Can PolitiFact Be Salvaged?
Rachel Maddow is fed up with PolitiFact. She’s not alone. PolitiFact’s galloping case of Broderitis seems to have worsened recently. Perhaps its most infamous foray into useful idiocy was its 2011 “Lie of the Year” award for Democrats who correctly characterized Paul Ryan’s “Coupons4Codgers” plan as the end of Medicare as we know it.
But PolitiFact routinely distorts the facts in ways large and small, as chronicled frequently at this blog and elsewhere. This morning brought a fresh example of PolitiFact’s moldy decay to my attention: It rated Florida Governor Rick Scott’s claim at CPAC that his administration is “poised to get rid of over 1,000 more regulations in 2012” MOSTLY TRUE despite the fact that the numbers simply don’t add up (by PolitiFact’s own account) and that they had to broaden the definition of “the Scott administration” to encompass the entire Florida legislature to even get within striking distance of TRUE.
So who are these PolitiFact people and why do they seem so hell-bent on muddying the waters their mission statement claims they are here to clarify? This came up last week when Mistermix pointed out yet another example of the broken mathematical model PolitiFact uses to separate fact from fiction. Balloon Juice commenter Lex said:
The Tampa Bay (formerly St. Petersburg) Times [sponsor of the PolitiFact project—ed.] is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a journalism think tank and training center. I’ve attended two training sessions there and also have served as a presenter at a third (off-site). To this one-time customer, Poynter appears, with a few exceptions, to be generally a well-run, thoughtful, public-spirited place and, overall, a force for good in U.S. journalism.
However …
Lately, they’ve been kind of screwing the pooch, both with respect to Politifact’s misstatements and inconsistencies and with the way they handled Jim Romenesko.
After the Politifact Medicare “Lie of the Year” debacle, right before Christmas, I wrote Politifact’s Bill Adair, a guy whose work I’d long respected. I cc’d Poynter President Karen Dunlap, whom I’ve also met. And I said, basically, “I love you guys, but you’re violating the first rule of holes and damaging the Poynter brand.” I was hoping that they might hear and respond to someone with ties to Poynter in a way that they might not respond to some anonymous member of the general public. But I never heard a word back from either one of them.
Lex’s assessment squares with my personal experience with The Tampa Bay Times, which is generally a decent paper. The paper competes in the Tampa Bay market with the more conservative Tampa Tribune. I’m sure it’s not immune to the panic and despair that characterize damn near all mainstream news outlets these days as they struggle to survive a wrenching market dislocation occasioned by the rise of the internet, a profusion of ideology-centric cable channels, etc.
Many folks have suggested that PolitiFact is willing to interpret the facts in a wildly inconsistent manner to avoid getting tagged with the “liberal” label, which it believes will hurt business. I’m convinced that this is true. The question is, what can be done about it? Should we just conclude PolitiFact is worse than useless as Maddow suggests and accept that it has zero credibility now and never will?
If it continues to operate as it currently has, I see no other choice. But the idea behind PolitiFact—objective parsing of political speech to reveal what’s true and what’s bullshit—remains an important service in theory and one we can no longer count on news bureaus to perform. And, as Lex points out, the organization behind PolitiFact isn’t some Murdoch propaganda outlet that revels in its ability to squeeze the rubes. So perhaps it is capable of reform.
Maybe a fix is as simple as this: Get rid of the ratings. Just give us the facts that are already contained in each rating entry and let us decide for ourselves where it falls on the truth scale. From what I’ve seen, the facts presented seem mostly accurate and well-sourced; PolitiFact fucks up when they try to assign ratings. So they should stop doing it.
I realize that would take a lot of the fun out of it, both for PolitiFact and its readers. The PANTS ON FIRE thing is cute, gimmicky and an essential attention-getter for marketing purposes. But as PolitiFact has demonstrated in terms that can be mathematically illustrated, they haven’t found a way to apply labels in an unbiased manner.
They’ll need to decide what’s more important: the marketing or the mission. So far, it has been the former. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
[X-POSTED at Balloon Juice]
Posted by Betty Cracker on 02/21/12 at 05:27 PM • Permalink
But the idea behind PolitiFact—objective parsing of political speech to reveal what’s true and what’s bullshit—remains an important service in theory and one we can no longer count on news bureaus to perform.
I’m sure I’m not making a startlingly original observation, but that’s the nub of it right there: the degeneration of news reporting.
Some of it has to do with stretched resources as the various media have to adjust to the sheer volume of outlets available versus the problems of funding it all now that so much information (arguably too much information) is so readily available for free, and the changes in the rhythms of reporting in the age of 24-hour news, in which there’s no downtime for reflection.
Add to that an age-old problem: there’s never been a truly objective media outlet since mass communication developed. Even if they cover issues with a regard to reporting facts, if you’ve ever campaigned or tried to break issues into the mainstream media, you know they gatekeep like crazy, and if your issue isn’t one they want to cover, you’ll have an uphill battle getting them to do so, and then another one to combat any distortions they introduce.
It’s a bit like blogging. Some RW blogs (even those which have some regard for fact) work on the basis that being first to publish is what’s most important, and accuracy less so. You can always update if you get something wrong and you have a few scruples to rub together.
But anyone can set themselves up as a factchecker. We’ve had a bit of fun with the WaPo’s Glenn Kessler and his “Pinnochios” on this blog, for instance. He often illustrates the same problem you’ve identified with Politifact: he may present the raw information (though I think he’s usually far less thorough and even more selective than Politifact, partly though considerations of space and a fixed publishing schedule, if I’m being more than charitable), but his conclusions and especially his ridiculous ratings are just another layer of subjective opinion overlaid on reality, which is more of an entertainment function than an information one. Couple that with a tendency to resort to sophistry that he shares with Politifact at its worst and it’s a hot mess.
If I need help with a complex issue or one where the facts aren’t clear that’s breaking, I’ll often head for Media Matters, which I think have a better track record, perhaps because they have a transparent partisan bent (which means they’re selective in what issues they research), and they don’t do ratings. On top of that, like most people, I have a string of trusted journalists and bloggers I’ll check out. But they can all get things wrong. Maybe crowdsourcing is the way to go, with all its drawbacks.
Shorter me: There’s nothing wrong with being partisan as long as you have some respect for facts, along with respect for your readers and viewers. It’s when you pretend not to be partisan while tailoring your output to another agenda that you insult both.
Bryan, your blog’s tagline is:
The best evidences showing PolitiFact’s liberal slant.
Which I have to assume you aren’t claiming would be a good thing, if true.
It doesn’t read, for instance:
The best evidences showing PolitiFact’s slant against the truth.
Which is what this post’s addressing, and would be more useful to me as somebody who tries to write about stuff and not screw up so often that the folks who bother to read it lose patience.
If PolitiFact had an illiberal slant, would you have started a blog about it?
I don’t find the term “liberal” offensive in itself (though I’ll be amused if you try to claim that your repeated usage of it in your posts isn’t intended to be pejorative), I find it useless in this context (and not just because, as I said above, it means something quite different in the fleshworld culture I inhabit). It gives the impression that your blog’s aimed solely at those who share your view that PolitiFact does have a “liberal slant,” whatever that might mean, and I can’t find anywhere on your blog where you explain what you mean by that.
Instead, you’re just counter-spinning against PolitiFact’s spin. And I see nothing in your posts or arguments that makes me want to refer to or rely on you as a more reliable source or authority than any of the others I set out above, as you’re doing exactly what so many right-wing blogs already do day in, day out, in close formation (believe me, I read a LOT of them), while trying to claim some sort of truthy “independent” high ground on the back of general dissatisfaction and mistrust of PolitiFact.
FFS, just today you cite Don Surber as some sort of reliable source about the still-dead “death panel” meme!
Don Surber: “Hey PolitiFact, here’s your death panel”
Thanks to the Charleston Daily Mail and columnist Don Surber, a little reminder that PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year selection for 2011 isn’t the first to receive well-grounded criticism:
The liberal apologists at the Tampa Bay Times’ PolitiFact have denied for more than 2 years that Obamacare has death panels. How it could assure us in 2009 of just what was in a law that was not finalized until 2010 is a mystery that defies the laws of chronology; maybe in addition to having the power to divine the truth in politics, the personnel of PolitiFact have the power of prophecy.
Surber’s just getting started, so scoot on over to the Daily Mail’s website and read the whole thing.
That’s not “evidences,” it’s just more of the same from a notoriously highly partisan writer.
You’re part of the problem, while pretending to part of the solution. Maybe somebody with way too much time on their hands should start PolitiFact Bias Bias.
You can say they won’t work. But to claim that the only cost reduction strategy is to refuse to pay for care is a lie.
As a basic matter of logic, isn’t it true that if the cost-cutting measures do not work then the remaining cost-cutting measure is refusing to pay the cost?
Calling that statement a “lie” or even “Lie of the Year” is way too kind. It’s one of the most craven, outrageous bits of demagoguery I’ve ever witnessed in US politics.
Notice how your evaluation is all attack and no substance? You know as well as I do that PolitiFact presented Palin as saying the PPACA set up death panels as a specific legislative feature. And that aspect of things is absent in your reply. The realistic approach from your side is to admit that rationing is inevitable but to excuse it as a necessary feature of the goal of universal coverage. But you can’t pin a lie on Palin that way. Except the way you just did it: Assert it vehemently and repeatedly.
Your “about” page devotes precisely one sentence to addressing the issue I was referring to
Heh. The second sentence you quoted had a direct reference to errors of inconsistency. And one you left out completely refers to “examples of journalistic error or bias.” So maybe you’re the one engaging in equivocation by shifting whatever it is you mean by “the issue I was referring to.”
You still adhere to your own unique and plain wrong definition of “arbitration,” but kudos for at least locating the mote in your own eye.
After your careful elucidation of my error how could I miss it? lol
Seriously, I’m using the standard definition and saying it applies at some level to anyone who wants something taken as true. Your argument against amounts to counter-assertion (if we cut you some lack on the fallacy of appeal to ridicule).
Nice fact-checking, ace.
Nice genetic fallacy.
Bottom line, I was almost four years ahead of BC with the suggestion that PF drop its “Truth-O-Meter” graphic. I was ahead of the left with virtually every valid criticism of PolitiFact’s process.
But maybe if you launch into another round of personal attacks we can forget all about that. :-)
Bryan, I was willing to give you a pat on the back for at least playing and enduring this blog commentariat’s penchant for sarcasm, snark and viciousness where silliness and false equivalency are concerned (at least for me), but then you trot out this ... this ... whackadoodleness
Notice how your evaluation is all attack and no substance? You know as well as I do that PolitiFact presented Palin as saying the PPACA set up death panels as a specific legislative feature. And that aspect of things is absent in your reply. The realistic approach from your side is to admit that rationing is inevitable but to excuse it as a necessary feature of the goal of universal coverage. But you can’t pin a lie on Palin that way. Except the way you just did it: Assert it vehemently and repeatedly.
Palin said, quite clearly as it was directly quoted to you (again when quoting a current Republican demagogue ver-fucking-batim it seems sense and sensibility go out the window and I bolded the part you seem intent on kerning to its very finest kernel)
And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
Now you can claim that rationing is the end all be all of the ACA, but no one here has made that argument and I for one feel no reason to make it because it’s pure speculation.
On the other hand, the stupidest person to appear on the national political stage since at least the debut of Louis Gohmert, specifically claims a made-up monster that will kill your kids and your grandma. She was lying, Bryan, and you fail to realize that for reasons that escape me. She isn’t stating her opinion, like the rest of the mendacious right, she’s lying to stoke the fears of her willfully ignorant constituency in an effort to win a political fight, not a rhetorical one, not a logical or truthful one, but a base political fight that allows for no truth, no common sense and certainly no facts to stand in its way.
The reason Politifcat has been severely and justly criticized for its bullshit parsing is because someone somewhere decided they were a voice of reason. Now you may have seen through their clever ploy long before the rest of us dullards caught on, but the difference between me and you is that I don’t need a fucking Politifact to tell me what the truth is. I read enough to figure that out by myself and yet you seem to give weight to their ramblings that seem rather overblown.
Again, Rick Santorum is a liar, Mitt Romney is a liar, Newt Gingrich is a flaming asshole and a liar of the first degree; the Heritage Foundation is a cabal of liars, along with climate-change deniers, religious persecution whiners, folks like the always-odious Franklin Graham and scatter-brained nincompoops like those in the Birther movement. I don’t need to check Politifact to come to those conclusion, like with Palin, all I need to do is to read what they say and compare it to the real world I inhabit.
Your calling may be to take down Politifact and I honor you for it, but I really don’t give a damn.
Comment by HumboldtBlue on
02/22/12 at 03:01 PM
Bottom line, I was almost four years ahead of BC with the suggestion that PF drop its “Truth-O-Meter” graphic. I was ahead of the left with virtually every valid criticism of PolitiFact’s process.
Yet you still fall for, or slyly choose to propagate, the rubbish penned by Don Surber, among others, as if it were fact, and insult your reader’s [sic] intelligence by expecting him to swallow it just like you (claim to) have. You’re either woefully misinformed or a blatant propagandist. Quite possibly both.
The whole tenor of Surber and Gottlieb’s articles was easily debunked with just three quotes from quasi-random commenters at the WSJ—hardly a difficult exercise, and if you’d been seriously searching for credible “evidences” and had any regard for the truth or countering “errors of consistency and ideological bias,” you could have unearthed similar criticisms yourself and included them in your post, if only to counter them—you haven’t addressed any of that. For instance:
So it couldn’t be the case that Palin genuinely objects to placing the power of rationing specifically in the hands of the government and communicates that in her Facebook post.
The first and third quotes I cited explain that:
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) is an independent panel of non-Federal experts in prevention and evidence-based medicine and is composed of primary care providers (such as internists, pediatricians, family physicians, gynecologists/obstetricians, nurses, and health behavior specialists).
And furthermore:
The USPHS Task Force has been around since the 1980s and has been used to define the wellness/preventive health benefit for insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid.
Which situation you endorsed as “here’s your death panel.” You’ve tried desperately to sidestep these “evidences” as you flail around. Fact is, the lie stands uncorrected by you and your right-wing buddies. Palin made her allegations (and you’ve whined that PolitiFact published its judgment) before all the mechanisms were made public, and they ended up—as might have been predicted—by adapting the status quo.
Palin has the faint excuse that what she prophesied so categorically and graphically is not part of the legislation as it panned out. You, Surber, and Gottlieb have no such excuse for continuing to this day to try to revive “death panels” as a going concern and zombie boogieman.
As for an irony award, anyone who shows such a shameful disregard for factuality and “evidences” (not to mention the English language) while running a blog with “Bias” appearing unironically in its title deserves to walk away with it to a resounding round of catcalls. The prize is a sammitch. Expect a delivery any day now.
But let’s cut to the chase: Everyone on this thread has a bigger wang than you, and no amount of debate will change that.
Nope. There are a number of countermeasures that could theoretically be taken if the cost-cutting measures in the bill don’t return the expected savings. They could include things like slashing the defense budget to pay for the costs, adjusting the approach along the way to generate more savings or raising taxes on billionaires.
That’s an unserious response.
You’re trying to sidestep the logic by simply declining to cut the costs of medical care (“slashing the defense budget to pay for the costs”). Alternatively, we have the amazingly non-specific “adjusting the approach.” What does that mean? Rationing? You can cut fees to physicians. That tends to decrease the number of physicians. You can limit some (oops, rationing, nevermind!).
What adjustments to the approach do you take to control costs that do not amount to rationing?
But people like Palin and Sowell aren’t interested in having that debate.
Pardon me, but the bill was passed via reconciliation despite considerable opposition without the opportunity to get to that debate. Instead we got gimmicks like saving money on the budget by making up the difference with taxes (taxes pay the costs, they do not reduce the costs). Ironically, some of the taxes were placed directly on medical products. Woohoo! We’re cutting costs! Even better than that, a big hunk of the savings the CBO had calculated came from a program that was axed last year after the administration admitted it was too expensive (it would have elevated costs).
Both Sowell and Palin laid out the case for the dangers of government control. That’s having the debate. For conservatives, “death panels” became a shorthand term for that danger. For many liberals, it was just taken as a big lie.
That “level of productivity” phrase? It’s a bald-faced lie that Palin apparently pulled straight out of her ass since there’s nothing in the legislation that even remotely resembles it.
Again, Palin never said it was specifically in the legislation, so your logic fails. She referenced Sowell’s statement about the inevitability of rationing and correctly noted that we may expect the bulk of it to affect the ones who most often need very expensive medical care: children and the elderly. Then she (ingeniously) used her own family as an example in conjunction with a snappy phrase (“death panel”).
If you’d cared a bit earlier what PolitiFact does, btw, you could have earlier seen the wisdom (in terms of journalistic ethics) of eliminating the “Truth-O-Meter.”
Sheer, shameless demagoguery.
That’s kind of a tough sell given that she described the economics of the situation prior to providing the illustration. It would be a good case of demagogy if she had skipped right to the end, though.
apparently miss half the story (they use piss-poor tactics to put Democrats in a bad light too)
I seem to remember that you read so much that you don’t need PolitiFact. Yet you keep making statements that have an insufficient foundation in the truth. My blogs often acknowledge harm to Democrats and liberals. We just happen to be good about reminding people that harm to Democrats and liberals does not negate the fact of a liberal bias if conservatives receive the bulk of the harm. Our examples of harm to conservatives are, frankly, better and more numerous than the ones Democrats come up with (part of the reason for the “Smackdown” feature). And that shouldn’t really surprise anybody when you look at how journalists report their ideological leanings.
