The voters have seated a new House of Representatives with an agenda dramatically at odds with that of the president, and we’re entering a period in which the partisan divisions that shaped the first half of the Obama administration will play out in a different way. Battles will be waged with the usual weapons—a mix of facts and spin, which can be difficult to tease apart. At stake is the direction of American policy.
What can the press do to be a force for a more productive democratic conversation? PolitiFact—the Pulitzer-winning project of the St. Petersburg Times—has one idea. The project, which has been fact-checking statements by political figures since 2008, is a digital expansion of a more traditional form: newspaper pieces that check the accuracy of political advertisements. But PolitiFact doesn’t fold up its tent after the voting and has continued to stand ready to adjudicate the factual basis of any claim that might cause a typical citizen to ask, “Is that true?” And it’s expanding. PolitiFact has franchised local versions in eight states, overseen by local newspapers. We’re all for it.
Still, while PolitiFact and its Truth-O-Meter produce eye-catching accountability journalism, in some ways it’s also a symptom of how journalism has lost its way. The work it specializes in ought to be the task of every reporter on every beat. It shouldn’t be confined to a special team.
Too many reporters hack their way past policy debates by simply quoting political actors on each side, without making an effort to track down the facts, examine the logic, and flesh out the context. A twisted idea of fairness, combined with simple laziness, ends up obscuring issues, making them boring and complicated rather than big and vital.
A “pants on fire” rating on the Truth-O-Meter may help clean up political discourse, but such weapons are limited. One can mislead without betraying a carefully constructed set of facts. While the Truth-O-Meter’s middle regions capture some of this nuance, pushing for intellectual honesty in political debate requires verdicts and explanations that cannot always be mapped along a true/false continuum.
That calls for another kind of accountability journalism, one that tests arguments and rhetoric and simply explains things. In many cases, doing this well is no different than covering policy debates well—talking to experts, finding the numbers, laying it all out. Journalists who work like this try to make their stories comprehensive, and as comprehensible as a needle on the Truth-O-Meter. There’s an old set of tools at the ready—kitchen table reporting with ordinary people, narrative that presents policy in human terms, series that present information in digestible chunks.
PolitiFact’s Internet heritage points to the promise of new tools, too. Take, for example, The New York Times’s online “Budget Puzzle: You Fix the Budget,” which in November, as Obama’s deficit commission finished up, allowed readers to try to bring the projected 2015 and 2030 deficits into line by selecting from a menu of options of program cuts, tax hikes, and reforms. Popular spending bogeymen—foreign aid, government waste—were revealed as adding up to little more than rounding errors. Among other things, the interactive graphic showed how difficult it would be to hit the numbers without some increase in taxation. It also showed, while not a popular option in some circles, that no cuts to government-provided retirement and health benefits are necessary if you are willing to cut elsewhere (the military, maybe) and impose or reinstate some taxes, mostly on high incomes.
Readers ate it up. The graphic got 1.36 million page views, the Times’s David Leonhardt tells us, and 13,000 tweets, more than any Times story yet. It wasn’t the last word on the budget, and its easy interface obscured all the hard work behind it. But it did what’s required of the best policy journalism: it gave citizens a way to get at elusive truths.
One of the biggest flaws with Politifact -- aside from the fact that they smugly refuse to correct their own demonstrable errors of fact and judgment -- is their inability to deal with dishonest rhetoric, as opposed to factual statements.
They often end up nitpicking honest misstatements or manufacturing errors -- "He said 20 billion and in fact it was 22.3 billion! Pants on fire!" -- and ignoring propagandist distortions and leaps of logic because representations weren't based on fact-based statements.
So on the larger questions of dishonesty -- "One can mislead without betraying a carefully constructed set of facts." -- you said it right there.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 10:39 AM
As the editor of PolitiFact, it's nice to see us mentioned as a role model. Thanks to our eight state partners and other fact-checking efforts from friends and competitors, it's fair to say there was more fact-checking in the 2010 election than ever before.
I need to take issue with James' comment above, however. Although I recognize that critics sometimes find our work can be overly focused on details, I think they overlook the many fact-checks we do on large distortions and broad themes in falsehoods, such our work on the claim that the health care law is "a government takeover" of health care, which we named our 2010 Lie of the Year.
We have a great reputation for accuracy and a policy to correct any mistakes that are pointed out to us.
#2 Posted by Bill Adair, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 01:33 PM
Thanks for weighing in, Mr. Adair. I'd just like to respond that your decision-making about issuing corrections of your own work is less than transparent. Although I believe Politifact to have made a valuable contribution to the American political dialogue, I have written in to note several factual errors in your work on occasion. My correspondence was polite and offered substantiation of my claims of your errors, but I received no response and the errors were not corrected. In addition, you (Politifact, not you personally) tend to get arrogant and defensive when someone takes issue with your judgment. As I said, I admire your work, but there is always room for improvement. I offer this as constructive criticism, and I hope you take it as such.
Cheers.
#3 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 01:57 PM
The newspapers in question found a sudden interest in fact-checking only after the GOP trounced the Dems in November.
Before then, there wasn't much interest among "professional journalists" in separating the fictional chaff from the verifiable wheat in political discourse.
Go figure...
#4 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 04:00 PM
I have been so disappointed in the media's treatment of the outright lies we hear so often that they come to be believed (e.g., "Death Panels" "The Health Plan is killling jobs" The Democrats are just as guilty as Republicans of hate propaganda).
And the slanted "balance" of the so-called liberal media, who must find an opposite argument to every statement (as if there were a defense of the Holocaust!). I subscribe to the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck, which sends out a weekly summary as well as spot correctons to the political discourse. I much prefer their sober approach with the facts than the "pants on fire" hyperbole from Politifact. FactCheck must be readily available to reporters and newscasters. Why don't they use It?
#5 Posted by Helen Crotty, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 04:09 PM
The reason why they don't use it is because politics in America is not a fact driven discussion. Politics in America is a narrative driven discussion in which complex subjects are digested by ill-knowledgeable people:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/01/overheard-in-the-newsroom/
who then excrete a narrative their editors will approve of for the public.
The public is given stories, not facts, by their press who have done so since Reagan (to my recollection).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SV_mvc4zKw
This is starting to change, but it's a bottom up, citizens demanding better, process.
We have to keep fighting for facts and for truth.
#6 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 07:17 PM
Here is an example of Politifact's bad judgment and their excruciating reach to manufacture a false equivalence between Republicans and Democrats. Both sides do it!
"We gave a Half True to Tim Kaine’s statement that President Obama’s approval ratings are 'fine' compared to other presidents who went on to re-election. Kaine, who is chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was correct in noting Obama’s mid-term numbers are better than those of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. But he left out an important detail: Obama’s numbers are significantly lower than the average of re-elected presidents over the last 72 years."
Oh, right! Tim Kaine made the same statement that hundreds of journos had made about President Obama's approval ratings -- "they're fine!" -- but he didn't go back 72 years and take an average! So he's a half-liar! Why 72 years? Why not 60 years? Why not 110 years? Because Politifact found that if they cherry-picked an average of 72 years they could award a Half True to a factual statement.
Now take this other Half True from Politifact:
"'Despite claims that this trillion dollar bill would reduce deficits and save taxpayer dollars, the new law is riddled with budget gimmicks that double count savings, offset 6 years of benefits with 10 years of tax increases, and rely on cuts to Medicare and tax increases to fund a new entitlement,' Cantor said."
Equivalence! Politifact found an equivalence! Both sides do it! Tim Kaine's "Obama's approval ratings are fine!" is JUST AS BAD as Cantor's statement. HALF TRUE!
In fact, Krugman had a column outlining precisely how the "double-counting" accusation is an outright lie. So Cantor should have gotten a "Pants on Fire." But, Politifact, like most journos -- just ask Trudy Lieberman!-- hasn't expended the time and effort required to understand enough of the details of the health care law to parse Cantor's statement. So they went easy on him with only a Half True.
Another "ruling" by Politifact that irritated me was, again, Tim Kaine's statement that
"'The Democratic candidates in that primary in Kentucky both got more votes than Rand Paul did,' adding that Democratic voters are 'energized.'" This is a factually true statement, okay? Factually correct. But did that impress Politifact? No. Tim Kaine got a Half True for this factually true statement, why? Because McCain won Kentucky, "less than half of Kentucky Democrats had a negative opinion of the Tea Party" and "Those primary vote totals really aren't an indication of strong prospects for the Democratic candidate Conway, or conversely, less support for Paul." Huh? So?
See, the chairman of the Democratic Party's factually true statement is only Half True, even though it is factual, because Politifact imputed some kind of unspoken meaning -- that Kaine DID NOT SAY -- in order to call him a half-liar. Kaine stated a fact about the primary voting results, and stated the Democrats were "energized." How is that Half True? How is Cantor's accusation of "double-counting" equally Half True? Kaine's statement was True, Cantor's statement was False.
I award Politifact three judgments of False Equivalence for their pretzel-like fact-twisting, mind-reading, and data cherry-picking.
#7 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 10:32 PM
Facts are stubborn things~John Adams
#8 Posted by mark A. York, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 11:16 PM
And, if you want to get into egregious polifact parsing that's been covered on cjr, there's always this:
http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/truth_be_told.php
"It's only half true that Haliburton / KBR defrauded the federal government. You see, fraud is one of those things you can do half way, like making a sale or murder."
I don't use politifact so I can't say in general how they're like, and I have nothing but meh for Huffington, but in that instance politifact's performance was "half-ass".
#9 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Wed 19 Jan 2011 at 11:19 PM
While we are airing our Politifact grievances, another thing that annoys me is Politifact sniffily dismissing criticism of its judgments, anyone pointing out factual errors and requesting a correction -- "Oh, they're PARTISAN." Never mind that you might have a good point. If Politifact judges someone to be "partisan" (and I wish he'd explain exactly how he makes that judgment, sight unseen, and why that disqualifies someone from requesting a correction) then no matter how politely one might make their case, no matter how much substantive evidence one presents, then their point is not worthy of consideration.
Big News: Journos and "partisans" are their biggest reading audience. That Politifact has such contempt for the people who are most interested in their work, is kind of a relic of old-style editorial arrogance. It's very frustrating and makes them seem untrustworthy. A shame, too, because they often put a lot of research into their efforts. AP is becoming a worthy competitor, however. Watch your back, Mr. Adair!
#10 Posted by James, CJR on Thu 20 Jan 2011 at 12:39 AM
Now, here's a perfect example of Politifact's shoddy and outright mistaken "fact-checking":
They "fact-checked" the State of the Union and Rep Ryans's response.
President Obama said "We are living with a legacy of deficit-spending that began almost a decade ago."
That got a Half True because "[T]he nation's debt did not begin under President Bush." They go on to talk about the debt, not the deficit. Get that? They acknowledge that there was a surplus -- no deficit spending -- under Clinton. They say "Obama is correct that there was a turning point toward deficit spending a decade ago. But he isn't telling the full story of the nation's deficits, a "legacy" that began long before George W. Bush was president. We rate the claim Half True."
Now let's go to Ryan. Ryan says "The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy."
I mean, that's an overblown statement, yet they rate that a full "True."
Why? Well, to explain, they must go to an "alternative" measure of debt called the "public debt." What is most commonly used and recognized is the "gross federal debt." So they cherry-pick a little-used measure of debt. They quote some economist from the Heritage Foundation and then say "By the end of 2010, public debt is projected to be 60.3 percent of GDP, and by the end of 2012, it's projected to be 66.6 percent. If current practices aren’t changed, public debt will reach 90 percent of GDP in 2020." they conclude by saying "We'll also note that these numbers could change over the course of the next two years, depending on economic conditions and policy choices. Still, we considered Boehner's statistics valid, and Ryan's formulation is equally solid. So we rate his statement True."
Now, Paul Krugman also fact-checked Ryan's rebuttal. He focused on the following:
Just take a look at what’s happening to Greece, Ireland, the United Kingdom and other nations in Europe. They didn’t act soon enough; and now their governments have been forced to impose painful austerity measures: large benefit cuts to seniors and huge tax increases on everybody.
Greece maybe fits that description. But if you’d read anything about the euro crisis ... you’d know that Ireland was running a budget surplus on the eve of the crisis, and had quite low debt. Its problems now have nothing to do with fiscal irresponsibility in the past; they’re the consequence of weak financial regulation and the government’s too-generous bank bailout.
He adds "And I also suspect that Ryan is honestly unaware that the UK has not, in fact, experienced a debt crisis."
So Ryan make some CLEARLY untrue statements that Politifact chooses to ignore, instead choosing a hyperbolic statement where they cherrypick a little-used measure of debt and quote someone from Heritage Foundation, and pronounce this preposterous statement as fully True.
And they take Obama's factual statement and rate this factually true statement Half True by intentionally confusing deficit with debt.
Politifact is clearly, clearly biased. Their work is just worthless. They completely ignore factually untrue statements by Paul Ryan, award him a True for a preposterously overstated, fear-mongering distortion, and perform astounding acrobatics with deficit-debt terminology in order to call President Obama a half-liar.
Is anyone going to call Politifact on this? Mr. Chittum?
#11 Posted by James, CJR on Wed 26 Jan 2011 at 09:42 AM