The New York Times headline was unarguably true: “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” The data the piece relied on: The percentage of PolitiFact’s fact-checks that came in as “Pants on Fire” or “False.”
Liberal journalism professor Jay Rosen archly noted on Twitter: “Anything jump out at you?” His implication was clear: Republicans were closer to the top of the chart (more dishonest), while Democrats tended to occupy the bottom.
Chart from “All Politicians Lie. Some Lie More Than Others.” https://t.co/IqkRtn6nUr Anything jump out at you? pic.twitter.com/zx3kKyaYH2
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 13, 2015
This is the opposite of data journalism, though. There is simply no criteria by which PolitiFact or other fact-checkers decide which claims to check. So these numbers don’t give us a picture of how often one politician lies versus another politician. Instead they show what portion of claims Poltifact and their friends decided to check were false, by those fact-checkers’ standards. It’s selection bias through the roof.
For example, Politifact and the Washington Post fact-checked Wednesday night’s debates. They picked a handful of statements from each. Hillary Clinton went 0-for-2 with one claim not having enough evidence. That would hurt her overall ratio if Politifact were to revisit that “All politicians lie” chart, but not by much. To show how arbitrary are the claims they choose to check, the Washington Post has a much longer list, which doesn’t even include all of the ones Politifact included — such as her false statement about Bernie Sanders’ position on “clean power” rules.
I bring this up today because last night provided the fact checkers with an opportunity to correct a widely held misperception: that the court’s ruling in Bush v. Gore determined the outcome of the election — or as Clinton put it: “A court took away a presidency.”
This isn’t true. Even had Gore won the case, he would have lost the election. I laid this out in a post a couple of years ago. The short version is that the media recounts found Bush would have won under (a) the recount Gore requested, and (b) the recount the state supreme court had ordered, and that the only recount that could have given Gore the election was explicitly forbidden by state law and never pursued by Gore.
Many journalists and readers don’t know this. They believe Clinton’s falsehood. If the fact checkers exist to inform the public, they are falling down on the job. If they think they exist to demonstrate who lies more, then they don’t understand their own limitations.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
