Fact-checking Bill Adairs Politifact: YOU LIE!

Politifact, the factchecking company, made itself a laughing stock when it selected "Republicans want to end Medicare" as Lie of the Year.
When the internet nearly universally despised them, they themselves admit they received 1500 emails on this, nearly all of them negative, they decided to use the old Echo Chamber defense http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/22/fact-checking-echo-chamber-nation/, in which they mae the peculiar statement that:
"We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false."

WHAT????

Sooooo, you don't know whether Ryan's plan would actually end Medicare, but Democrats who claim such, are wrong anyway?

Wow.

Whats more, their defense to this is not an actual defense, it's the typical, cowardice, independents position: Echo chamber!?!? REALLY?? They say:
"And yet, for many of our readers, the love for PolitiFact has always been conditional. They love us when we confirm their views that the other side is wrong and they hate us when we don't."

Wow, they really make the huge mistake of interpreting what people think! Are they mind readers?
Maybe some on the left would not totally disagree with them on this, but to pick it as Lie of the year, is egregious.

They say that they've looked into all the criticism, and that you can go fuck yourselves, they're still right, neh neh nuh neh neh.
And to their discredit, they don't actually have an argument as to WHY "Repubs ending medicare" is such a false claim. They arrogantly claim they are right, and that's final.

Oh well.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/dec/22/fact-checking-echo-chamber-nation/


Factchecking PolitiFact itself.

1.
They give Romney 20 "True" statements, 3 of which are about the exact same thing: how mccain switched on taxes for the rich. So that one could go down to 18.

They also rate Romney's claim about how Obama increased the debt more than the previous 43 presidents combined as Mostly True, because 2 out of 3 measurements on that debt say that.
The kicker? those 2 measurements are about either a LONGER period, or one which Obama wasn't actually influencing the deficit.
End of fiscal 2008 - end of fiscal 2012
Obama inauguration - end of fiscal 2013
The fairest measure would be:
end of fiscal 2009 - end of fiscal 2013
in which Obama's deficit is NOT more than the previous three combined, by their own admission.

So, I rate PolitiFarts claim as Mostly False

2.
Their rating of Huntsmans claim that the US spends more on defense than the rest of the world as Mostly False. To be sure, it's not MORE, since that would mean that the USA spends more than 50 percent of global defense expenditure. Instead it's 40-45 percent, with a big unknown in what China and Russia spend.
I wouldn't have rated it as MOSTLY false, but a mere Half True would have done it, because Huntsman is almost right 45 % is really close to 50 percent.


My comment on the Weekly Standard:
In your criticism of Cohn, you're using a classic fallacy, called the non-sequitur.
he says:
"But Politfact and its counterpart, Factcheck.org, are prone to certain errors. Among them is a tendency to confuse statements of opinion, or interpretation, for statements of fact."

you respond:
"If the problem is, as Cohn acknowledges, PolitiFact tends to portray what's obviously opinion as fact, doesn't the notion that they single out Republicans as "lying" much more often suggest that they're just disagreeing with Republican opinions a lot more than Democratic ones? How is that not bias?"

Cohn does not say that EVERYTHING that politifact states is prone to this error. So, PF could be doing both, talk about facts, and mistake some opinions for fact.

I'm not sure I'd do away with factcheckers, they often source their statements quite well, and not with bloggers as you suggest elsewhere.

If three-quarters of their Pants-on-fire lies are made by Republicans, and you think that is because of selection bias, feel free to give them as much Democratic statements as you wish. I'm sure there's money to made from an effort like that, sure that someone somewhere would pay senior citizens a bunch of money to flood the Politifact website with tons of Democratic statements they think are lies.

Or is it the case that your and the rightwings innate, kneejerk assumption that ALL media is liberally biased, makes you not even try that?