Readers are well aware of The Scrapbook’s attitude toward PolitiFact, the much-admired “fact-checking” watchdog of American politics run by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida. Under the guise of a journalistic enterprise, PolitiFact is, in truth, a partisan rapid-reaction squad, largely in the service of the Democratic party. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course—just as long as everyone understands that PolitiFact’s judgments are entirely subjective.
Which is why The Scrapbook tends not to worry too much about correcting PolitiFact’s more tendentious observations. That would be comparable to debating Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D.-Fla.) or expecting a serious response from President Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest.
This past week, however, The Scrapbook’s eyebrows were raised involuntarily by PolitiFact. In response to the exchange of Americans held hostage in Tehran for Iranian-Americans convicted of or being prosecuted for violating economic sanctions, Sen. Marco Rubio said that, if elected president, “our adversaries around the world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak like Barack Obama, and it will be like Ronald Reagan, where as soon as he took office the hostages were released from Iran.”
To which PolitiFact responded with all the fury of the uninformed: “Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 may have coincided with the release of the hostages,” it declared, “but historians say it did not cause it. . . . Instead, the Iranians had tired of holding the hostages, and . . . the administration of Jimmy Carter did the legwork to get the hostages released.”
This is not just untrue, but embarrassingly so. For several months before the release of the hostages in Tehran, the Carter State Department had been negotiating a ransom deal with the Iranians. But just as Iran released the hostages at the moment Ronald Reagan took the oath of office—in order to humiliate Jimmy Carter one last time—there can be no doubt whatsoever that the Iranians were nervous about dealing with the new president. Indeed, at the time, the Washington Post asked, “Who doubts that among Iran’s reasons for coming to terms now was a desire to beat [Reagan] to town?”
More troubling to The Scrapbook, however, is PolitiFact’s invocation of “historians” to support its ludicrous argument. For the “historian” in question is none other than Gary Sick, the Columbia political scientist who labored on the Carter ransom-negotiation team and later publicized his very own conspiracy theory that the 1980 Reagan-Bush presidential campaign had (secretly!) persuaded Ayatollah Khomeini to keep the hostages imprisoned until after Reagan’s election.
Gary Sick’s attempt to rationalize his failure is, from a psychiatric standpoint, understandable. Less forgivable was the saturation coverage of Sick’s fantasy in the New York Times of the day, whose columnist Leslie Gelb (another Carter State Department veteran) accused President George H. W. Bush of “treachery.” Or, for that matter, PolitiFact’s revival of a now-forgotten, and long since discredited, conspiracy theory.
The Scrapbook, incidentally, has its own idea how this happened. The writers at PolitiFact are staffers at a Florida newspaper called the Tampa Bay Times, few of whom seem to have been alive when all this happened. No doubt, they consulted some obsolescent sage at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, who remembered Gelb’s column and its accompanying fairy tale. This is what passes for “fact-checking” in sunny Tampa.
