Politi-Score: First Half 2011 Results à la PolitiFact

This blog has looked at the PolitiFact (PF) scoring methods of various political websites such as the Daily Beast and Smart Politic’s Eric Ostermeier. PolitiFact, in its new mobile app, has developed its own “rules” (as far as I can see) with regard to “scoring”—

1. Everyone is included (office holders, non office holders, blogs, e-mails, non-partisans).

2. Individual “scores” are not shown based on numbers but relatively based on percentages (in a color coded bar chart format).

There seems to be an avoidance of any comparison of Republican/Conservative with Democrat/Liberal because to do so would reveal, as the Daily Beast and Smart Politics have found, that the rulings favor Democrats. Below is how PolitiFact’s mobile app would look if, for the first half of 2011, you could get a reading of Republicans/Conservatives, Democrats/Liberals, and “Other” in total. I’ve put the Politi-Score to the right of each one in the Bar Chart.

Percentages are included in the bar chart for better clarification.

As I was compiling these rulings, it appeared that there were a lot more Republicans being reviewed, perhaps because of their nationwide rout of the Democrats in the elections this past November…just more Republican statements to review because there’s just more Republicans in office! Indeed, a quick computation revealed that the percentage of Republican rulings had increased about 8 percent from just over 50% to 54%, while the Democrats dropped 16% from about 44% to almost 36% of all PolitiFact rulings.

Lil White Lies: Mister Predictor

Yes, my conservative counterpart has made yet another startling prediction about PolitiFact: (emphasis added):

I was thinking on Friday (I know, I know! I'm trying to quit!). PolitiFact is taking a pounding to their reputation on their FaceBook page. And, no, I'm not patting myself on the back. There are a pretty fair number of "fans" who write strong criticisms of the PolitiFact entries.

If this trend continues, I foresee PolitiFact either curbing their hosting of criticism or terminating the FaceBook page altogether. It is, in the end, all about protecting and burnishing the brand. If the criticisms are not somehow marginalized, the brand suffers. I just can't see the St. Petersburg Times putting up with that over the course of time.

Only problem is, he said this on November 21, 2009, in his blog, about 18+ months ago. Since then, PolitiFact’s Facebook page has gone from about 7,000 fans to approaching 38,000, and PolitiFact has expanded with at least six (or more) other state partnerships. Oh, and I think they got that Pullitzer for 2009 as well. So, instead of patting yourself on the back, Bryan White, maybe you need to kick yourself in the arse for being so egotistical.

And just in case he goes back and deletes the post (I get the impression he checks his “Stat-Counter” frequently), I’ve snipped a screen-print of it.

Sidebar: Barely True...or Mostly False? Part 2

In my "Part 2" of Bill Adair’s breakin’ out the Truth-o-meter on the June 28th edition of  MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, he mentions to host Chuck Todd that he is thinking of changing the “Barely True” category to “Mostly False.” At first I got all excited and thought maybe he read something I posted about six weeks ago which was headlined with precisely this suggestion. My ego eventually deflated, however, as I realized there could be other factors: I believe I saw some commentary at the Facebook page to that effect, but, more significantly, there was a ruling on a statement made around June 1 by the National Republican Congressional Committee where they essentially interpreted Barely True as True, which shows what can happen when you say something that’s mostly false is “Barely True.”

This is what NRCC spokesperson Tory Mazzola told PolitiFact (PF) in response to their inquiry as to why Mazzola claimed a PolitiFact-confirmed “True” for “Barely True”:

We [PF] sent him [Mazzola] an e-mail this morning (June 1) noting our puzzlement, and he replied. "By ruling it ‘true,’ albeit barely, you determined that the Democrats' responses were not believable, not credible, or false at least a degree more than ours were true," he said.

So, it all depends on interpretation…and a “Mostly False” ruling would likely have resolved this. As I said in my previous post, I do not like the words “Barely True” because the word True is somewhat misleading as it conveys the “True” or truth of the ruling more strongly than the False, even though it's more "False" than "True". And that’s exactly what was "conveyed" to Troy Mazzola and the Republican National Campaign Committee.

Politi-Score: Fact-checking Bill Adair

“…only chain e-mails score lower on the Truth-o-Meter than Michele Bachmann...”

PolitiFact’s Bill Adair has a recurring fact-checking role on MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown” hosted by Chuck Todd. I think yesterday’s (June 28) was the first one I’ve watched; while Adair does a pretty good job vocalizing the reasons for the rulings, he did say something (actually two things, one of which I’ll address in my next post) that merited this post.

Adair stated that only chain emails beat out Michele Bachmann as the “least truthful”. I wrinkled my nose at that statement (as something someone looking for a statement to fact-check might do) and said to myself, I don’t think that’s true. I recalled that the e-mails were all lumped together on PolitiFact’s “Personalities” page, regardless of political affiliation. There were 89 through the end of 2010, and to get a more accurate read on the Politi-Score, it we necessary for me to categorize them as to whether they were from Democrats, Republicans, or they were “unknown”. As it turned out, almost half (44) were in that “unknown” category.

Bachmann and chain e-mail total PF rulings and scores at the end of 2010.

Above is a screen-print of my filtered Excel spreadsheet reflecting Bachmann’s and the separated chain e-mail Politi-Scores at the end of 2010. The second to last column reflects the Politi-Score (the last column "DB Score" is the Daily Beast score, discussed below). Bachmann was way ahead of the chain e-mails because at that time she had 7 Falses and 6 Pants on Fire. In the Politi-Scoring methodology that means she didn’t even make a positive score, because False is assigned a zero and Pants on Fire is assigned a -25. Because among the chain e-mails there were 21 scoring from True to Barely True, only the e-mails of “unknown” affiliation scored a negative, although the negative wasn’t as high as Bachmann’s.  

Current Bachmann and chain e-mail total PF rulings and scores.

Politi-Score: First Half Preview--PolitiFact Writers Revisited

The first half of 2011 is almost over, so I have started compiling PolitiFact rulings from where I left off at the end of March. As I start with PolitiFact National and there’s just a few days left in June, I thought it would be worth it to take another look at the PolitiFact National writers again in terms of the Politi-Score. At that time, it appeared that PolitiFact writer Angie Drobnic Holan favored the Democrats more than the two other writers Lou Jacobson and Robert Farley; however, now that more rulings have been accumulated, that theory may have been a bit premature.

Holan’s Politi-Score dropped from 63 to 53 for Democrats and went up a bit for Republicans; both Farley and Jacobson dropped in “truthiness” on both sides. Here is the chart for the first quarter, and below that (outlined in red) is the chart for the first half (first and second quarters combined):

First quarter 2011 (click to enlarge).

First Half 2011 (click to enlarge).

Conclusions? Well, if we are to believe that PolitiFact is liberally biased, it would seem they selected more Republican statements in the second quarter that were false. They did select more Republican statements, aside from whether they “knew” the statements would be ruled False or Pants on Fire. For the record, there were 116 rulings total published by PolitiFact National for the second quarter of 2011 (as of Monday, June 27). Of these, 45 were Democratic/Liberal statements and 67 were Republican/Conservative (the rest were non-partisan). The Democrats had only two Pants on Fire rulings, and 10 False; the Republicans had 11 Pants on Fire rulings, and 19 False. That’s a ratio of 5:1 on Pants on Fire and 2:1 on False comparing Republicans to Democrats.

Yesterday, a Facebook commenter named Vic Pilkington addressed me on something similar:

… what is your tally when comparing right and left "pants-on-fire" and "false" starements? I contend the right have a 4:1 edge over the left on those statements considered as having no basis in reality.

Well, I guess it’s even worse than Vic thought. For the second quarter of 2011, at PolitiFact National, there IS some basis for that reality. On the other hand, we have about a quarter of all the rulings represented here, and the rest (the PolitiFact partners) need to be reviewed.

Politi-Score: Update on PolitiFact's New App

PolitiFact was supposedly going to publish something more ("next week" as I recall) on how the part of its new Mobile App,  the Truth Index, which it described as the "Dow Jones Industrial Average of truth", was calculated.  At least that was the impression I got from its announcement of this app.  However, now it appears that particular article has been withdrawn.  I've been waiting for this explanation, because frankly it isn't apparent to me how it works.  But I will keep working on it.

For example, it said something about "a seven days average of the previous rulings" but I don't know if that's in total (a rolling average) or the total just for that period.   But the large variances don't coincide with a rolling average.  Maybe PolitiFact will eventually "tell" me.

Postscript:  A few hours after this was posted, PolitiFact published an article "PolitiFact App Now Available for iPhone" ostensibly to replace the article lifted. 

Sidebar: Holy Troller, Batman!

Working for a highly political organization for many years, I watched the politics in action and learned the do's and don'ts...one if the many things I learned was that you don't "burn your bridges" by alienating everybody, because sooner or later, you're going to alienate someone who's going to hurt you back more than you think....in other words, actions have consequences.

For the first time, at the Facebook commentary suggestion of one Shiela Fahey Wallenius, I visited my conservative counterpart Bryan White's Facebook "Wall".  It looked like a laundry list of various PolitiFact commenters, Bryan's lengthy "j'accuse" of those committing some version of fallacy sin.

If she had been posting regularly at FB PolitiFact's page, she would know this is not true.

Wallenius, however, decided to take it one step further when Bryan decided to pick on her (see above snippet from Facebook).  She declared Bryan a "professional troll" since it appeared that his only purpose--his assignment--was being the in-house aggravator of PolitiFact's (Liberal or Democratic) Facebook page commenters, as noted by her suggestion above.  She stated she had not only blocked him but reported him. Another commenter, Barry Powers, joined in. Bryan's co-conspirator "Deff Jyberg" rushed to Bryan's defense, but the commenters ganged up on both of them, one of them linking Deff Jeff Dyberg to Bryan's PolitiFact Bias blog site.   It was an engaging reading.