As Dan Bice reported last week, Paul Ryan lobbied loyalists to vote early and often for PolitiFact to name as “Lie of the Year” the claim that his Medicare proposal “ends Medicare.”
PolitiFact – the national fact-checking franchise in which the Journal Sentinel is a participating newspaper – rated the claim a “Pants-on-Fire” lie this past spring. But Ryan critics, like the lefty website Think Progress, are pushing back pretty hard on the assertion that it’s a lie at all:
Capping costs to beneficiaries, closing the traditional fee-for-service program, and forcing seniors to enroll in new private coverage, ends Medicare by eliminating everything that has defined the program for the last 46 years.
For argument’s sake, let’s stipulate that the claim should be qualified and that it’s important to say the Ryan plan “ends Medicare as we know it.” That’s at least part of PolitiFact’s beef with it (scroll down to the ninth paragraph from the end).
Now consider PolitiFact’s judgment over the weekend about Tommy Thompson’s claim to have “ended welfare” when he was governor.
Well, not quite, the fact-checkers said:
[O]ther forms of welfare — such as food stamps — still exist
the story notes. It adds later:
Moreover, despite its strict work requirements, W-2 arguably has its own welfare components.
In short, PolitiFact suggests it’s probably more accurate to say that Thompson ended welfare as we know it.
And the result of that omission? Another “Pants-on-Fire” rating?
Not at all.
The Thompson claim was rated “Mostly True.”
I was thinking about the puzzling difference between those two judgments when someone Monday tweeted a commentary by John McQuaid on fact-checking in journalism.
McQuaid jumps off from a critique of the nearly ubiquitous fact-checking operations in the conservative Weekly Standard. In that article, Mark Hemingway writes off operations like PolitiFact and the fact-checking stories that the AP and others do after presidential debates and speeches as simply examples of “the media’s desire to tamp down opinions they don’t like” – a desire that Hemingway predictably suggests is driven by liberal media bias.
Hemingway cites a study by the University of Minnesota website Smart Politics of PolitiFact that found Republicans accounted for 76 percent of the “False” or “Pants on Fire” ratings while Democrats accounted for just 22 percent. The Standard writer asserts that “selection bias” and “tendentious arguments” are likely at work.
As an aside, the Minnesota study’s author, Eric Ostermeier, also raises the question of selection bias – but acknowledges that can’t be proven with the data available. (Probably no surprise, Ostermeier’s report drew a significant number of comments on his website taking issue with his suggestion and arguing that Republicans and conservatives were more likely to lie.)
Hemingway also quotes Politico writer Ben Smith (now departing for BuzzFeed), who tells him: “Most political disputes are too nuanced to fit the ‘fact check’ framework.”
True enough, but that shouldn’t be an excuse to dispense with the fact-checking enterprise altogether. Brendan Nyhan recently pointed out at the Columbia Journalism Review website that too often political reporters go in the opposite direction – ignoring the question of truthfulness entirely when confronted with misleading claims by political candidates:
For these journalists, producing meta-level analysis of the effectiveness of deception as a campaign tactic is more important than correcting the factual record for readers.
Nyhan adds:
These sorts of stories play into the hands of campaign strategists who exploit the objectivity bias of the press, knowing that artificially balanced coverage of “controversial ads” and savvy analysis of their effectiveness will likely reinforce the ads’ messages.
Nyhan refers to a misleading Rick Perry ad. Dan Froomkin picks up the theme at Neiman Reports and surveys ethicists about how journalists should report a Mitt Romney ad’s deceptive use of a quote from President Barack Obama. The consensus: that the press should point out such deception when it occurs.
But fact-checking has its limits, writes McQuaid at Forbes.com. He sums up the Standard‘s Hemingway this way:
Fact checking is corrupt, an insidious stealth effort to frame the debate in liberal terms.
McQuaid, though, suggests that that isn’t the real fault:
The main problem, as Hemingway and – from a different perspective – Glenn Greenwald show, is a bias toward the Washington Beltway consensus and overconfidence that the “truth” on an issue can be discerned instantaneously by talking to a few experts.
And he, too, cites the debate over Ryan’s Medicare plan:
There was also PolitFact’s odd declaration that the Democrats were lying (“pants on fire”) in an ad claiming Republicans voted to “end Medicare” when they passed the Ryan plan – elevating a vapid, unresolvable political-semantic dispute to a matter of “truth”: If you change the nature of a program but leave its name intact, are you “ending” it? Damn, I don’t know. It depends on your point of view!
McQuaid’s remedy? Rely less on traditional “experts” and inside-the-Beltway consensus, and recognize that a few phone calls won’t be enough to untangle “a complex, contentious issue.”
And don’t invent a “truth” where the truth is genuinely in dispute.
Who is a journalist? The New Media world was alarmed last week at the news that an Oregon federal judge had concluded a blogger didn’t deserve the same shield law protections as traditional news organizations, in a defamation case that could cost the blogger $2.5 million.
Word of the decision prompted much understandable handwringing about the potential chilling effect of the finding as blogging continues to assert itself as a journalistic medium.
For instance, Dan Kennedy of Northeastern University points out that the ruling treats journalists as a separate class apparently having more rights, instead of affirming that the First Amendment protects all of us.
David Carr at The New York Times gave the issue a second look and pointed out reasons that journalists – whether new media or old – might have second thoughts about defending the blogger in question. Money quote:
The ruling on whether she was a journalist in the eyes of the law turned out to be a MacGuffin, a detail that was very much beside the point. She didn’t so much report stories as use blogging, invective and search engine optimization to create an alternative reality. Journalists who initially came to her defense started to back away when they realized they weren’t really in the same business.
But that doesn’t really matter, Kennedy responds:
[I]f her behavior was that egregious, then the plaintiffs should have had no problem convincing a jury that she acted negligently. … [The judge’s] contention that journalists enjoy greater free-speech protections than non-journalists is an outrage, and should not be allowed to stand.
See more links related to the case here at the Poynter Institute. Also (again at Forbes), Kashmir Hill makes an argument similar to Carr’s.
And finally… Lee Enterprises finally took a long-expected step Monday and filed for federal bankruptcy reorganization. The company publishes 54 papers in the U.S., including the Racine Journal Times and a handful of other Wisconsin papers. It also produces the content of the Wisconsin State Journal, under a complicated relationship in which it is half-owner of Madison Newspapers Inc. (doing business as Capital Newspapers). The Capital Times Co., which publishes a website and two weekly editions all under the umbrella of the Capital Times, owns the other half.
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