The Clown Act that is Politifact

I don’t know why I still on occasion go over and look at Politifact.com, but it’s probably for the comedy value.  An example of this is the fact that today they actually have a story about a claim made in the television program ‘Glee’.  Seriously.

But I’m writing this to discuss the absurdity of some of their rating decisions (and probably their overall rating methodology).  A few weeks ago, after President Obama delivered the State of the Union address, Politifact initially ruled a claim that Obama made – “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than 3 million jobs.  Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.” – as Half True.  In their original article about this item they explain their ruling thusly, “Obama is correct on both counts when using private-sector job numbers. But he went too far when he implicitly credited his administration policies. So we rate the statement Half True.”  To sum up what Politifact is saying, what President Obama said was 100% true, supported by facts, but we (Politifact) judge the statement only half true because though the statement is supported by facts, we (Politifact) think that since Obama is taking credit for these facts, the statement is only Half True.  It should be noted that Politifact did later upgrade their ruling to Mostly True and they provided an explanation for the change here.  Wonderful.

Now let’s fast-forward to an item that appeared on Politifact.com earlier this week.  They rate a claim that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida made – “The majority of Americans are conservatives.” – as Mostly True.  What is truly absurd about their analysis of this statement can be seen in the first two paragraphs that they have written:

Liberals may want to argue with Sen. Marco Rubio’s remarksat the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

But they don’t have the evidence to argue with this statement: "The majority of Americans are conservatives."

This is absurd because Politifact is essentially asserting that the burden of proof is on liberals to prove Marco Rubio incorrect, rather than with it being in its proper place, with Rubio showing evidence to support his own claim.  This is truly shoddy analysis, but let’s move on.

To support their ruling of Mostly True, Politifact cites a Gallup poll from 2011 that says that 40% of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, 35% identify as moderates, and 21% identify themselves as liberals.  For the sake of this post, I’m going to leave alone whether just claiming you are conservative, moderate, or liberal automatically means that you really are conservative, moderate, or liberal, and I’m also going to leave alone the topic of defining what it actually means to be a conservative, a moderate, or a liberal.  Instead, I’ll do as Politifact has done and use ideological identification as a proxy for actual ideology.

And in doing this, let’s revisit what Politifact actually quotes Rubio as saying.

“The majority of Americans are conservatives.”

This statement is demonstrably false.  There is zero evidence that Politifact lists in the article to support this statement, even using the proxy that I discussed above.  Zero.  I have never seen a scenario in which forty percent is the majority of anything (you see, because the remaining 60% would be larger than the 40%).  At the end of the article, Politifact says the following in rating the claim:

Rubio said that the majority of Americans are conservative.  A respected ongoing poll from Gallup shows that conservatives are the largest ideological group, but they don’t cross the 50 percent threshold. So we rate his statement Mostly True.

So let’s recap the Rubio case.  Marco Rubio said something that is demonstrably false when you look at the evidence that Politifact has provided, yet Politifact elevates the claim in their ruling system to Mostly True.  President Obama makes a claim that is 100% factually accurate, but it starts as Half True, before it’s later upgraded to Mostly True.

There’s a passage in the post about Senator Rubio in which Politifact says:

First, he said a majority of Americans are conservatives. In Gallup’s poll, the number has never crossed the 50 percent threshold.  Technically, he would be more accurate if he said a plurality of Americans are conservative.

No, technically he would be more accurate if he said that a plurality of Americans identify as conservative.  However, what Rubio said is not accurate at all, and only in Politifact’s crazy rating system could it garner a Mostly True.

Lastly, I would like to apologize for my description in the title of this post, The Clown Act that is Politifact.  I have don’t have any evidence that any people that write for Politifact have worked as circus clowns, rodeo clowns, or appeared as clowns at children’s birthday parties.