Krugman: PolitiFact "overwhelmingly in the ballpark"

Great news for PolitiFact! Luminous lefty economist Paul Krugman has given PolitiFact his sort-of seal of approval (bold emphasis added):

PolitiFact has examined 258 Trump statements and 255 Clinton statements and classified them on a scale ranging from “True” to “Pants on Fire.” One might quibble with some of the judgments, but they’re overwhelmingly in the ballpark.

 At PolitiFact Bias, we wonder what it means for Krugman to declare that PolitiFact's ratings of Clinton and Trump are overwhelmingly in the ballpark.

Did Krugman double-check all of PolitiFact's research on those 513 fact checks and find the vast majority "in the ballpark"?

We tend to doubt it. Who has time to double-check that many fact checks if it's not a full time job?

Did Krugman simply judge the fact checks were "in the ballpark" based on his own vast store of political knowledge?

That option seems more likely. But isn't that type of judgment particularly prone to confirmation bias?

That's an obvious yes, right?

PolitiFact, of course, bills itself as nonpartisan. But what solid evidence do we have of PolitiFact's nonpartisanship? Is it reassuring, for example, that founding PolitiFact editor Bill Adair declines to reveal his politics while having his picture taken in his office with a life-sized cardboard President Obama looking on from the background?

PolitiFact's credibility rests on the plausibility of its claim to nonpartisanship. Krugman endorsements don't help that much. The Krugman endorsement might be expected if PolitiFact leans left, thanks to confirmation bias. We encourage readers to consider what would qualify as good evidence of nonpartisanship and whether PolitiFact delivers the goods.

As for whether PolitiFact is "in the ballpark" with its ratings--that can only come from scientific study designed for that purpose. If Krugman ever produces such a study, we will consider his claims based on the merits.

Until then, pfft. Krugman citing PolitiFact's ratings to bolster a pro-Clinton argument, even to the point of suggesting PolitiFact's ratings will serve as a predictor of the debate results (!) only further discredits Krugman.


Correction Sept. 27, 2016: Added the name of PolitiFact's founding editor, Bill Adair. Adair's name was omitted in the first published version.

PFB Smackdown: Paul Krugman on PolitiFact and Eric Cantor

On August 4 this past week, PolitiFact rated "Half True" Rep. Eric Cantor's (R-Va.) statement that the nation faced an "ultimate problem" of a "growing deficit."  Liberals apparently think this is the latest evidence that PolitiFact is overcompensating for the dishonesty of Republicans.  As usual, the evidence can't bear the weight of claims like this one from noted partisan hack and Nobel laureate Paul Krugman of The New York Times:

News organizations in general, and PolitiFact in particular, are set up to deal with a world in which both parties generally respect reality, and in which dishonesty and delusion are roughly equally distributed between the parties. Faced with the highly asymmetric reality, they choke — treating mild Democratic exaggerations as if they were equivalent to outright falsehoods on the other side, treating wild misrepresentations on the GOP side as if they were slight misstatements.

Why did PolitiFact rate Cantor's statement "Half True"?  PolitiFact noted that Cantor referred to a growing deficit.  Yet right now the deficit is shrinking, and is expected to continue shrinking for a few more years before it starts heading back up.  Cantor received a "Half True" because the ultimate projected trend is a rising deficit.

Krugman erupted:

[H]ere we have a senior GOP official talking as if we lived in an alternative universe in which deficits are rising, not falling. And PolitiFact declares his statement half true.

Krugman, unsurprisingly, objects to PolitiFact's ruling because, perceived from his Keynesian soapbox, Cantor's rhetoric risks keeping the U.S. from keeping its deficits high enough to keep our economy healthy.

The Keynesian soapbox serves as a poor vantage point for judging either Cantor or PolitiFact.

In context, Cantor obviously was talking about the long view.  It's no secret that over the long term, entitlement spending figures to dominate federal government outlays.

The Congressional Budget Office puts it like this:

The explosive path of federal debt under the extended alternative fiscal scenario underscores the need for major changes in current policies to put the nation on a sustainable fiscal course.

Even Paul Krugman knows that running a deficit adds to the debt.  So there should be no problem at all understanding Cantor's point:

CANTOR: Here is the problem. What we need to have happen is leadership on the part of this president and White House to come to the table finally and say, we're going to fix the underlying problem that's driving our deficit. We know that is the entitlement programs and unfunded liability that they are leaving on this generation and the next.

Got that?  "This generation and the next."  Cantor's talking about the long term budget implications of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security.  The recent decrease in the deficit has approximately zero to do with that structural deficit problem.  Krugman completely misses it.  PolitiFact mostly misses it.

This case provides no evidence of PolitiFact going easy on a Republican in an effort to appear fair.  It's a case of PolitiFact failing to pay attention to context and treating a Republican too harshly.  PolitiFact's recent ruling on President Obama's claim that the minimum wage is lower today than when President Reagan took office serves as an instructive comparison.  The minimum wage is obviously higher today than in Reagan's time. Do Krugman and Rachel Maddow complain?  Not publicly, so far as we can tell.

Even though Mr. Obama did not suggest adjusting the figure for inflation, we think one rightly interprets his statement taking an inflation adjustment into account.  And Cantor ought to receive similar consideration in the form of paying attention to the context of his statement.

This is not a case of PolitiFact overcompensating to appear fair.  It's another case of PolitiFact allowing its liberal bias to put a thumb on the scale.

Have we mentioned that Paul Krugman is a partisan hack?

Nothing To See Here: Krugman plays lawyer

With a hat tip to Power Line blog and John Hinderaker, we present our latest "Nothing To See Here" moment where we highlight a fact check that PolitiFact may or may not notice.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and partisan hack Paul Krugman krugsplains the latest legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act and tells his readers why the challenge is ridiculous:

(N)ot only is it clear from everything else in the act that there was no intention to set such limits, you can ask the people who drafted the law what they intended, and it wasn’t what the plaintiffs claim.

We're not offering any hints why Krugman's claim interests conservatives.

Krugman's talking about the Halbig case, where a D.C. Circuit panel ruled the language of the ACA specifies that state-established exchanges could receive federal subsidies but made no such provision for exchanges set up by the federal government. The en banc D.C. court, not-at-all-packed-with-three-unfilibusterable-Obama-appointed-liberal-judges, later reversed the panel's ruling.

Nothing to see here?

The meaning of PolitiFact's "Lie of theYear" for 2011

I wonder whether this award will have those conservatives blasting politically-motivated “fact check” operations rethinking that criticism?

--Ed Morrissey, Hot Air blog

Fact check critics who base their criticism on a completely consistent pattern of wronging only one party or ideological position should take Morrissey's argument to heart.

As I have written repeatedly, a significant ideological bias does not require all the harm to hit one side and all the benefit to accrue to the opposite side.  In scientific terms, a simple majority of cases favoring one ideology over another indicates an ideological bias (after taking the margin of error into account).  Two out of three "Lie of the Year" awards going to conservatives, for example, fits well with the hypothesis of liberal bias.  Granted, three out of three makes an even better case.

What, if anything, does the 2011 "Lie of the Year" mean with respect to the issue of media bias?

Answer:  probably not much.

One liberal media hypothesis, as expressed by economist/political hack Paul Krugman:

(T)he people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear “balanced” — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.

Krugman's charge is plausible if we simply take him to mean that PolitiFact carries a consciousness of the effect on its brand of, for example, choosing a Republican claim as its "Lie of the Year" for 85 years straight.  We'll table discussion of Krugman's evidence supporting a "clear fact that there's a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than the other."

At the bottom line, the criticisms of the 2011 "Lie of the Year" from the left are no better than the right's criticisms of the 2009 and 2010 "Lie of the Year" winners.  The latter linked story helped earn Joseph Rago a Pulitzer Prize.  This year's award is no different than those in the past except that the left got hit instead of the right.  And, of course, the apoplectic response from the left creates such a contrast to the right's past reactions that Karl of Patterico's Pontifications offers the following:

PolitiFact’s most useful function may be in triggering an analysis of the overwrought reactions of these progressive crybabies. 

The left is largely content with PolitiFact so long as conservatives take the worst of it.  If not, well, the sky is falling and PolitiFact loses all credibility.  Or something like that.

Krugman's hypothesis is an unlikely explanation for this year's "Lie of the Year" selection.  The pressure to pick a lie of the left was probably subtle and semiconscious.  Why?  Because PolitiFact already carries very little credibility with conservatives, Ed Morrissey notwithstanding.  PolitiFact has angered its main demographic without much hope of building trust in a potential audience of largely suspicious conservatives.

If PolitiFact gains nonpartisan credibility with this move, the effect is primarily in-house:  The journalists reinforce their own belief in their fairness and objectivity with moves like this one.

PolitiFact probably misjudges its audience.  The net effect will be decreased overall trust in the brand.  Sure, the staff can take solace in the absurd notion that criticism from partisans on either side shows their even handedness.

It doesn't work that way.

Stay tuned, because PolitiFact Bias will soon roll out objective research supporting our position that PolitiFact manifests a significant bend to the left.



Correction Sept. 5, 2017: Very belatedly effected the change from "James Rago" to "Joseph Rago" in the seventh paragraph. RIP Joseph Rago.

Nothing To See Here: Krugman on economic policy

The Sunday column from Nobel Prize-winning economist and liberal hack Paul Krugman has at least a couple of nuggets in it that should interest fact checkers.

What should be done about the economy? Republicans claim to have the answer: slash spending and cut taxes. What they hope voters won’t notice is that that’s precisely the policy we’ve been following the past couple of years.  Never mind the Democrat in the White House; for all practical purposes, this is already the economic policy of Republican dreams.

No, I'm not talking about the "Democrat in the White House" line.

Introducing PFB's Anecdote-O-Meter

Just kidding with the title.  The o-meter stuff is too trite to use as more than a one-off joke.

But the subject is anecdotes and their role in helping to show bias in a body of work.

Most of us think we can perceive bias in an individual piece of journalism--an anecdotal evidence.  And we may often be right, but the appearance of bias in reporting or fact checking may simply occur at the result of writer error.

So how does one tell the difference between mere errors and ideological bias?

One method, bolstered by the methods of science, involves counting the number of errors and tracking any association with political parties or ideas.  Mere errors ought to occur roughly equally in stories regarding Republicans compared to those involving Democrats.  Where the errors harm one party more than the other beyond the line of statistical significance, evidence of a political bias has come to light.  The degree of deviation from best practices also may figure in a scientific study of journalistic errors.

In March of 2008 at my blog Sublime Bloviations, I started tagging relevant posts with "grading PolitiFact."  On occasion I have criticized PolitiFact for harsh grading of Democrats.  The vast majority of the posts, in accordance with my selection bias, is made up of criticisms of faulty grades given to Republicans or conservatives, or ridiculously gentle treatment of Democrats or progressives.

I work under no illusion that the list represents definitive evidence of a systemic bias at PolitiFact.  But the number of times PolitiFact's grades go easy on Democrats and tough on Republicans does count as an important and legitimate evidence supporting (not definitively) the charge of bias.

If the ideological bias at PolitiFact is not significant, then it should be possible to compile a list of comparable size and quality containing criticisms of PolitiFact where PolitiFact favors Republicans and deals harshly with Democrats.

I don't foresee that occurring.

The list from Sublime Bloviations, in chronological order (and do pardon the more polemical bent in the earlier entries.  I was shocked by the amateurish fact checks I was reading):

The Weekly Standard: "Liberal Pundits Shocked to Discover PolitiFact Not Always Factual"

Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard has earned himself the reputation as perhaps PolitiFact's top critic.  As evidence of that, Hemingway beat me to the "late to the party" theme by about a month after the progressive outrage over PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" selection for 2011.

I'm sorry I missed his article before now.

Hemingway:

So the liberal punditry woke up today to find that PolitiFact has declared the "Lie of the Year" to be Democrats's claim that Paul Ryan's budget will "end Medicare" or "end Medicare as we know it." They're having quite the collective freakout—see Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, Brian Beutler, Steve Benen, et al.

Hemingway concedes the "end Medicare" claim has some truth to it:

Accusing Republicans of trying to end Medicare as we know it is also a stupid criticism because the implementation of the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will also "end Medicare as we know it." And unlike Ryan's plan, Democrats already made IPAB the law of the land. Under IPAB, unelected federal bureaucrats chosen by the president will bypass Congress and set the Medicare budget, and this will likely have pretty dramatic consequences for the program, such as severely restricting doctor access and rationing. It might well prove unconstitutional to boot.

So why all the outrage if Medicare as we know it is already dead and gone?  Hemingway has a hypothesis:

Liberals are freaking out over this because they're so used to PoltiFact and other fact checkers breaking things their way.

Ouch!

But he's probably right.  And, as usual, it's well worth reading the whole article.



Correction 2/21/2012:  Fixed spelling of "Pundits" in the title.

Facebook comments show the dire need for the PolitiFact Bias website

Over the past few days, we received a number of comments on our Facebook page that help show the dire need for our work.

We are not identifying the person by name, though we expect it's easy to find on our page. It's a public page and the comments were posted in response to our public posts on our page. In short, it's public.

We discourage any attempt to harass this person or make contact with them against their wishes.

Beyond that, we offer thanks for the comments because we can use them to help educate others. We're using quotation marks but correcting errors without making them obvious. So the quotations are not always verbatim.

We're spotlighting these comments because they are so typical of our critics.

Apoplectic Now: The Aneurysm of the Year

That massive popping sound you heard on Tuesday was the collective hearts and minds of liberals across America bursting as they witnessed their favorite source of smug validation betray them. PolitiFact editors played their pre-selected card and announced the Democrats' claim that Republicans voted to "end Medicare" as the Lie of the Year for 2011.

What could go wrong?

The wrath unleashed on PolitiFact went far and wide as hysterical condemnations and inordinate smiting piled up on the left side of the Internet. The High Priest of Haute Liberals himself, Paul Krugman, sounded the death knell in his subtly titled article "Politifact, R.I.P." in which he described PolitiFact as "useless and irrelevant." Talking Points Memo called the decision a "sham", and Steve Benen at Washington Monthly called the decision "indefensible" in his article "PolitiFact ought to be ashamed of itself." The list goes on and on and on (and on.).  The formerly ubiquitous mention of PolitiFact's Pulitzer that was previously announced as a badge of credibility is suspiciously absent in these articles.  

But for long-time PolitiFact critics like us, few things in life have been as entertaining as the epidemic hysteria witnessed over at PolitiFact's Facebook page. Check out this sample of outbursts posted on various Facebook threads throughout the week. (Names have been removed to protect the aggrieved):

"I've awarded Politifact the Steaming, Festering Turd of The Year Award for this one. Your credibility has been flushed."

"Politifact, you're either being bought off by the right wing echo machine or you're scared of them."

[The Pauline Kael Trophy goes to:] "This has been voted by everyone I know,including myself as the stinkiest,lamest,most cowardly decision of the year!"

"You let Fox News choose your Lie of the Year, didn't you."

"Embarrasing."

[This guy may be on to something:]"Maybe, we just gave a group of idiots too much credit to begin with simply because the bore the name 'Politifact.'"

"PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" is pretty good.......... for me to poop on."

"Noting your selective ignorance of objective facts, I am now forced to ignore you as a reference source. Unfortunate, but I am only interested in objective, FULL, analysis of facts." [Which is what I considered you when you were confirming my opinions.]

"So now we know Politifact is as bought as the politicians they scrutinize."

[Murderers!:] "Presumably, politifact also believes that if someone kills another person that it is not murder if they kill them slowly with a slow acting poison. Such lame and disreputable analysis and logic is incomprehensible for an organization wishing to claim some skill and reputation at factchecking."

[From the 'Paul Ryan stuffed the ballot box' conspiracy:] "The mere product of lobbying. Hey politifact way to bend over and take it. Hope you had on lipstick so atleast you looked good doing it."

[The Jews!:] "How many shekels did you guys get for that choice?"

"Did you guys get purchased by Newscorp?"

"Another election stolen. Dislike."

"What a bummer, I trusted Politifact implicitly until this." [Spencer Pratt responds]

[Baby, Don't Go Award:] "If you guys can do something to win back your credibility after this outrageous and outlandish ruling, then I may be back. Right now, though, I'm unliking this page and deleting the bookmarks I have to your website."

"Either you fire your editorial board and give yourself a pants on fire or just close up shop."


"God you guys are stupid."

Hell hath no fury like a liberal scorned.

PolitiFans fell into one of a few groups. Some accused PolitiFact of being a tool of the GOP.  Others claimed Paul Ryan sabotaged the vote by his email campaign (unaware that the readers poll is not the same as the editors' pick). Most simply said the claim was true, and that determining what constitutes the "end of Medicare" is an issue of semantics that falls outside the scope of objective values. That's a fair point, and it's one we've chronicled a number of times, including last years Lie of The Year. So where have all the indignant liberals been since PolitiFact's inception? Affixing varying degrees of "fact" to obvious hyperbole and opinion has been PolitiFact's shtick all along. For the left to become unhinged now betrays their own selective bias. In short: PolitiFact served its purpose as neutral, objective arbiters of fact, as long as they were validating liberal axioms.

To illustrate this point, check out this Jonathan Chait article (with some, uh, minor edits in bold):

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would very dramatically change health care.

...

Is that “a government takeover?” Well, it’s a matter of opinion. At some point, a change is dramatic enough that it is clearly a government takeover. If you proposed to replace a voluntary, free market system with a plan that mandated everyone purchase health insurance and the government dictated what patients and ailments insurance companies had to cover and what to charge, I would hope Politfact would concede that this would be “a government takeover,” even if you call the new mandates “a free market solution.” On the other hand, small tweaks could not accurately be called “a government takeover.” Between those two extremes, you have gray areas where you can’t really say with certainty whether a change is radical enough to constitute a takeover.


Does ObamaCare indeed establish a government takeover? I would argue no. But it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact. And the whole problem with Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” is that it doesn’t grasp this distinction. Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a claim is a question of opinion or a question of fact, let alone whether it is true.

Obviously, Chait's unedited piece argued that whether or not Ryan's plan did in fact end Medicare was a matter of interpretation (and ironically it mirrors the Wall Street Journal's op-ed about last years LOTY). We tend to agree with this criticism. And to be fair to Chait, he's called PolitiFact out for being harsh toward the GOP before. But the mountain of new criticism of the Lie of the Year, and PolitiFact's operation in general seems to be a few years late. Like all of PolitiFact's betrayed lovers this week, the reaction to the sudden realization that PolitiFact operates as a biased actor with motivations less noble than honest determination of facts is comical and disingenuous to everyone who's seen it for years. The irony for us is it took PolitiFact's calculated attempt to appear even-handed for the liberals to rise up in revolt.

The Medicare claim was the winner from the outset. Just take a look at its competitors. The reality is that Jon Kyl's abortion claim, Michelle Bachmann's vaccine statement, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz's rant about Jim Crow laws were hardly repeated outside of PolitiFact's circles. They were minor blurbs that barely lasted on the news cycles and had no place being in the running for statements "that played the biggest role in the national discourse." For all the gnashing of teeth about the winner, somehow PolitiFact managed to protect Team Democrat from any unflattering press about legitimate nationally popular issues like Solyndra or "Fast and Furious." The ten finalists were carefully selected, with an eye on the Medicare claim to be the winner. And anyone that thought they would select a GOP claim for the third year in a row ignored the reality that PolitiFact is a political animal with a brand to protect and an impartial image to uphold.

In the end it's hard to determine the final estimate of the damage PolitiFact has caused with its overwhelmingly liberal readership. We've seen smaller scale exodus whenever they've gone after Jon Stewart that had only short term effects. Whatever the case, conservatives would be wise to avoid finding anything redeeming in this temporary respite from the partisans at PolitiFact. As we've explained before, the shoddy standards PolitiFact employs will inevitably hit both sides of the aisle, but the liberal fishbowl of the newsroom will ultimately cause them to come down against the right much more often.

The 2011 Lie of the Year selection does little to diminish PolitiFact's aura of liberal bias. If anything, it exemplifies the selection bias and inherent flaws of their operation that have made it so unreliable in the first place. Whether this is PolitiFact's demise as a tool of liberal validation, or if it bolsters their claims that "upsetting both sides proves they're doing it right", for us at least, it's been a fun week to be watching.


Bryan adds:

Count me among those naive enough to believe that PolitiFact would pick three consecutive Republican claims as "Lie of the Year" depending on the material under consideration.

Jeff notes: I was correct in predicting the winner would go against the left, but my final pick (Obama hasn't raised taxes) was wrong. I suspect that had PolitiFact followed my advice there would be much less turmoil among the ranks. It's hard to imagine liberals being too upset about PF confirming Obama raised taxes.