WaPo’s “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler: Slippery and Illiterate

When you set yourself up as a self-described “fact checker,” you’d better have your ducks in a row. We here at Rumproast, among a number of others, have had cause to point and laugh at Glenn “Gepetto” Kessler’s “fact checking” efforts at the Washington Post before now.

A notable example was when Kessler judged President Obama’s claim that “We said working folks deserved a break, so within one month of me taking office, we signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history, putting more money into your pockets” false by the simple expedient of asking whoever was hanging around the WaPo offices that day what they thought “biggest” meant:

We took an informal survey in our office and asked people what they thought the president’s statement meant. Everyone agreed he was claiming the biggest tax cut in terms of dollars.

After a bunch of fancy-dancy semantic shuffling, Kessler dealt from the bottom of the deck:

“The point the president was making [is] that is there is not a tax cut that has been enjoyed by such a broad section of the population,” an administration official said, pointing to a report that said that 95 percent of working families received some kind of tax cut under the Making Work Pay provision in his stimulus bill. ...

In other words, this isn’t about the size of the tax cut, but about the fact that every working family, except those making more than $190,000, received as much as $800 in tax cuts.

That strikes us as very odd way to claim “the biggest,” but maybe that’s because Obama can’t make that claim. We ran the numbers every which way, but the fairest over time is to look at the tax cut as a percentage of national income (Gross Domestic Product minus depreciation.)

Ding! Goalposts successfully moved. Four Pinnochios.

The most recent ironically self-referential candidate for the new Rumproast Award for Shamelessly Misleading Fact Checking must have followed quite a night on the tiles, or perhaps a snort or two from the hipflask.

Obama ad cherry-picks fact checking organization
Posted by Glenn Kessler at 11:15 AM ET, 01/19/2012

We love ads that cite fact checkers, but President Obama’s first campaign ad contains a real blooper. It cites a positive fact check by PolitiFact, while ignoring a subsequent column taking away that original ruling.

The Facts

The ad attempts to push back against a slashing ad attack on Obama’s clean-energy initiatives by a group called Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group, and accurately quotes from an ABC analysis that said the ad “contains claims that are not tethered to the facts.”

The Obama ad that quickly slips in claims that slickly appear to be the result of Obama’s policies, though the ad does not directly make that claim—a reference to 2.7 million clean-energy jobs, a note that for the first time in 13 years foreign oil imports are below 50 percent.

Kessler then goes on to attempt to pick holes in those figures, but his ire is apparently particularly raised by the Obama campaign ad’s citing of that PolitiFact ruling:

Then, in bold type, the ad proclaims: President Obama “kept a campaign promise to toughen ethics rules” and it cites: “PolitiFact, 1/21/09.”

Politifact did write that on Jan. 21, 2009, but then it almost immediately changed its ruling as Obama began granting waivers to his ethics policy.

It Depends What You Mean By “Facts”

Now comes the “Doh!”

As of yesterday afternoon, the WaPo carried this addition to the opening of the article:

(UPDATE: There were two PolitiFact rulings that same day, and Obama choose the one most favorite, so we are revising our original ruling.)

It looks like the WaPo’s outsourced its subediting to Babelfish, but I guess a skilled reader can easily drill down and decipher it in the original gibberish. That particular “update” is now gone, but the ass-covering still continues at the end of the article:

UPDATE: It turns out that PolitiFact on Jan. 21 also gave Obama a “promise kept” for another piece of the ethics rules, banning lobbyist gifts to executive employees. We had missed the fact that the Obama campaign had cited this ruling—not the other, more important one—in its back up material for the ad. So the campaign actually cherry-picked the best possible ruling.

The Pinocchio Test

The suggestion that Obama was responsible for the 2.7 million clean-energy jobs or the decline in foreign oil imports is bad enough, though the ad does not directly claim that. We have more trouble with the citation of PolitiFact.

We had originally given this a Four Pinocchio ruling because we believed the campaign had ignored the fact that PolitiFact had changed its ruling. Instead, it turns out it cherry-picked one ruling while ignoring the other negative one. That’s pretty slippery, but it is more of a three Pinocchio violation rather than a Four, so we are revising it downward.

The Tosser Test

Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler misunderstood what the Obama campaign ad was driving at, blatantly misrepresented it, criticized the campaign for citing a different PolitiFact decision to the one he chose to pillory, then when somebody presumably pointed out that he was barking up a lobbyist’s trouser leg rather than a tree, he tried to cover up his own incompetence by blaming it all on the Obama campaign for claims it never even made!

For this latest ridiculous virtuoso display, Glenn Kessler is the proud first recipient of our new award for factually challenged fact checkers:

Posted by YAFB on 01/20/12 at 08:08 AM • Permalink

Mitt says Obama raised taxes 19 times

They said it’s half true even though

Of the 19 provisions Romney is citing, we conclude that 13 may be reasonably defined as taxes (though of those, only four are already in effect). Of the remaining six provisions Romney cites, we find two that are subject to disagreement and four that are probably not taxes at all.

If it wasn’t 19 it’s not true.  The end.  That’s like ‘Mitt said Obama has 19 toes!’ and they say ‘Well Obama’s got ten toes so he’s partially right’.  No he’s not.  Obama does not have 19 toes so the claim is false.

There were a zillion of those in the Bush years. Too bad CNN didn’t go with that hip-hop slang plan.

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