After staring in some amazement at PolitiFact’s ostensibly unbiased rulings on the truthfulness of various statements made during Wednesday night’s presidential debate, I finally realized what the problem is: PolitiFact’s self-described Truth-O-Meter is clearly broken. Thankfully, however, it’s broken in a way that’s both predictable and fixable. You see, if you simply turn the Truth-O-Meter two notches to the right for any claim made by a Republican, and two notches to the left for any claim made by a Democrat, its reading actually becomes surprisingly accurate.
Here are some examples from Wednesday night’s debate:
Recommended Stories
President Obama said that Mitt Romney’s proposed Medicare reforms were estimated to “cost the average senior about $6,000 a year.” As PolitiFact notes, “[T]he figure is rooted in a study of an outdated Medicare plan” proposed by Paul Ryan. PolitiFact writes, “The problem with Obama using this estimate is simple: The CBO analysis [which offered a highly questionable conclusion to begin with] was of the original Ryan plan, not the more recent one that Romney supports,” which is substantially different.
This would seem to be the end of the inquiry — Obama quoted an estimate for a plan that isn’t Romney’s. PolitiFact, however, was seemingly persuaded by a report from (what it describes as) “a liberal think tank” and a memo from a 2008 Obama campaign advisor, each of which claims that the estimate holds for Romney’s plan as well. Thus, PolitiFact rates Obama’s claim as “Half True.” But once we push the needle over two spots to the left, the rating becomes what it should be: “False.”
