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.

PolitiFact Detractors: Virginia Night Cap

It seems my conservative counterpart was forced to reference my analysis of the recent mega-paper protest by the Virginia Republican Party to PolitiFact (PF) Virginia, basically presenting an overly voluminous case of why it was biased toward Democrats. Bryan White called me a person with “semi-daily clock-work accuracy” as far as my being “correct” in terms of the ruling “statistics” used in the paper. Gee, I was hoping for a battle of wits, but I guess he’s apparently unarmed.

But White did bring out one point with regard to “the Weekend Dump.” This was the Republicans’ contention that more positive Republican PolitiFact rulings were “buried” in the weekend editions of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, while negative ones were saved for during the week, on the premise there were more readers during the week. He felt that the Sunday or weekend news may have more readers, not less, which contradicts their “bury” allegations.

Dumping stories over the weekend can put them in the Sunday newspaper, which is often the most widely read portion of a major newspaper. No case is made for the significance of a weekend dump for either a daily paper or an Internet news site. If the Richmond Times-Dispatch literally publishes the most positive Republican stories in its least popular editions then the Virginia GOP may have a legitimate gripe, but that evidence does not appear in this document.

Where readership demographics are reported on the internet, four major markets (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco) separate weekday and Sunday readership, and it appears Sunday is always higher for all adults. This backs up White’s assertion.

On the other hand, let’s consider the growing group of people who get their news on line. For example, (it appears to me that) many more comments are made on line at the PolitiFact Facebook page during the week, as the rulings are generated. Less commenting is posted on weekends, although some rulings are published late Friday. This may not mean anything, but this would seem to infer that the rulings are read by the majority of on line news fans during the week. Of course, the only way to verify that is for PolitiFact to look at its website “statcounter.”

Click to enlarge:  You can
barely make out Virginia since both
parties are so close to zero.
Compare to Wisc. and Nat'l.

In reviewing the Republican Party numerical data, I computed the Truth Index for ALL rulings ever done by PolitiFact Virginia to evaluate against the Republican’s anecdotal contention that the rulings “on average” favored the Democrats. Warren Fiske reported a very similar result to mine using a different scoring method which gave equal weight to the Truth-o-Meter categories. I used the scoring method delineated by Bill Adair for the Truth Index about a year ago, which more heavily weighted the negative rulings. But the result was approximately the same: the Republicans and Democrats were in a dead heat at PF Virginia. As an update, however, I started running overall stats for 2011 to current, as I have more detail for those records to make more interesting analyses. In charting PolitiFact by state, it was found that for 166 rulings done by PF Virginia since the start of 2011, there was still a dead heat, but the Republicans were trending to a very slight advantage over the Democrats. In other words, the very slight advantage the Democrats have in their overall score was accomplished in 2010, when PolitiFact Virginia first kicked off, and then it reversed to the Republicans' favor since that time. But it’s more of a “margin of error” variance, so it does not mean much.

The snippet to the left shows the Democrats in blue and the Republicans in red.  I will be publishing the complete chart in a later post.  The baseline is "zero" on the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter, a rating of Half True.  Each line is 10 points on the Truth Index.  The Truth Index score was rounded for easier reading; in Virginia the Democrats were at a positive .78 while the Republicans were at a positive 1.56.  It should be noted that PolitiFacts Virginia and Wisconsin are the only two PolitiFact states to appear to favor the Republicans; all others have higher scores for the Democrats, as can be seen in the overall score at the right, where for 2,935 rulings, the Democrats are at a negative .81 and the Republicans are at negative 24.07.  (Perhaps the Virginia Republicans are looking in the wrong place for "bias" and this is something the Republican party should do on a national level.)

Nevertheless, White makes a brief admittance at the end of his post that the Virginia Republican Party’s paper was similar to his PolitiFact Bias blog: “… the report scores with the anecdotes and not much else.” He notes the last 32 pages of the 86-page opus were fluff, a simple listing of all the Republican rulings by PolitiFact Virginia. In other words, it’s right there in the same league as Eric Levine so aptly described: the Republican Party of Virginia report on PolitiFact is just one more Gish Gallop of anti-PolitiFact propaganda.

Postscript 7/24/2012:  I should also note that this puts a previous post on the weekday/weekend publishing of PolitiFact National in a different light.  It makes them look good from the aspect of the newpaper, but not so good from the aspect of on-line readers, in terms of a alleged "bias."

Truth Index: Friday is Fact-Check Day!

In my last review of PolitiFact Detractors, I published a response to a very one-sided, gigantic opus of talking points put together by the Virginia Republican Party, about the various ways they thought PolitiFact (PF) Virginia was biased in the way it did its Truth-o-Meter rulings. One of their complaints was called the “Weekend Dump” where they wrote that “PolitiFact [was] More Likely To Dump Positive Republican Rulings Late On A Friday, Or Over The Course Of The Weekend, As Well As Save Negative Republican Rulings For Publication During The Week (Monday Through Thursday).” (Don’t Know Why They Have To Start Every Sentence With A Capital Letter But That's How I Copied It!)

All that was needed  was to add a new field for the day of the week in my data. I already had the publish date so it was a easy task. I found that yes, using PolitiFact's Truth Index as a measure, for PF Virginia, there were more positive rulings for Republicans on weekends, and they were more negative during the week, but it was essentially a similar theme for the Democrats, contrary to the anecdotal rulings the Virginia Republican Party pointed out, at least for the first six months of 2012.

Then I thought I’d take a look at PolitiFact National, because it occurred to me when the Virginia Republican Party said there were rulings "buried" in the Saturday Richmond Times-Dispatch, I thought they could be those of PolitiFact National, since very few rulings are ever published on Saturday (most are by PF Oregon).

It should be mentioned that when I did the final filter, I found that PolitiFact National did not publish rulings on Saturday or Sunday (at least thus far in 2012). So I had to assume everything “over the weekend” as what was published on Friday.

Click to enlarge:  Certainly looks like more negative Republican rulings during the week at PF National.

PolitiFact National did 191 rulings in the first half of 2012, 130 Republican and 61 Democrat. From Monday through Thursday it published 154 rulings, 105 on Republicans and 49 on Democrats, and the rest (37) on Friday (25 Republican and 12 Democrat). During the week the Democrats had rulings which averaged a positive Truth Index of 1.02, whereas the Republicans were much lower, at a Truth Index average NEGATIVE 47.6, with 17 Pants on Fire rulings (the Democrats had only 2). With the Friday rulings over the weekend, however, the Democrats dipped to a Truth Index of negative 8.3 and suddenly got very close to the Republicans Truth Index, which made a marked improvement from negative 47.6 to negative 10.

PolitiFact Detractors: Virginia Whine Drunk Deeply

Recently I did a post on what I believed to be right-wing bias by PolitiFact (PF) Wisconsin by looking at the timing—PolitiFact Wisconsin published very negative rulings on Democrats, and positive rulings (or nothing) on Republicans, in the period just before the June 5 recall election.

Well, PolitiFact (PF) Virginia’s detractors, in this case, the Republican Party of Virginia, published a massive tome in what they called an “Open letter to the Commonwealth of Virginia.” It can only be described as an 86-page collection of “sound bites/talking points” claiming something similar against PolitiFact Virginia as published by the Richmond Times Dispatch. I should say, it claimed A LOT of things.

The timing they claim is that PolitiFact Virginia buried Republican positive fact-checks in the weekend edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch when fewer people viewed the news and saved negative Republican fact-checks for during the week when more people would see them, and vice versa for Democrats.

Let me address each of the claims from the Virginia Republican Party before responding to that timing claim, the third item on this list.

1. PolitiFact Virginia “disproportionately” targets more Republicans. This was also addressed by the response to the Republican Party by PolitiFact Virginia writer Warren Fiske, but let’s review it with more specifics: 

According to Wikipedia page for Virginia “Of the state's 11 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans hold eight and Democrats hold three.” There are two Democratic U.S. Senators, but a Republican Governor (Bob McDonnell) and a Republican Lieutenant Governor (and Attorney General). And of course, Eric Cantor (R) is the House Majority Leader. The lower house of the Virginia General Assembly is 67% Republican. The upper house of the Virginia General Assembly is split 50/50 for forty Senators.

Counting all seats held, there are currently 98 positions held by Republicans and 57 positions held by Democrats in the state of Virginia. That means the Republicans hold 70 percent more positions.

Based on that percentage, you’d think PF Virginia would likely do more fact-checks on Republicans in a similar proportion. They’ve actually done less, about 50 percent more instead of 70 percent. So it can be argued that maybe PF Virginia doesn’t do enough on Republicans.

2. PolitiFact Virginia gives more negative rulings to Republicans.  In 2010, I posted a finding that PF Virginia actually favored the Republicans in what was then my version of the Truth Index, and tied that into the fact that the Richmond Times-Dispatch endorsed McCain in 2008 and Bush in 2004 (and that Eric Cantor’s wife was on the board of the company that owns it).

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: Skirting the Wage Gap



At PF Wisconsin wage disparity for doing the same job merits a False; elsewhere, not so.

This post is a combination Grading PolitiFact Review and Grading PolitiFact Liberal Style, because it's turned out to fit both. It focuses on four PolitiFact (PF) rulings on the same subject. Grading PolitiFact’s Bryan White wants them all to be False or Pants on Fire, while to me they're a tentative Half True. The statement is that women earn, on average, 77 cents (or 79 cents or 81 cents, depending on the ruling) for what a man makes…and the addition of “doing the same job” (except for one) which was what brought them down in their rating for the ruling. Four fact-checks on this were done this quarter by PolitiFacts National (a Mostly False for Obama) and Rhode Island (a Mostly False for Congressman David Cicilline) and for the less specific (but supposedly “correct”) statement from senate candidate Tim Caine that it’s not for the same job, which merited a Mostly True from PolitiFact Virginia.

The fourth was from PolitiFact Wisconsin: it was women on average earned 81 cents on the dollar for the same job coming from  Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Falk, for which she received a False.  So White got his False on one of the statements; however, the PolitiFact Wisconsin review committed the same type of error he lamented in determining the real wage differential among all the occupations, because (according to most of the writers) it couldn’t really be done.

Looking at this chart (see below) from Wikipedia, I don’t know how one couldn’t conclude that women earn less than men. Maybe the gap is closer for the same work in certain categories, but there’s still a gap. Women earn less in almost every occupation ( only more in 4 out of 111, according to PolitiFact Wisconsin). But since we know women generally earn less overall, that gender bias exists (and studies show we’re not sure why) and it’s difficult to find evidence to show that women earn less for the same work across the board, the Mostly Falses (and the False) should have been more like inconclusive Half Trues.

Click to enlarge:  Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009.

The ruling on Tim Caine of Mostly True where he didn’t add the “for the same job” came with the subtitle “There are many ways to look at pay gap.” This should have been how the “Mostly False” finders should have looked at this to conclude a Half True. Indeed there are many ways to look at it, but there’s still a gap.

Truth Index: 2011 PolitiFact Writers

There’s been some suggestions to me for improvements to the PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index on writers, and so I’ve tried to incorporate them here. One was, that my previous method of presenting the writers, by degree of variance between the Democrat and Republican Truth Index, didn’t mean a whole lot , and was in and of itself not a sufficient indicator that the writer might be biased. So I’ve decided to relate it to the state Truth Indexes for now.

It is true that it’s really hard to tell much from doing it the way I did it before. When I hear about “selection bias” the question becomes, to me, who does the selection, and how do they select. If a writer is not part of selecting the claim, in other words, if the claim is an assignment, this would certainly affect their variance. Some of the writers have very true leaning ratings (like Eric Stirgus of PF Georgia) while others have very false leaning ratings (like James Nelson of PF Wisconsin). A future post might look more closely at why Eric Stirgus appears to have so many more True ratings for both parties as compared to his PF Georgia compatriot Willoughby Mariano, especially if the Truth Index holds for both in 2012.  It was surmised that part of the reason PF Wisconsin's averages dropped was because of the labor unrest and recall efforts (and statements made associated with them) which were highly publicized in February.

The Truth Index here reflects all PolitiFact rulings for the year 2011 because that’s when I started keeping track of the writers.

Click to enlarge: These include ALL 2011 work of the writer (some also wrote for PF National as well as their state.)
Jacob Geiger's Democrat Truth Index calculated to zero.

Tom Feran of PF Ohio had the largest variance between Democrats and Republicans the last time, and retained this “gap” for 2011, at almost 60 points. He did about 60% more Republican rulings. Half of his Democrat rulings were done on Dennis Kucinich and Senator Sherrod Brown, who score very high on the individual Truth Index (Steve at Quibbling Potatoes also noted the affect on the Truth Index of Sherrod Brown) and might explain why his Democrat Truth Index was so high.

The Truth Indexes by writer are in the same order as the PF states featuring the major writers (those who have written the most rulings) for that state. This can be compared to the Truth Index by state in my previous post. For an even closer look, here’s a chart on the two Republican-favorable states Virginia and Wisconsin, to get a look at which writers affected the averages.

Click to enlarge:  Geiger's looks slightly different than overall chart because it only includes his PF Virginia work.

A few personnel changes should be noted here as well. It appears Robert Farley is no longer writing for PF National. I often see him as a writer over at FactCheck.Org., so he may have “jumped ship.” One of PF Virginia’s writers, Jacob Geiger, has not authored a ruling since July, 2011, and it appears he’s been replaced by Warren Fiske along with a rev up by Sean Gorman.

Next, individual politician ratings.

PolitiFact Detractors are even on YouTube!

This latest PolitiFact detractor, some fellow named Peter Schiff, who sounds like a libertarian,  has a radio show somewhere in the Virginia area. I “wikied” him and, wouldn’t you know, he’s the “CEO of Euro Pacific Precious Metals, LLC, a gold and silver dealer based in New York City.”

In this "audio" YouTube video, he interviews Jacob Geiger, a writer for PolitiFact Virginia, who ruled that Tea Party senatorial candidate Jamie Radtke was "Barely True" in a statement she made earlier this year (see below audio-video):

"We’re spending so much money that we can’t even borrow it fast enough -- the Federal Reserve has to print more money just to keep up!"

Radtke continued: "The international financial markets know what it means when a nation monetizes its debt, even if Washington doesn’t. Commodity, food and energy prices have been climbing over the past 12 months: Corn prices have risen 69 percent; wheat prices have risen 44 percent; sugar prices have risen 15 percent; and gasoline is back at three dollars a gallon... and rising."

Geiger verified the price increases as actually 75% for corn, 52% for wheat and 12% for sugar; he came to his ruling of Barely True because “Radtke goes off track when she attributes these higher prices to a Federal Reserve that helps the United States "monetize its debt."

While Peter Schiff didn’t have the bombast of say, Rush Limbaugh, he was clearly off on a lot of things as he blamed everything on the printing of money and alluded to gold and silver as the favored monetary measure. But he was incorrect to say that economic growth doesn’t create inflation or that gold prices are an indicator of inflation. Economic growth in theory should not cause inflation, but in reality it almost always does (or, in reverse, there can be “stagflation”, recessionary inflation). Gold prices may serve as an inflation or deflation hedge, but it is not always a precursor to inflation. Gold reached a high in early 2008 along with oil, and then it declined. During that time, and for the rest of 2008 and 2009, core inflation stayed very low.

But Radtke wasn’t talking about gold and silver. She was talking about agricultural commodities, and Radtke’s take on it was correct (and Geiger shouldn’t owe her an apology, as Schiff continually demanded). Corn, wheat and sugar are not a finite supply like gold and silver, so I’m guessing futures speculation, due to the droughts and floods, had driven them higher for the time being. And by the way, the price of soybeans has declined this year—shouldn’t they be going up as well?

I don’t think Jacob Geiger was used to the verbal interview and his short silences and "uh, uhs" were disconcerting. He shouldn’t have let Schiff distract him over the prices of gold and silver, clearly what Schiff was trying to push. In other words, Schiff was trying to turn PolitiFact into a marketing tool for gold investments...perhaps, as well, the reason for the YouTube video.

 

Lil White Lies: The Tax Cut Billemma

Emphasis added is a very important feature of this critique, for it spells out the differences for which PolitiFact’s critics think it can be rebuked.

PolitiFact Virginia’s fact-check reads as follows (emphasis added): that Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.) claimed “The tax-cut deal [Tax Cuts Compromise] ‘adds more than $800 billion to the deficit over two years -- more than the cost of TARP and more than the cost of the Recovery Act’ and about the same as health care reform.”  It ruled his statement Mostly True.

Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) actually said in his statement: (emphasis added)

“This bill adds more than $800 billion to the deficit over two-years – more than the cost of TARP and more than the cost of the Recovery Act. It costs about the same over two years as the 10 year cost of the Health Care Reform bill, which we paid for." …

But Bryan White finds his loophole in the second paragraph: (emphasis added)

“We cannot add more than $800 billion to the deficit through tax cuts and tell the American people with a straight face that they won’t have to sacrifice anything in the future to balance the federal budget. If we didn’t have the political will to end the Bush-era tax cuts tonight, we certainly won’t have the political will to do it two years from now during a presidential election.”

According to Bryan, it’s “tax cuts” only that adds $800 billion to the deficit, and not “the bill”, and since it’s only tax cuts, the $800 billion is incorrect and also less, not more than the cost of the TARP, ARRA and the HCR bills. Note (1) That it is the bill he says adds more to the deficit than TARP and the Recovery Act, and that IT (the bill) costs about the same as HCR; and that (2) Scott initially calls it “the bill” and then (in the second paragraph) refers to it as tax cuts. It appears Scott is using “the bill” (or “tax deal” as PolitiFact refers to it) interchangeably with tax cuts. He could be talking about either one or both. Maybe he just didn't want to get into all the detail, since even Bryan admits, 90% of it was tax cuts.  So PolitiFact writer/researcher Wes Hester chooses (or as Bryan would say, selects “with bias”) the FIRST description—bill—the beginning subject line for the statement--but Bryan thinks it should be the second paragraph “context” line, which is “tax cuts”. Further aggravating the rhetoric is PolitiFact referring to the bill (or tax cut) as “tax deal” in its title which Bryan uses to further his cause.

As a believer in the “Laffer” curve, I find it troubling that the tax cuts, as they were originally put in place in 2001 and 2003, failed to increase tax revenues, and job creation remained flat. So, while there may be some economic recovery, there will likely be no “payback” for this tax compromise. This means in terms of “offsets” to cost, the TARP and HCR contain more “offsetting” factors than the Tax Compromise, while the ARRA is about the same, i.e., it’s hard to tell.