from then on he was a fairly regular PolitiFact fact-check target until his nomination put the fact-checks on (maybe temporary) steroids. He now has 174 rulings, which I believe is the second highest for PolitiFact.

 

But the trend shows, just as my last post with monthly trends showed, that Romney's Truth Index fell off considerably once he announced his candidacy for the second time in 2011. Of seven Falses awarded Romney between April and September, six of them were bad enough to be made Pants on Fire. He had only one True ruling during that time. By 2012, his average leveled off somewhat around negative 15.

 

Obama's Truth Index has been pretty steady in the positive 12 area (with 416 rulings as of this post), although the pre-2010 trend indicates he got off to a rocky start. He started with a very respectable 30 and then plummeted in the very next quarter to a negative 11. His Truth Index for that quarter only was a negative 62.5, with four Falses, with not one True nor one Mostly True. Must have been that the PF honeymoon with Obama was over.

 

The CQ Connection: A theory set forth in a PolitiFact Pants on Fire analysis by my conservative counterpart was that the Congressional Quarterly had influenced a less biased approach to the rulings, that PolitiFact had gone wild with Pants on Fire once the CQ partnership "was dissolved" at the end of 2008:

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).

Part of my effort is not just in dating the PolitiFact rulings, but determining which ones were written by a Congressional Quarterly writer. My interest was to see how the writers treated Democrats and Republicans in terms of the Truth Index, to see if there's any correlation to support PF Bias writer Bryan White's claims. But to do so is an enormously tedious exercise, because PolitiFact National has roughly 1,780 rulings to go through for almost a four year period.

 

So to start I did Obama and Romney (for purposes of this post), with John McCain in my sites to next do a "presidential candidate trend" comparison; but at this point I've only done less than 20 percent of the rulings, so it will be a while. That being said, a few points about the Congressional Quarterly (CQ): between Obama and Romney CQ writers wrote about 15 percent of the rulings: 39 for Obama and 9 for Romney. The Truth Index as computed for only the Congressional Quarterly writers was within half a point: a positive 5.1 for Obama and a positive 5.6 for Romney. The Pants on Fires seem to defy White's contentions, however: Romney received only one from a CQ writer, while the three Pants on Fires Obama received were all from PolitiFact writers.

Truth Index Extra: Who's On First

Since I do the PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index in a variety of ways as permitted by my data, I thought it might be interesting to use my conservative counterpart’s so-called “PoF” (Pants on Fire) bias factor in a way he may not have thought of. It seems to me he should have calculated this bias factor not for PolitiFact National as a whole but for its writers, to see if the results point to a person who may be “liberally biased” with "subjective" judgment more than the others. After all, for him it should not be what but who--PolitiFact National is 74% more likely to make a False ruling Pants on Fire for Republicans, according to him…well, then, who at PolitiFact National is more likely to relegate a Republican False ruling to Pants on Fire?

Since I've kept track of the PF ruling writers since the beginning of 2011, this chart represents 18 months of data up until June 30, 2012, the Falses and Pants on Fires from roughly 3,000 rulings. These totaled 790 rulings for Democrats and Republicans; here is a graph of the top ten writers representing a little over 55% of these 790 rulings, starting at 107 for Lou Jacobson down to 23 for PF Rhode Island’s C. Eugene Emery (on average about 44 False rulings each). They are arranged in order of “PoF Bias” lowest to highest.

Click to enlarge:  Only writers with 20 or more False/Pants on Fire rulings were included.

Aaron Sharockman (PolitiFact Florida) and W. Gardner Selby (PolitiFact Texas) never assigned a Pants on Fire to a Democrat during that period of time. I jury-rigged their scores because Excel doesn’t recognize zero divisors….by adding one to the calculated Republican and Democrat percentages . My suggestion to the PolitiFact Bias blog would be to take a look at their False rulings on Democrats to see if they are “fair” because if the vast majority of them are, he has a problem. Of course, he has a problem with the entire bogus formula he came up with, but that’s another discussion.

PolitiFact Georgia’s Willoughby Mariano should be PolitiFact Bias’ new little friend (or maybe a thorn in their side since she’s doing the opposite of what their formula is supposed to reveal). From 2011 through the end of June she was 78% more likely to assign Pants on Fire to a Democrat—almost the opposite of the percentage calculated for PF National. She also makes PolitiFact Georgia the most Republican friendly (in terms of the “PoF” factor), even though its overall Truth Index favors the Democrats. And to think she was actually a “co-winner of a National Headliner Award in investigative journalism for a 2002 series of stories about exploited workers at theme parks”—sounds like a bleeding heart liberal to me! Second to Mariano was PolitiFact Wisconsin’s Dave Umhoefer, who was 35% more likely to assign Pants on Fires to a Democrat.

Interestingly the chart points to the person who the anti-PolitiFact blog seems to have the most beef with as seen in its Grading PolitiFact critiques—Louis Jacobson. He’s the most frequent assigner of Pants on Fire to Republicans before Republicans-only Sharockman and Selby. I also looked at Angie Drobnic Holan in terms of National versus Florida for the Pants on Fire assignment to Republicans. Unfortunately, there were only 11 done for PF Florida and ALL Pants on Fire went to Republicans at a rate of 36%; in the case of National she was 48% more likely to assign a Pants on Fire to a Republican. For Sharockman, who as noted never assigned a Pants on Fire to a Democrat, he was almost twice as likely to assign a Pants on Fire for National as he was for PF Florida (40% versus 21.1%).

Truth Index: No Mas Pantalones....

Of the first 5,000 PolitiFact rulings, it was established that 8.7% of them (435) were Pants on Fire.  I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the affiliation breakdown in that category:

Click to enlarge:  Compare this graph to previous post which shows Republican/Democrat/Other total distribution of rulings.

If everything was perfectly proportional, that is, Democrats and Republicans had Pants on Fire in the same proportion as the number of rulings, the Democrats would have had 170 Pants on Fire (versus 106), the Republicans would have had 226 (versus 271) and "other" would have been at 39 (versus 58).  In  other words, while the Republicans had about 2.5 times as many Pants on Fire rulings as the Democrats, they are about 17% higher than what they would have had proportionately (62% Pants on Fire versus their making up 53% of all rulings), and the Democrats are about 37% lower, while those of neither party are about 50% higher in the Pants on Fire category.  Of course we cannot expect it to be perfectly proportional to the population of rulings, but what this shows is that the Republicans Pants on Fire are not that severe, as people like Eric Ostermeier would have you believe.

Sidebar: PolitiFact Gets Out the Cookie Cutter

Back in the 1980’s, General Motors made a critical mistake with its cars as a means of cost saving. The most expensive part of the car when there’s a design change is the metal fabrication: the outer skin of the car. The cost of metal fab tool and die changes is unbelievably huge. This is the only part of the car GM “owns” and does not outsource because it is actually more expensive to do so. To save (a lot of) money, Roger Smith (a.k.a. the Roger of Michael Moore’s documentary “Roger and Me”) decided that the cars at each platform (small, mid-size, luxury, etc.) would have the same “skin” while only making  changes to the “badging” and other options that were unique to the brand. The term for it was “commonization”—by having as many parts of the car the same between the brands, GM would save money in terms of purchase (volume discount) as well as manufacture. The result was GM getting labeled by critics for having cookie cutter cars—panned in competitors TV commercials of parking valets who couldn’t find the drivers’ GM car because they all looked so much alike, as well as such memorable vehicles like the Cadillac Cimarron. With that and GM’s persistent lack of quality, the sales downfall began until they slowly eroded into bankruptcy.

The same ruling but with different names.

With that in mind, these six rulings from the end of August/early September, found when I was compiling the latest PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index statistics, were a bit troubling in the same sort of cookie cutter way. While there was some variation in the writing, “commonizations” could be found throughout the rulings. While re-checked rulings often exhibit these characteristics, this one was not a re-check but a six-in-one, one-time collective effort.

According to certain conservative websites and blogs, there are 70 “card-carrying socialists” in the U.S. House of Representatives, specifically, the 111th Congress. From there, PolitiFacts Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon and Texas merely had to fill in the blanks as to the Democrats being accused of this in their respective states, and those were the statement(s) for fact-checking.  Then it was noted that the 111th Congress is not the current congress but the previous. So that left a few people voted out in the 2010 Republican rout who may have been counted in the total “70” number. Then there’s naming the name of the “culprit” who was spreading this: a blogger named Dan Cofall on a website called Sovereign Citizens United, who of course did not respond when asked by PF for any comments.

Next PF went to the socialist group itself—the DSA, Democratic Socialists of America—to confirm if those Democrats named were indeed listed as card-carrying members, to which its  national director Frank Llewellyn responded that any such list was “completely fraudulent.” As repeated verbatim in most of the rulings: