Sidebar: Oh The Strawmanity!

In the course of my YouTube experience, I ran across a lot of people who used logical fallacies, particularly in the debates concerning religion.  Since my conservative counterpart focuses on them in his fact-check project, blog, and in commentary on Facebook, I also realized that this may have been the same place where he honed his skill on spotting/using them, besides that which he received in his education.

 

A straw man is an argument based on misrepresentation of the opponents' position.  The trouble with straw man is they are often thrown around like so many straws.  They are a logical-fallacy way of saying in your opinion the opponent is lying.   Some people will use them if they don't have anything else to argue with, like an accusation that bears a slight relation to the claim, so it's often difficult to distinguish whether it's really a straw man.  In other words, like everything else, logic can be abused.

 

My main defense (more than once) of PolitiFact's choice of the 2012 Lie of the Year--Mitt Romney's attack ad in the electoral-college crucial state of Ohio where there were several Chrysler plants, that its Jeep division was going to build cars in China--was its cruel inference that those Ohio plants would close.  If I had written that defense today, I would have stated it differently:  Romney's statement (and the ad) were straw men.  He misrepresented the position of Fiat-Chrysler and he misrepresented what Obama did at the time.

In a statement from Fiat-Chrysler management, it refuted that very misrepresentation.  In Obama's case, that was pretty much left to the fact-checkers.

But that is not really the point of this post.  The point is as I wrote it in the way I did, my counterpart attacked me by saying my arguments were straw men--as he stated, "an impressive array."  In other words, he was defending Romney's straw man by claiming those who said it was not true were using a straw man (not just PolitiFact, but Factcheck.Org and the Washington Post). He was doing the very thing that I had seen done in YouTube and Facebook commentary:  when all else fails, bring out the straw man.  Now I understand.

Grading PolitiFact *Liberal*-Style: No "Set" for Navratilova

But another "point" perhaps!

Martina Navratilova's recent statement (published May 7) rated by PolitiFact as a Half True resulted in a big brouhaha review from MSNBC'S popular pundit and gay-rights promoter, Rachel Maddow. Navratilova stated on the TV show "Face the Nation" that "in 29 states in this country, you can still get fired for not just being gay but if your employer thinks that you`re gay, you could still get fired.”

On the face of it, it is true that 29 states do not ban discrimination against gays. But PolitiFact's ruling took into account that in those 29 states there existed similar protections for some employees by means of federal and local laws as well as private company policies.

I had some problems, however, with how PolitiFact came to concluding this Half True...I would want to ask writer Louis Jacobson a couple questions: Did he ask Navratilova or any representative of Navratilova how she framed it? Could it be that she was not aware of such exceptions? It was not indicated in the sources. Did he "count" in terms of those who were in the "exception" category, approximating what percentage of people would be covered in those states not having such protections? It could have been estimated, but it would have taken some time. For example, there's Virginia, which has a high percentage of people working for the government but as a state does not prohibit such discrimination. But in other states, even with other protections, the percent of those having them might be very small--so small that it would not be that relevant.

 

I was a bit disappointed in how Rachel Maddow did the segment on how PolitiFact handled the ruling. Her very curtailed explanation of the exceptions was as follows:

They fact checked a statement about state law, found it to be true, decided it didn’t seem seemly or whatever to actually just call it true, then they searched other unrelated information about how there are other kind of things, besides states, like some companies, they don’t want to discriminate, and doesn’t that count for something?

I vehemently disagree with Maddow. It IS related, and they're actually the same types of laws (which she conveniently left out), not just "some companies" that "don't want to discriminate." It was a four- point bullet list (which some like to call "concrete examples").

Erik Wemple of the Washington Post describes Maddow's approach to fact-checking as "strict constructionist" which means "don't look at the context." Well, to take a term from tennis (used in another way), I'd love, LOVE to see what Maddow would do if PolitiFact did the same with, say, the 2012 PolitiFact Lie of the Year from Mitt Romney about Chrysler moving  vehicle production to China. Perhaps then she'd understand why it is important.

 

Wemple noted that it was not Navratilova's intent to mislead. But the Half True is not a ruling given for misleading statements; it is for those "missing important information." This is where I diverge further however, because the statement on its face was fully accurate, not partially, the criteria for a Half True. As it was fully accurate, but needed the additional information for the other ways in which discrimination was banned, it really qualifies for the Mostly True.

 

Because it would be difficult to account for the number of those who would benefit from those other laws banning discrimination, and because context was not verified by speaking with her, it would have been entirely acceptable to give Navratilova a Mostly True instead of Half True. The exceptions put a large shadow on a True ruling, and PolitiFact was correct in not awarding it. Half True, however, may have been too severe.

Truth Index+: Buh-Bye, Bachmann

What can I say.

Michele Bachmann was someone I termed a statistical "outlier" when it came to the PolitiFact Truth Index+, because she was so far off everyone else in terms of it, as well as in terms of its category Pants on Fire. When she announced she would not run for her congressional seat in 2014, PolitiFact "honored" her by describing the reasons for such a feat:

She had a remarkable streak: Her first 13 ratings were False or Pants on Fire.

Bachmann went on to compete in the 2012 Republican primary for president. She earned her first True rating for a statement she made during a 2011 debate that then-Sen. Obama "refused to raise the debt ceiling because he said President Bush had failed in leadership."

When a question was raised about her veracity, Bachmann cited our work during one of the many Republican presidential debates. "After the debate that we had last week, PolitiFact came out and said that everything I said was true," she said at a debate in Sioux City, Iowa, on Dec. 15, 2011.

Alas, she was totally wrong. In fact, the week before we had rated her statement that Mitt Romney instituted "socialized medicine" in Massachusetts as Pants on Fire.

Bachmann has been extensively covered on this blog--in fact, my very last post--and has been subjected to the Politi-Score, that is, taking into account all the fact-checks done on her by every source. In her case, she had four (4) sources because of the Minnesota Public Radio Fact-Checker in her home state. And she required more work than the others I've measured using the Politi-Score, as I ended up with a 5-part series when I covered her in August of 2011. It is still worth checking out, as it goes over many of the statements she made which were checked multiple times: (at that time) of the 50 statements from the 4 fact-checkers, a third of them were duplicated, and two statements were checked by all four fact-checkers (and for the most part rated quite consistently, which says something about the integrity of the fact-checkers' processes).

 

61% of Bachmann's statements
were rated False, of which
42% were Pants on Fire

Her Truth Index+ alone, however, should be reviewed in proper context. PolitiFact provided her last ratings by percentage for 59 rulings (see chart at right), but that was all (the same they would do for anyone else). Here is how she looks (below) when you calculate Bachmann's Truth Index+ and compare it to the overall Truth Index+ (through 3/31/2013), as well as that for Republicans overall, for Democrats overall, and compared to her fellow Republicans in Congress, and as an added individual comparison, to the next best female Democrat in congress who probably gets closest to her in terms of making those occasional outrageous statements, Nancy Pelosi, although she's only been subjected to the Truth-o-Meter 22 times, I'm assuming because she relinquished her Speaker of the House position following the Republican mid-term election rout in early 2011(and didn't attempt a run for president as Bachmann did).

 

As can be seen, the Truth Index+ for all the other measures goes from 84% higher for the Democrats overall down to 54% higher for her fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives. I'd also venture to say that for those who've had 50 or more rulings, which puts her in a very special Truth Index+ category especially for females, she probably ranks dead last as far as the Truth Index+ (males AND females).  And the more rulings, the more tell-tale "for truthiness" is the Truth Index+.

 

Today, PolitiFact published an article re-iterating its "principles" with regard to doing rulings. Bill Adair, PolitiFact's creator and outgoing manager, stated under the heading "Choosing Claims to Check" that "we select the most newsworthy and significant ones" and in a bulleted list of "questions they ask themselves" in selecting a statement asked "Would a typical person hear or read the statement and wonder: Is that true?" And Bachmann certainly met that criteria in many of her statements.  

 

In some ways, hard-line conservativism and Tea Party associations made her a colorful character.  But I can't really say she will be missed. Well, we still have 19 months to go, and anything can happen...so I'll keep my mouth shut.

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.

PolitiFact: A Truth Index Video!

Adieu to Adair: A Parody

Or:  Getting It Right with the White Knight

Recently it was announced that Bill Adair would be leaving PolitiFact to be a "Knight Professor":

This summer we say goodbye to Bill Adair, founding editor of PolitiFact.

Adair, who helped create the Tampa Bay Times' prize-winning fact-checking site, will join Duke University as the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, Times Editor Neil Brown announced Thursday. .

A national search for the next PolitiFact editor will begin soon, Brown said. Adair will continue a relationship with PolitiFact as a contributing editor.

I will miss Mr. Adair as he was very nice to me.  He featured my blog once in a PolitiFact article and sent me an e-mail letting me know he actually read it on occasion.  I hope all my data and charts didn't make him too dizzy.  I believe he worked very hard to make PolitiFact an objective fact-checker, even with all the nay-sayers.

 

On the light side, we certainly have a "White Knight" to replace Adair: Who better than my conservative counterpart, Bryan White! He really needs to apply for Adair's job, if he hasn't already done so! He has a journalism background/education, is already doing fact-checks, as well as a multitude of meta-fact-checks. Who better to understand the needs of the PolitiFact brand that someone who has been trolling its fact-checks and its Facebook page since 2008!

In fact, here's the un-cut, unedited list of things he might do as PolitiFact's chief editor:

(1) Have a little "cardboard Obama effigy" fire event to represent starting anew, to emphasize who should have really received ALL the Pants on Fire awards. It will be replaced with a giant framed official portrait of Ronald Reagan. It's like replacing Satan with Jesus!

Burn that Obama cut-out down!
His presidential pants are on fire now!

(2) Fire release Louis Jacobson, so he can move onto better things and blacklist him. After all, he was hired over White, and that's only fair considering that (IMO) no one would want his shoddy work, and his extreme bias must be prevented from infecting other news organizations.

(3) Offer Erick Erickson, one of the most unbiased right-wing journalists of the internet, the opportunity a huge salary increase and bonus to come down to Tampa to replace Jacobson. If he is unavailable, PolitiFact Bias co-founder and brilliant, prolific blogger (of "BewzNewzandVewz") Jeff Dyberg will be offered the position. Also make Tom Kertscher (of PolitiFact Wisconsin) a PolitiFact National Associate editor second to White, since he was the only writer who did truly fair fact-checks favoring Republicans.

 

(4) Eliminate certain PolitiFact states for cost saving/productivity improvements for favoring Democrats. Consolidate Miami (PolitiFact Florida) to Tampa (and demote the very biased Angie Drobnic-Holan to researcher status), plus shut down New Hampshire, Oregon and Rhode Island because their low output is not cost effective they have too many Democrats and are too liberal. Put PolitiFact Ohio on warning that their franchise will be terminated unless they substantially improve their performance Republican Truth Index to exceed the Democrats. Preferable PolitiFact states which should exemplify fairness and truthfulness in reporting would include but are not limited to: Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana and South Carolina.

 

(5) Institute a PolitiFact across-the-board policy in which any ruling will go through White for final approval.    In order to eliminate selection bias, White will select all statements as well.  It will totally eliminate selection bias by replacing it with selection bias favoring Republicans.

 

(6) Erick Erickson (or Jeff Dyberg, if he is available) will be responsible for enforcing instilling within PolitiFact the very best journalistic methodology as practiced by both he and Bryan: There may be instances where one party Republicans would have significant underlying arguments that make most of their statements true, or their statement at face value, if true, is to be ruled on at face value. Or that party Democrat might have statements that should have significant underlying arguments that make their statements false (unless the statement at face value is false). Since White and Erickson (and Dyberg) want only Politi-FACTS fact-checks favoring Republicans and denigrating Democrats, not opinion.

 

(7) If Jeff Dyberg is hired, require force on threat of their job that all PolitiFact project employees to read and carry a copy of inspirational readings/expressions to assist in their journalistic efforts Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

 

(8) "Lie of the Year" will be eliminated. Instead a vote will be conducted from the "Most Honest Republican Person of the Month" (see final point Number 11--"Most Honest Republican Person of the Month" replaces Pants on Fire). And instead of the vote being indiscriminately over-ridden by the PolitiFact management for its own choice, our "Most Honest Person of the Year" will be the voters' choice of the 12 "Most Honest Republican Person(s) of the Month", which will be a much more popular, fair option.

 

(9) To further PolitiFact's popularity and its new fair and balanced approach to fact-checking, it will be regularly featured on cable network news shows Fox News and the Blaze.

 

(10) And a message to Bill Adair in his new role: we don't need your stinkin' editorial contributions! Just joking!  We will certainly take a look at them flush them down the toilet.

(11) MOST IMPORTANT: The Truth-o-Meter category Pants on Fire, due to its inherently subjective determination as uncovered in White's impartial, fair-minded and unbiased studies , will be eliminated. An exhaustive review will be performed on the Pants on Fire already awarded to determine their legitimacy so that those claims indiscriminately awarded to Republicans can be removed with Democrat Pants on Fire kept in, since Democrats are much bigger liars than Republicans.

 

Instead, there will be a renewed emphasis on telling the truth which Republicans, like Bryan White, as everyone knows, have a monopoly on, as opposed to egregious lying. So a "Most Honest Republican Person of the Month" (also see Number 8) will be featured for being honest, forthright and adhering to the best of patriotic and conservative principles.

 

This should assure that PolitiFact becomes a much improved, unbiased publication that readers can enjoy without the defects of "Pants on Fire" or the flawed, logical-fallacy riddled and liberally biased fact-checks of some of its former writers. This should greatly balance and increase the readership base. Another Pulitzer prize here we come!

A Note About My Absence

As some friends, acquaintances and readers may have noticed, I haven't been doing a whole lot so far this year at this blog.  I haven't been doing too much commenting on the PolitiFact Facebook page, either, or surveying my nemesis' work as is my usual custom.  After the election I had grown a little weary of politics in general and decided to take a brief sabbatical.  At the same time, PolitiFact was pretty much doing the same, particularly at National level, where they did very few rulings.  But January came and went, and I was having trouble getting my butt back in gear.

In February at the encouragement of a YouTube acquaintance, I decided to give a try at making a "non-personal" video--that is, instead of another video about my cats or my travels, as I had already uploaded to YouTube, I made one about an even more controversial subject than politics.  I first revved up my Windows 7 Movie Maker skills by doing an "amusing and double-entendred" religous sign video, followed by a lengthier video responding to another YouTuber.  That video concerned Biblical slavery.

 

Many videos on YouTube are what can best be described as "Vlogs"--the video blog, the next step up from the blog, where the YouTuber videotapes herself or himself speaking at various lengths on certain subjects.  That's also the easiest way to do it: a camera, webcam or smartphone can easily record and upload a video in just a few easy steps. (Although I consider it difficult in respect to keeping on topic and communicating well.)  My "YouTube Style" is a bit more sophisticated.  I generally splice other videos together as a response to another video:  I research for other videos which may answer the "question" or "opinion" of the video I've targeted for response, especially if it comes from experts who are known in that field.  I try to match one expression to its opposing expression for some congruity.  So I have to use the Movie Maker to clip each video, as well as adding an intro and a closing, where I have to list any credits in case I use music or a some other copyrighted material in making my point.  Occasionally I may add some audio I've recorded where I provide any needed explanation(s).

 

The Biblical slavery video was noticed by a "hub" YouTube site which "mirrored" it and it's  received almost 1,000 views.  While that's not 1.4 billion like Psy of "Gangnam Style"  it's given me some confidence in my ability to produce an interesting, quality video.  I've done a few more using Corel Video Studio, an "upgrade" to  Windows 7 Movie Maker.  More learning pains and time lost to this blog.

 

So that's become a sort of hobby of mine, and of course, it's apparent I can do that with PolitiFact's rulings as well.   So I've finally gotten back to compiling the rulings for the first quarter of 2013, and when I am finished I really want to attempt to do a "PolitiFact Rulings and Truth Index" video for YouTube to be shared with this blog.

 

 In the course of my foray into video editing (which is really what I do) I've also learned from some YouTube Christian apologists and counter-apologists (YouTube has a large loud atheist community) much more about logical fallacies, where they are often employed, and are probably used to some excess by my conservative counterpart.  So, I may be renewing PolitiFact Bias and Zebra Factcheck criticisms from this perspective, although this will be more occasional as I want to concentrate on my efforts on the database of PolitiFact rulings, now approaching 7,000 in count. 

 

So, I'm not done here, and I will be back in a different, hopefully more interesting way.  Thanks for your support!