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]
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