Tom Sgouros: PolitiFact’s Double Standards

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Tom Sgouros, GoLocalProv MINDSETTER™

 

Got a call last week from Gene Emery, the Projo editor in charge of their PolitiFact stories. It seems he was interested in talking about e-verify, the US immigration service's program that businesses are supposed to be able to use to verify a new hire's citizenship or immigration status.

A couple of weeks ago, on the "Lively Experiment", I used a fact about e-verify to buttress a point I made about Governor Lincoln Chafee's common sense, and the frequent nonsense he endures about his policy stands. Unfortunately for me, the way my sentence came out overstated what was in my notes, and because the conversation was about Chafee, not e-verify, I couldn't get the moment to clarify it. If you've ever been on one of those shows, you'll understand how hard it can be to get a word in at all, let alone clarify a side-issue on a point made about something else entirely.

View Larger +

But no matter, edited properly and taken very carefully -- the way PolitiFact does it -- my statement was not correct. I certainly regret that, offer my apology to anyone who was misled, and I'll take the lumps that come with it.

GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLAST

That said, I thoroughly disagree with Emery on his full-throated defense of e-verify.  Appealing e-verify decisions is neither easy nor cheap for the people wronged by the system. Plus, the data he used to defend e-verify's accuracy includes hires made by the military and Transportation Security Administration, as well as banks, security firms, and other companies that do private background checks of their prospective employees before they even get to the e-verify stage. Including this data in an analysis of e-verify's accuracy will very naturally get you a highly exaggerated sense of how reliable a system it is for the situations where it really matters. If you really want a useful evaluation of e-verify, does it make sense to average the experience of the Pentagon personnel department with the experience of someone hiring minimum-wage workers in Arizona? This is a real question of data and philosophy, and Emery and I come down on different sides.

My real error

But here's another thing that PolitiFact edited out of my "Lively" words, and that was probably my real mistake: I was quite critical of PolitiFact itself just a moment or two earlier while making a point about the sorry state of mainstream political journalism today.

PolitiFact deserves a lot of criticism. They have a high profile and an easily understood rating system. They could be of enormous help to the conduct of political debate in America, but by imagining that you can check any old fact without some familiarity with the subject at hand, they have chosen instead to be a force of very uncertain value.

The example I used on the show was that last year, they reported as "Mostly False" a union claim that pension concessions had saved the state a half billion dollars. They based this on the fact that the half-billion was not current savings, but projected savings over the next 30 years.

Of course projected expenses of exactly this kind were precisely what made our legislature line up and vote for the "pension reform" debacle of this past year, so it's hard to see how the PolitiFact complaint has merit.

But worse, they aren't consistent. Less than one year earlier, in November 2010, PolitiFact reported as "Mostly True" some questionable budget savings claimed by Governor Carcieri, among which was $111 million in projected savings on health care costs. The math of this projection is precisely the same as the math on the unions' claim of $500 million. So how does one claim get to be true and the other false?

Since my conversation with Emery, PolitiFact went deep into the weeds in order to rate a statement by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse "Mostly False" when all he had done was to point out that increasing our reliance on renewable energy will decrease our reliance on imported oil, a virtually unarguable claim. Unfortunately for Whitehouse, the three Rhode Island projects he used as examples were electricity-generating projects, and we get little of our electricity from oil, so PolitiFact apparently felt justified in calling him out. But there are plenty of renewable energy projects funded by the Treasury grant program Whitehouse was defending that will displace oil imports: solar and geothermal projects can provide both heat and hot water, applications that use lots of oil. So how is his claim false in any way that matters?

On Friday, PolitiFact downrated a completely true claim by a Harvard professor because they disagreed with his use of the word "packed". Einer Elhauge of the Harvard Law School had described the first US Congress as "packed with framers" when it approved mandatory health insurance for seamen in 1790. But, says Emery, who wrote this PolitiFact article, there were only 20 signers of the Constitution in that first Congress, out of 91 members. To him, that's not "packed." This, of course, had approximately nothing to do with what any normal person could see was Elhauge's point (which is more than an interesting historical point; it will be important in the court case defending President Obama's health insurance reforms), but it allowed the PolitiFact writer to one-up a Harvard Law professor. Score!

View Larger +

And of course the big PolitiFact boner of the past year was their nomination for "Lie of the Year" a Democratic claim that Rep. Paul Ryan's plan would "end Medicare." This is, of course, perfectly true if you look at the substance of the program and the impact of the changes on the lives and finances of elderly people. It is false only if you feel that the continuity of the name "Medicare" is more important than the policy substance. PolitiFact even complained that the elderly people shown on Democratic ads wouldn't be affected by the changes because they are old people now and the Ryan changes would only affect people younger than 55. Had the ad producers only used digitally-aged 30-year-olds, would that have made it ok?

These policy issues: pension funding, renewable energy, Medicare, health insurance reform, and yes, e-verify, are controversial because they have far-reaching implications in Rhode Island's and America's future. It does not matter if Senator Whitehouse neglects to include a heat energy project in his list of examples; it matters what America's energy policy is. The level of debate that PolitiFact encourages about these issues is, well, let's just say it's not very edifying. If they actually cared about any of the issues about which they write, they would have the sense to be embarrassed by their performance. They could be much better than this, but have chosen otherwise.

But hey, picking nits, missing the point, and double standards virtually define mainstream American political journalism these days so why should PolitiFact be any different?

Tom Sgouros is the editor of the Rhode Island Policy Reporter, at whatcheer.net and the author of "Ten Things You Don't Know About Rhode Island." Contact him at [email protected].


 

If you valued this article, please LIKE GoLocalProv.com on Facebook by clicking HERE.

 

Related Articles

 

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

 
 

Sign Up for the Daily Eblast

I want to follow on Twitter

I want to Like on Facebook