Last week, after the President started receiving a torrent of criticism over his broken promise that Americans who wanted to could keep their health insurance plan under Obamacare, I wrote an item asking the question “Will PolitiFact Ever Correct Its Biggest Obamacare Error?” I noted that the fact checking organization had repeatedly rated Obama’s “if you like it you can keep it” promise as being “half true.” Further, PolitiFact had done nothing to go back and update their old incorrect rulings to acknowledge overwhelming evidence Obama publicly told a blatant lie. And curiously enough, I noted PolitiFact rated Mitt Romney as “false” for saying that up to 20 million Americans may lose their health insurance — even though respected experts now say that figure is in the ball park. Romney may have been overstating things a tad, but he was a lot more accurate than Obama’s promise no one would lose their insurance becuase of Obamacare. Of course, you wouldn’t come to that conclusion if you trusted PolitiFact.
Following up on this, Sean Higgins at the Washington Examiner wrote a column detailing six different times PolitiFact had affirmed Obama’s obviously untrue promise about Americans keeping their health insurance. The organization declined to respond Higgins’s direct inquiry about how they could justify their rulings. The day after Higgins’s column appeared highlighting their non-response, the PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote a column for Poynter headlined, “How to fact-check the health care law.” The article enumerated four main points. Number three was “talk to both sides of the partisans” and four was “welcome reader reaction.” PolitiFact has a terrible track record of dealing with legitimate criticism, and the fact PolitiFact’s editor had the temerity to claim they embrace feedback right on the heels or refusing to respond to Higgins only underscores this point.
Now it’s true that some rays of common sense are shining through PolitiFact’s glass house — the organization has finally acknowledged that Obama’s recent claim “that what he’d said was you could keep your plan ‘if it hasn’t changed since the law passed'” is a pants-on-fire lie. However, they still haven’t gone back and corrected their old rulings to acknowledge how wrong those were.
And following their tacit-but-nonetheless-obvious admission they blew it on Obama’s promise you could keep your health insurance, they’ve written another lengthy column attempting to explain themselves — “Sorting out the real story on ‘If you like your plan, you can keep it.'” The column makes a number of eyebrow-raising claims, such as “Make no mistake, the blame for the mess happening now starts with Obama.” Well, yes — that’s true. However, the blame also belongs with PolitiFact, which wrongly and repeatedly lent credibility to the president’s lies. There was ample evidence at the time that the president was not being honest, and there’s certainly enough evidence now that PolitiFact should be more forthright in admitting its error.
But by far the most risible aspect of PolitiFact’s self-justification is their attempt to lessen the impact of Obama’s lies by adding irrelevant context to the debate in a transparent attempt to deflect blame. There’s an entire section of the column dedicated to denouncing the “Spin from the right”:
Both claims are wrong, even by the admission of the person who created an estimate that Beck and Fox News cited as proof. We rated Beck’s claim Pants on Fire.
Christopher Conover, a scholar at the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University and an adjunct scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, recently estimated the number of people that would lose their existing health insurance coverage by the end of 2014. His number: somewhere between 18 million and 50 million.
Conover said a larger number of Americans, about 130 million, would combined see their coverage dropped or their plans changed. But he specifically wrote:
“Let me clear that I am not predicting that 135.8 million Americans have or will have their policies canceled due to Obamacare.”
However Beck and Fox News may have mischaracterized Conover’s work, they aren’t acknowledging how damning it is for Obama and those who defended his ridiculous claim. Here’s what Connover told the Daily Caller:
Conover also says it is hard to imagine President Obama didn’t know these statistics when he was flacking for his health care bill by promising Americans they could keep their health insurance if they liked it.
“If President Obama himself believed this the first time he said it, he was poorly advised,” Conover said.
Let me see if I understand what’s going on here. PolitiFact is chastising Glenn Beck and Fox News for exagerrating the number of Americans losing policies under Obamacare. In the course of doing this, however, they are uncritically accepting Connover’s claim that as many as 50 million might lose insurance policies because of Obamacare. Just a few days before, PolitiFact was on record as repeatedly defending Obama’s claim that no one would lose their policy because of Obamacare. At a minimum, this is mind-warpingly hypocritical.
But all that’s just the wind-up for PolitiFact’s noxious conclusion:
Here are three, key points to help you understand what’s happening:
1. “If you like your plan, you can keep it” is true for the majority of Americans who have insurance but not for everyone, particularly people in the individual market.
2. The health care plan was largely designed so that some health care plans would go away. If not this year, then at some point down the road. That’s what ultimately makes Obama’s promise such a misstep.
3. Opponents of the law are so obsessed that they have consistently overstated attacks against the health care law, and they are guilty of oversimplifying Obama’s original “if you like it” promise.
Emphasis added. What fresh false equivalancy is this? Obamacare opponents are “obsessed”? And how the hell can you possibly be guilty of oversimplifying the statement: “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.” When Democratic Senator Bill Nelson sent out a letter last month saying, “Let’s be clear: if you have health insurance now, you can keep it,” was he guilty of oversimplifying the president’s words? Does PolitiFact even realize that Glenn Beck has no control over my health care policy? Aren’t the president’s lies far more consequential than a talk radio guy?
The answer to that last question is an emphatic yes. And the fact PolitiFact thinks, say, a single errant and erroneous Glenn Beck statement is somehow relevant context to the president’s decision to brazenly lie at least 36 times, tells you all you need to know. If I were a Democratic political hack whose boss was caught red-handed in a serious lie, I wouldn’t do anything different than what PolitiFact has done here: Admit as little as you think is necessary to retain credibility and no more. Then pivot immediately and try and blame some right-wing bogeyman for mucking up the debate.
I have pretty serious issues with the entire media fact checking landscape, but PolitiFact is uniquely terrible. They’re frequently incompetent and brazenly biased, and when they are absolutely forced to account for their shoddy work they are incapable of owning up to the full extent of their mistakes. If they think self-serving and dishonest explanations like this are going to restore their reputatio, they are sorely mistaken.
