Politifact is standing by a “half true” rating it gave to an accurate claim in National Review. But by apologizing for the item, the award-winning fact-check project by the Tampa Bay Times has opened up a can of worms about the usefulness and purpose of “fact-checkers” in media.
Politifact gave the poor rating to claims about the Affordable Care Act made by National Review’s Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson. The fact-checking group awarded a “half true” rating for Goldberg and Williamson’s claim that the Affordable Care Act will give “elevated legitimacy” to alternative medicine.
“Goldberg wrote that homeopathy, acupuncture and aromatherapy ‘have been given elevated legitimacy under the Affordable Care Act,’” PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson wrote. “The law does provide a leg up for alternative therapies (although it’s unclear whether homeopathy and aromatherapy would ultimately benefit).”
“In practice, though, it’s important not to oversell the impact. Most of the provisions in question are modest, and the one with potentially the biggest impact has been curbed by a subsequent guidance from HHS. The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details, so we rate it Half True,” Jacobson said.
The “half true” rating for a claim that is true, coupled with the fact that Jacobson apparently did not get comments from either Goldberg or Williamson, prompted immediate responses from the National Review authors.
Politifact in turn said its reporter didn’t manage to find Williamson’s email address and posted an editor’s note about the rating.
But the dustup raises questions about what exactly is going on with the many “fact-checking” media out there.
On the one hand, it’s good to have a group dedicated to verifying the truth of remarks made by public figures, said Steve Buttry, a visiting scholar at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication.
On the other hand, news outlets are relegating the chore of fact-checking to niche groups. Finding accurate information, Buttry said, is the duty not just of groups with the word “fact” in their titles, but of all journalists.
“The more fact-checking the better,” Buttry told the Washington Examiner in a phone interview. “We too often do the ‘he said, she said’ stories without saying anything about the truth. So as far as fact-checking, I wish we’d do it more routinely in stories.”
Goldberg and Williamson charge that Politifact’s insouciance about reporting indicates the group’s bias.
“One way to ruin a newspaper’s reputation is to make the news subservient to politics, which is what has happened at Politifact,” Williamson wrote this week in response to the rating. “The Obama administration is dear to Democrats, and the [Affordable Care Act], being threatened from several directions at once, is something that Democrats and so-called liberals feel the need to defend.
“Politifact, and by extension the Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute (which owns the newspaper), is deploying rank and obvious intellectual dishonesty in the service of narrow, partisan political sympathies,” Williamson continued. “It is detestable, and it deserves to be condemned by all those who care about newspapers — not only by the conservatives against whom its intellectual dishonesty is directed.”
Goldberg was also unimpressed.
“Rarely have I been more annoyed about a criticism that matters so little,” Goldberg told the Examiner. “That’s the amazing thing about Politifact’s ridiculous ‘finding.’ Why not just buy some good will and give an honest answer about such a trivial thing? The question answers itself.
“Politifact is not some lab of emigre German scientists objectively measuring the truth in beakers and syringes,” the columnist continued. “They’re a bunch of liberal journalists, doing what liberal journalists so often do, putting their thumbs on the scale in accordance with their worldviews. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they honestly believe they proved my statement was only half true. But that’s a much bigger indictment of their legitimacy — because it demonstrates how sincerely biased they really are.”
In his response, Goldberg wrote, “I have little use for Factcheckers, though I have plenty of use for facts and I believe in checking them. The problem with the Factcheckers is that they seem to think they have an authority they did not earn to tell other journalists what the facts are. That’s bad enough, but they almost invariably end up objecting not to untruths but to truths they don’t like. That often makes them combatants, hiding behind their self-appointed status as referees.”
Noted in both Goldberg’s and Williamson’s responses is that PolitFact’s Jacobson apparently did very little to contact the National Review authors to speak with them about their Affordable Care Act claim.
“We did email Jonah Goldberg last week [at his work email] about the report; I’m not sure why he didn’t see it,” PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan told the Examiner. “We do make an effort to contact the speakers for all our reports, and Jonah was the speaker in this case. For Kevin, the reporter didn’t see the email icon on Kevin’s National Review bio page or he would have emailed him as well.”
“I tried to call Kevin today on the phone and couldn’t reach him,” Holan said.
When asked to explain PoltiFact’s “half true” rating for a claim it found to be error-free, Holan called the Half True rating “partially accurate” but charged National Review with minimizing important details or taking things out of context.
“As we noted in our report, the provisions for alternative health care in question are modest, and the one with potentially the biggest impact has been curbed by a subsequent guidance from [Health and Human Services],” the PolitiFact editor added.
PolitiFact stands by its decision to rate Goldberg and Williamson’s remarks as “half true.” But the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking group has since added the following editor’s note to the report:
For Buttry, fact-checking groups serve a purpose in journalism, but it will always be on the reader to remain skeptical, to question and to not assume that something is an authority just because it has the word “fact” in its title.
“Saying ‘here’s the truth of this story,’ as fact-checkers do, is one of journalism’s most important functions and it’s something that is an attempt to balance too many news organizations or individual journalists who’ve gotten away from this,” he said. “I’m a fan of it and wish we’d do it more routinely in stories. And that’s kind of my reservation: That we’ve made fact-checking with groups like PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s fact-checker this little ghetto of journalism. We haven’t stamped out that ‘he said, she said’ story that doesn’t find the facts.”
And because fact-checkers have been relegated to a niche, supposedly carrying with them some sort of “authoritative power to make final judgments,” as Gawker’s Jim Newell suggested, the targets of fact ratings are often put on the defensive, their reputations and authority on given topics now open to doubt — even in cases such as this one, where the accuracy of the reporting is not in question.
“Readers should look at everything skeptically,” Buttry said. “Let’s look at the facts.”
Williamson did not respond to the Examiner’s multiple requests for comment.
