Grading ZFC: Bachmann is Full of Care, and BS

In reviewing this meta-factcheck of PolitiFact (PF) by Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC), I carefully listened to the entire 17 minutes of Michele Bachmann's speech at the annual CPAC on YouTube. I must have heard the word "care" between 40 and 60 times in the course of the speech, along with something to the effect of "our movement loves people." It was a pure--in terms of logical fallacies-- "appeal to emotion."

PolitiFact fact-checked the following part of her speech:

We wondered if it was accurate for Bachmann to say that "scientists tell us that we could have a cure in 10 years for Alzheimer's" were it not for "overzealous regulators, excessive taxation and greedy litigators." So we checked with a variety of Alzheimer’s researchers and policy experts. (Bachmann’s office did not respond to an inquiry for this article.)

(I guess if you're excluded from the CPAC Movement of Love you don't deserve a response!)

My conservative counterpart claimed that in analyzing Bachmann's statement, PolitiFact "commit(ted) a core blunder in its fact check analysis." He added that it "fail[ed] to pay basic attention to Bachmann’s statement and severely misrepresent[ed] it in the fact check."

Oh my, do we like to use exaggerative words, like "core blunder" and "severely" misrepresent. So....was that really what it was, or was it something less?

 

Something should be added as far as the context, that ZFC ignores or neglects to mention. Bachmann started out with describing how Jonas Salk invented his Polio vaccine and gave it to Eisenhower in the 1950's which was distributed to the general population. She used it to segue into how a cure could be found in the same way for Alzeimer's. But the two diseases are vastly different: one is a virus, and one is a degenerative, progressive brain disease of unknown origins. It's  comparing apples to oranges. On top of that, if a cure for Alzeimer's is found, does she think whoever discovers it is going to give it so easily to the "people" especially in this day and age of our political parties (and I'm not going to say it's just the Republicans) cow-towing to the lobbyists of major corporations? I'd like to see just how far all that "love and care" is going to go to do it.

But that is besides the point. Was Bachmann's statement misrepresented by PolitiFact in a way so it could ultimately set her pants on fire? A friend of mine who calls himself "Deconverted Man" on YouTube--his real name is Daniel--just finished up on some courses on logical fallacies in completing his degree. He also responds to videos on YouTube with his own where he analyzes, explains, and puts on a "counter" those logical fallacies he finds (and he seems to find a lot). He was gracious enough to review PolitiFact's fact-check as well as what ZFC had to say.

Meta Meta, All That Data

This past fall, my conservative counterpart started his own fact-checking website called Zebra Fact-Check, sort of jumping on that "conservapedia" bandwagon of playing to the right-wing choir. He gave a new term to a categorization of his Zebra fact-checks where he was again publishing criticisms of PolitiFact rulings as he did at his original blog: he called it a meta-factcheck, which by definition is the correct terminology, since he is "fact-checking the fact-check." So I suppose that makes me a META-meta fact-checker, because I am "fact-checking" his fact-check of PolitiFact's fact-check. Wew!

 

But more than that, on his new "non-blogspot" website, he includes a little detail on the "About" page that has me wondering....whether my speculation about his concentrated vindictiveness toward PolitiFact may in fact have some foundation.

I graduated from the journalism program at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg in 2008. The university campus is located across the street from the Poynter Institute, which owns both the Tampa Bay Times (then known as the St. Petersburg Times) and PolitiFact.

I regarded Poynter’s 2007 foray into fact checking with hope and interest at first, but that changed quickly to horror. I couldn’t believe that the Times would produce a product so deeply inferior to the Annenberg Fact Check model.

My blogging gradually changed its focus to criticism of PolitiFact. I hoped that vigorous criticism would help PolitiFact reach for a higher set of standards.

Here's what I've "speculated" about previously (in October, 2012):

Speaking of that, this makes my theory seem all the more likely that Bryan White may have been someone rejected for a journalist-type job by the Tampa Bay Times or PolitiFact itself: he states that these [new Zebra] fact-checks are what he does best. So this bolsters my theory that this was his retaliation. But that's pure speculation.

I had written this before I browsed his website and found where he listed his educational achievements. So now I know for a fact that he has the background necessary for such a job, and graduated and (as known) resided in the vicinity of the biggest newspaper in the Tampa/St. Pete area, right at the time the PolitiFact operation was starting. If this was expansion at the paper, there quite possibly could have been openings for, if not full-time journalists, at the very least, interns, for the specific PolitiFact project, because in the course of my recording the writers along with each ruling, it was apparent they had many interns who tried their hand at composing fact-checks. Nowhere did I see anything written, researched or edited by one Bryan W. White.

As of today's date, Robert Farley remains one of Factcheck.Org's lead writers, as can be seen in this screen clip

Then there's the "deeply inferior" comparison of PolitiFact to the Annenberg FactCheck. FactCheck.org, as I've noted in many posts, for the most part agrees with PolitiFact when checking the same item. The only difference is that Annenberg FactCheck doesn't have a Truth-o-Meter, and its fact-checks are often more limited in scope, because they will include several checks in one post at their website. So, in certain respects, its fact-checks are not as complete nor as sourced as PolitiFact's. To top that off, one of its writers, Robert Farley, used to write for PolitiFact (although White seems to have about the same opinion of him as he does Louis Jacobson and the others). While one could say Farley moved "up", there's really no way to verify that Farley went from an inferior fact-checking operation to a superior one...unless White could find out from Farley himself. It would be interesting to see what Farley would have to say about that, and I have a feeling he might not agree with White.

 

Nevertheless, something definitely smells even more rotten in Largo, Florida.

Confounded by Contextual Complications

It is our policy to make on-the-record email correspondence public where the content affects the context of a story.

Zebra Fact-check, January 7, 2013

 

Fact checkers should emphasize such contextual elements, not bury them.

Sublime Bloviations "Grading PolitiFact", August, 2012

 

(For the second damn time, practice what you preach!)

 

 

Right wingers feel vindicated that Fiat/Chrysler has announced it will be building Jeeps in China, especially at those websites critical of PolitiFact. Instead of beating the same dead horse again and again, I'm going to take another look at this in the terms of the right-wing argument: that if any (even a very small) percentage of production at the Jeep plants in the United States is replaced by production in China, then Mr. Romney's statement (see above graphic) is true in all respects, and needs no further explanation.

 

The right-wing website Zebra Factcheck (ZFC) uses the word "context" in almost every one of its "fact-checks." It seems to feel that it's so important that  they even have a tile symbol for it. For example, in one of its more recent posts on Marco Rubio, it claims that " In effect, PolitiFact takes Rubio’s tweet out of context."

Zebra Factcheck's littered graphics has a white tile symbol for "Out of Context"

 On his review of Romney's "Jeeps to China" comment, anti-PolitiFact website(s) PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck writer Bryan White duly notes the "context" he feels is crucially important to Romney's claims.

That’s right. PolitiFact takes a preferred Obama campaign claim about its rescue of the auto industry and states it matter-of-factly in a fact check of Romney. No additional context needed, apparently.

The media treatment of the dispute between the campaigns misses the context while focusing on the particulars. Romney is not simply making statements about Obama’s role in the auto bailout. His campaign is answering the Obama campaign’s messaging and pointing out missing parts of its story.

The only context I can see that was missed (according to Zebra Factcheck) appears to be what was presented by one of Romney's spokespeople to the New York Times in response to Romney's ad:

The facts are clear: despite his false and misleading attacks, President Obama took the auto companies into bankruptcy,” said a spokeswoman, Amanda Henneberg. “His mismanagement of the process has exposed taxpayers to a $25 billion loss.”

Romney had proposed "letting Detroit go bankrupt" in opposition to what President George Bush decided to initiate with a bridge loan to GM and Chrysler in 2008. He said the government "should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing." But even Michigan's future (Republican) Governor Rick Snyder and (Republican) Congressman Fred Upton, acknowledged that "there was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government." The respected, not really liberal Economist had this to say:

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.

Zebra Factcheck is the PolitiFact *Unskewed*

(OR "Fact-checking you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better"....)

If there's one thing to be learned from the elections, it's that creating one's own realities doesn't work. From Salon.com:

Conservatives will hear that Hurricane Sandy and Chris Christie delivered the election to Obama, that Mitt Romney wasn’t a true conservative, and that mainstream media bias blinded Americans to the truth. A few voices may acknowledge that the state of polling science is actually pretty good, and the demographics of the U.S. have fundamentally changed, but don’t hold your breath for a widespread reappraisal of the dangers of listening only to what you want to hear. The right-wing echo chamber is built of stronger stuff than the left’s.

And along with "mainstream media bias," fact-checkers must be 100% liberally biased as well! And Zebra Factcheck will unblind you to "the truth"! But I digress.

Current TV's Cenk Ugyur reported how much 26 polls were off in predicting this past election, listed in terms of accuracy: it almost came as no surprise to me that one of those near the bottom was the conservative Rasmussen--while the top poll was the liberal Public Policy Polling and one from the Daily Kos.

 

There were a number of polling analysis outfits, the most prolific being Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight, along with Real Clear Politics. But then a website called Unskewed Polls became well known, especially with Republicans, with over 25,000 fans on Facebook, as authored by Dean Chambers who was very highly critical of Nate Silver. It essentially based its election prognostications adjusting for what it believed was over-sampling of Democrats by the other polls (and under-sampling Republican enthusiasm)--because those polls were part of the "main stream media" and that by "showing results unrealistically favorable to Obama that they are leading to a perception among voters of the inevitability of Obama's victory in the election." 



Unskewed Polls electoral map Nov. 4: Romney to win 52% to 47%

And so, the weekend before the election up until election eve, Unskewed Polls was basically predicting a Romney sweep of 342 electoral college votes to 196 for Obama, as shown above  in a screen-snip from its website. Sometime Election Eve Monday Dean Chambers did some quick back-pedaling (strangely, with almost all the polling done) on his electoral map to make it look like he only failed to predict four states for Obama, changing the electoral counts to 275 for Romney and 263 for Obama. Meanwhile, people like Karl Rove and Dick Morris were making similar errors to Dean Chambers on Democratic over-sampling, in predicting a Romney landslide on Fox News. Everyone ended up eating a lot of crow failing to discern the voter suppression backlash and growing minority demographics.

 

So you can see where I am going with PolitiFact Bias (PFB) and its new "project" Zebra Factcheck. I believe the writers at PFB commit the same type of cognitively dissonant blunder, insisting that PolitiFact is "Democratically skewed" like Chambers claims all the polls are. And they think they are unskewering PolitiFact's rulings at their websites, just as Chambers says he does.

Giving ZFC a KO on CKDs

This first check of Zebra Fact-Check (ZFC) is also a postscript on something just posted as a response to PolitiFact Bias--on the misleading information in a late Mitt Romney campaign ad being used to rile autoworkers in Ohio.

ZFC writer Bryan White offers us this "these-are-jobs-in-China-from-the-U.S." citation from the Toledo Blade to back up the veracity of Romney's literal statement that Fiat/Chrysler is going to build Jeeps in China.

Jeep currently exports U.S.-made vehicles to China, which is Jeep’s largest market outside of North America. Last year, Jeep sold 22,294 vehicles in China. The company is expected to exceed that this year.

He then asks "If a Chinese Jeep plant takes over production of some or all of the more than 20,000 vehicles Jeeps sells in China then how does this not affect workers in the United States?"

Let's first start with the 22,294 vehicles from a relative perspective. One Detroit Jeep plant produces about 950 vehicles per day in 2 shifts. That means if the plant was working a normal 5-day work week, this would be roughly one month's production. Not very much, less than 10% of total annual production, and would be even less if the plant was at maximum production (3 shifts) or was working overtime. The Chinese production is what is called low volume. Even the 33,463 vehicles cited from the Business Standard fit the same definition: not enough for full production, not enough for a plant.

ZFC might counter that this could still be 10 percent of the workers being replaced....but that's not quite so black and white. If ZFC had been thorough in its fact-checking like it claims it is, it should have noted the paragraph at the bottom of the Toledo Blade article:

That commitment means Chrysler will not fully build and assemble Wranglers outside America. The automaker does currently ship low volumes of what the industry calls “knock-down kits” for final assembly in Egypt. Mr. Bragman said that's fairly common in the automotive industry, and the kits are not equitable to full-scale production plants. Parts would still have to be made and partially assembled elsewhere.

Knock-down kits (CKD = Complete Knock Down) contain "the parts needed to assemble a product" and are used when there is a low volume for export as "a method of supplying parts to a market, particularly in shipping to foreign nations, and serves as a way of counting or pricing." That is how Jeeps were produced in China up until 2009. The kits are assembled in the United States...and guess who does the assembly of the parts in those kits here for shipment to China? Now, if ZFC or counterirritant want to call Chrysler to find out if fewer workers are needed for CKD kit assembly than for full-scale assembly, they're more than welcome to find out. And, it is possible the kit assembly could be outsourced to a local supplier--but then, additional jobs would be created there to replace any auto plant jobs. 

So when Aaron Bragman, a senior automotive analyst at IHS Automotive, was quoted to say that the Chinese production "doesn't take any jobs away from anyone else" he was correct. Romney is not correct, and neither is ZFC nor counterirritant.

Finally, the original Bloomberg article said that Fiat was in "detailed conversations" about making Jeeps in China. It wasn't definite nor confirmed. So, what happens if the deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group doesn't materialize? I didn't mention this in my original criticism, but it is another large gray area on the Zebra. Because while Romney himself said the Italians ( I could do another post on that one as well) were "thinking" of moving the production to China, the ad (which was aired much more) said it was a sure thing...which it wasn't. That alone makes Romney's literal statement false.

But what else would one expect from right-wing fact-checkers.

Sidebar: Does Ze Bra Hold Up?

I knew it might be too good to be true when my conservative counterpart appeared to stop posting his criticisms of PolitiFact at both of his sites...as well as stop posting at the PolitiFact Facebook page.  I also thought he might be up to something.  In my last contact on the PolitiFact Facebook page, he said he was going to do the same Pants on Fire analysis of the state PolitiFacts, and it seemed likely to me he was going through the process of collecting the state data which was taking up his time.

 

It also seemed he was getting heard at a higher level in the right-wing media where he was cited and featured with an interview; he had also "un-blogspotted" his PolitiFact Bias site, making it a real website, in order to give it more "cred" I suppose.  There's most likely money to be made in connections to Big Government or Weekly Standard especially when you're regularly trashing an "independent fact-checker" as being liberally biased.  Now that he was being cited by the bigger names, it seemed that would be a natural progression.

 

As it turns out, author Bryan White has decided to launch a new website where he does his own fact-checks with a conservative bent.  Of course, he's not rating them like PolitiFact or the Washington Post Factchecker, and he's given the site the name of Zebra FactCheck, which I think reflects his ideology very neatly--for most conservatives don't see the world in shades of grey, they see it in black and white.  This also is very indicative of  the false dichotomies he often presents.  But in terms of the right-wing websites, he may have segued into something that might get him a real job.

 

Speaking of that, this makes my theory seem all the more likely that Bryan White may have been someone rejected for a journalist-type job by the Tampa Bay Times or PolitiFact itself: he states that these fact-checks are what he does best.  So this bolsters my theory that this was his retaliation.  But that's pure speculation.

 

All in all, it makes it easier for me in the sense that it is harder to make a criticism of a criticism of a factcheck than it is just to criticize the factcheck itself.  And that I will do.  In fact, I've discovered that the best way to check his fact-checks may be with PolitiFact's fact-checks.

 

In the meantime, I am having fun trying to find a comical symbol for "Checking Zebra-Factcheck".  I thought of De-Zebtions and the graphic for the title of my post "does Ze-Bra hold up?'  Or there's the black and white angle.  Lil Black and White Lies?  "Gray"-ding Zebra Factchecks" maybe?   Stay tuned.