There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you’re going to find that there’s truth on both sides.
PolitiFact, a political factchecking project based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been criticized for taking the latter approach. An item it posted yesterday (1/9/12) is further evidence of its preference for the appearance of evenhandedness over its reality.
The item addressed Rick Santorum’s assertion in a January 4 town meeting that as a result of the 1996 welfare law, “Poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for…one of the areas that had the highest level of poverty historically, which is African-American children.” PolitiFact concluded that the statement was “Half True,” since “Santorum is right that poverty rates declined after the reform’s passage. But opinions differ on the primary cause.”
As evidence that “opinions differ,” the factcheckers turned to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, best known for his argument that the poor aren’t really poor because they have microwave ovens and the like. Unsurprisingly, since he works for a group set up explicitly to promote conservative ideas, he does indeed have the opinion that the 1996 welfare law caused a drop in child poverty. But does this opinion have any basis in fact?
PolitiFact allows him to make his case at length, but the gist of it is this: “Since welfare reform, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004.” And PolitiFact helpfully gives you a link to a U.S. Census chart that shows that those numbers are almost accurate. But looking at the numbers for yourself, you see that there’s no indication that the 1996 law had anything to do with them: Poverty among black children peaked in 1992, at 46.3 percent, and declined steadily from then until 2001, when it hit a low of 30.0 before moving upward. 1996 does not seem to have impacted the poverty trajectory at all; a naive reading of the numbers would indicate that black child poverty goes up when someone named “Bush” is in the White House.
Here’s a graph of child poverty by race from Mother Jones (9/29/11–by raw numbers, not percentages) that illustrates the utter unremarkability of 1996 for black child poverty:
PolitiFact goes on to give equal space, and equal rhetorical weight, to sources who say economic growth is actually what drove child poverty down in the ’90s: “While Rector maintains that the economy played only a secondary role in reducing poverty, other groups says it’s the main driver.” But none of these sources directly rebut Rector’s arguments, or point out how dubious it is to give a 1996 law credit for a decline that began four years earlier.
So it’s true that “opinions differ” on whether the 1996 welfare lowered poverty for black children. A real factchecker would point out that the advocate for that opinion offers selective and misleading figures to back it up. But then, if you did point that out, you might look like you weren’t being evenhanded.
(Thanks to Neil deMause for bringing PolitiFact‘s report to my attention.)
I like politifact
Isn’t it ironic that the less credibly a “fact-checker” does its job, the more credibility it has with the corpress?
Birds of a feather …
the only salient thing to be derived from that chart is that poverty for everyone declined steeply during the Clinton years, and then began going back up under Bush
PoilitFact is scared of the right-wing noise machine, and so is bending over backwards to avoid appearing to favor “liberals.” They have lost credibility as a result. Facts do literally have a liberal bias, as Steven Colbert joked, and this has become frightfully evident to the frightened wonks at PolitiFact. Sooner or later they’ll just cave completely and get absorbed by one of the right-wing “think” tanks that’a squeezing their tail now. Robert Rector? That old fraud has been peddling the same bullshit for at least thirty years now.
Who is the best fact checker?
I believe it was Reagan who said, “Facts are stupid things.” I say we let the teachers do their jobs and help young people learn to discover facts on their own instead of swallowing force-fed test prep all the time, and we will see a renewed love of truth instead of “truthiness”!
I had the same kinds of complaints about FactCheck.org from its very beginning, and wrote to them at least a couple times about it. They would post an article about some Bush administration bull$#%& that affected the country in an important way, along with an article about some meaningless, unimportant, small fib or mistake made by a Democrat, and treat it as though it mattered or was as important as the Bush lie. And they would say something to the affect that both sides were equally bad. My local public radio system (MN Public Radio) has a fact-checking function and they do the same thing, except that they also are not very hard on conservatives, saying sometimes that their outright lies are “misleading” and that kind of thing.
Facts are facts…but it does not tell the whole story.Obamas time in office has been the worst period arguably since the great depression.That is a fact.It would follow that the only votes he should get are from people happy with the situation.We on the right have always said “all the facts are on our side”.On the left they feel the same.Fact is what matters is how the public interprets the interpretation of known facts,and what the hell will be done about it.The publics interpretation translates into votes.We shall see who’s facts ring true November hence.
So now even fact-checking sites are falling victim to the “fact-checkers are liberal/leftist” meme, and therefore overcompensating by attempting to be “balanced.” What nonsense. Fact checkers correct more conservative claims because conservatives take more liberties with the truth. It’s as simple as that.
I used to rely on Politifact to set the record straight. Now that they, too, are bending over for the Right, I’ll have to go elsewhere for the facts. What a disgrace.
TD….An entire industry (Rush-Hannity -O’reilly-Fox News)have made their bones on taking liberal TRUTHs and smashing them against the rocks.Day in and day out- round the clock.Dragging liberal facts into the light of day.Fact checkers correct more conservative claims?In what universe?Liberalism itself is based on a lie.The lie that this country was founded as a socialist experiment .
michael e, dude, step away from the Fox box. It is clearly rotting your brain.
michael e,
It’s strange that you say “Facts are factsâ┚¬Ã‚¦but it does not tell the whole story.” To me, this statement would mean, among other things, that one should not cherry pick one’s facts to create a predetermined conclusion.
You then go on to say “Obamas time in office has been the worst period arguably since the great depression.” Does that honestly tell the whole story?
Doesn’t the fact that Obama inherited this historically bad economy count for anything?
@michael e, facts are facts. The fact that you think there are actually two sets of facts is truly frightening.
People what i am trying to tell you is the argument in politics is not to argue facts(though they do that to).It is to take those facts and often times to arrive at two totally different conclusions.For instance my conclusion of Obamas time in office is -he sucks.EFK has a different feeling.He believes that Obamas time in office is terrible BECAUSE Bush sucks.
TD…..I don’t watch FOX
Rule of the Internet #14: Don’t feed the trolls. It only encourages them.