Absurdity Today Super Storm Sandy Aftermath Edition

With Julianna Forlano

Lil White Lies Extra: PFB prefers the GOP

PolitiFact Bias (PFB) has recently posted on a comparison of rulings which it insists are very much alike, but totally inconsistent when it comes to the Truth-o-Meter grade, having to do with congressional pay raises. Its recent post states the supposed contrast:

If the PolitiFact Ohio rating is accurate [a False ruling on a Republican] then the PolitiFact Florida rating is wrong [a True ruling for a Democrat]. And if the PolitiFact Florida rating is accurate then the PolitiFact Ohio rating is wrong.

So let's take a look at these rulings, plus a few others, to see if PolitiFact, according to PFB, is really being (unfairly) inconsistent. It turns out, PolitiFact Bias may have selected the wrong rulings to compare....which isn't too unusual.

 

The difference is the specificity.

The PolitiFact Ohio "False" rating is on senatorial candidate Josh Mandel, who said that his opponent, Senator Sherrod Brown, "voted six times to raise own pay." Now, it needs to be mentioned that the Brown campaign responded to Mandel's accusation by stating that it was just the opposite, that Brown had instead voted against pay increases seven times...which turned out not to be quite the case, either, when PolitiFact Ohio checked it out. These votes, from 1997 through 2012, were part of "broad pieces of legislation...[not] focused purely on the pay raise issue."

 

The PolitiFact Florida "True" for the Florida Democratic Party (FDC) said that 2010 governor candidate Bill McCollum voted for a pay increase four times, by the specific amount of $51,000, as well as having a $75,000 pension. This was based on an ethics law passed in 1989, which put automatic pay raises into place, as well as the amount of the raise received at the time as specified in the ad ( actually $55,000) along with the congressional pension. All following raises were automatic unless freezes were put into the "broad pieces of legislation" mentioned above--and if the broader bill was voted against, it was deemed voting "for" a pay raise.

Truth Index+: Obama-Romney FIVE MORE DAYS

Five more days...unless of course, something happens due to Super-Storm Sandy and voting gets delayed somewhere in New Jersey or New York City or New England....or Romney wins the vote but loses the Electoral College and sues...you never know.  The only "poll" I really pay attention to is one and even though it's now almost 80% favorable to Obama, that still means, because the fellow who calculates it used to do odds in Vegas, that, like any table in Vegas, the 20% can still come in.  And I'm very superstitious when it comes to being overly hopeful when gambling or making predictions.

But here's where Obama and Romney stand with regard to what was in the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter count for them as of October 30, 2012:

 

 

Obama is about 22.8% more "truthful" based on PolitiFact rulings than Romney.  PolitiFact is 3.6 times more likely to elevate a False ruling for Romney to Pants on Fire than they are for Obama.

 

For the trend line, I'm going to add a period-to-period average (in the dotted line) along with the accumulated average (shown in the solid line).  This is so you can see where the Truth Index+ made any significant movements:

Click to enlarge:  Romney's 2011 28.6 Truth Index was from his presidential announcement (see below)

And what did Romney say that got his Truth Index down so low in early 2011?  Well, a few of the things he said then he continued to repeat, and stated during the October, 2012, debates.  He also re-stated one of PolitiFact's Lies of the Year:  that "Obamacare" was a government take-over.  He also made the comment about Obama's worldwide "Apology Tour" and that the United States was inches from being a free economy.

 

But it looks like--for the last 4 months, at least--that even here Romney has narrowed the gap on the Truth Index+.  Since June Obama rates only 12% more "truthier" than Romney with the PolitiFact rulings.  Of course, there are some that say this is all for naught because PolitiFact has a left-leaning bias.  But so what...because there are also some that say that's malarkey, and back it up.

Three Pants on Fires in a row didn't help Romney's Truth Index in 2011.

 

 

 

Tchotchkes: A GOP Halloween

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?

Announcing "Truth Index+"

While PolitiFact's Truth Index scoring methodology appropriately penalizes the lower scores, particularly Pants on Fire, it also distorts the overall score in a way that prevents valid comparisons from being made.   It basically takes comparisons out of proportion.   It is also more difficult to graphically present with its negatives.

 

Back in 2010, I began with a grading system called the Politi-Score, where a True was an A+ at 100, a Mostly True was a B at 90, down to a 50 for a flunking Pants on Fire.  That wasn't bad but it also made comparisons too "tight".  I then tried starting at 100 points working down to negative 25 for Pants on Fire, because others in a PolitiFact discussion group I presented my work in seemed to feel that the penalty was necessary as well.  About that time PolitiFact created its own measure called the Truth Index, which starts at 100 for True, makes Half True the zero and then goes down to negative 150 for Pants on Fire.  While I've stuck with that for a while now, I've realized in order to attempt things like standard deviations or z-scores, negatives might be difficult to work with.

 

This time I decided that True will be scored at 100 working down by equal 20 point increments to zero for Pants on Fire.  This will also make it easier for doing graphs by doing away with the negatives.  It also makes percentage comparisons easier to understand because the scores are perfectly proportional.  It is almost the equivalent of a percentage measure in and of itself.

 

So now a timeline can be developed from the beginning (2007) until the end of September of 2012.   I've also included the cumulative timeline for the Congressional Quarterly--the group that worked with PolitiFact when it first began in 2007, ending at the end of 2008.  This chart shows the Democrats Truth Index+ versus the Republicans, and the results aren't surprising considering everything else published on this blog.  The period measure is quarterly for the cumulative Truth Index until the end of 2008, to show the Congressional Quarterly Index, after which it is annual, so the chart would be less cluttered.

 

Click to enlarge: CQ rulings stop at end of 2008 when CQ-PolitiFact partnership ended

So today it can be said that based on 2,463 PolitiFact National rulings, it rates a Democrat about 29% more truthful on the Truth-o-Meter than a Republican.  And the largest drop in the Republicans Truth Index occurred from the end of 2008 until the end of 2009 (about 7%).  Whether it's because the Congressional Quarterly was no longer assisting is disputable--my feeling is it had something to do with the new Democrat president's term and the advent of healthcare reform in congress.

 

Next up will be a look at the "Pants on Fire" factor for the same data.

PolitiFact Rulings thru September, 2012

Reviewing the PolitiFact rulings almost one by one from since "in the beginning" to re-verify my totals and make the details more accurate has been quite the experience.  It's taken almost two months, and I found I made a lot of mistakes:  not enough to change all the averages I've presented in this blog, except in one area, which is the "Official/Non-Official."  I believe the well known  Eric Ostermeier study of 511 PolitiFact rulings from 2010 used those currently or previously in an elected office: I decided that was not a good way to do it because there may be a difference in the level of truthfulness between being in office and not being in office.  Office-holders were only designated as such when they were in an elected office at the time the statement was made as evaluated by PolitiFact.

 

I had a couple gender and party misidentifications,  plus quite a few records which were done by the state PolitiFacts which I had included with National for through 2010.  My ruling count now corresponds with what someone at PolitiFact kindly told me their number was.  So, through the end of September, 2012,  PolitiFact added a record number 556 rulings for the quarter, to now total 6,274 rulings.  Here is how they breakdown affiliation-wise:

 

 

There are a lot of reasons why PolitiFact has selected proportionately more Republican statements than Democrats, the main one being that outside the president, Republicans have dominated state/local governments, particularly the PolitiFact regions that started up in 2010, such as Ohio (John Kasich), Florida (Rick Scott), Virginia (Bob McDonnell), Texas (Rick Perry), and Wisconsin (Scott Walker).  If PolitiFact had a New York or California affiliate, I'm guessing we'd see more Democrat rulings.

 

Next the revised Truth Index--which I'm calling Truth Index+ for now-- will be explained featuring the new database.