I began writing a comment in Hunter's excellent front page diary yesterday on the PolitiFact "Lie of the Year" controversy, but two things happened:
(1) The comment ran into multiple paragraphs; and
(2) Just as I completed it, my browser glitched, and I lost everything I had just typed.
So I decided to re-work my comment as a diary. I don't want to re-hash what Hunter said - instead, I want to focus on another aspect of PolitFact's self-serving defense of its editors' decision to choose the statement "The Republicans voted to kill Medicare" as their "Lie of the Year," a defense written by PolitiFact's editor in chief, Bill Adair.
Follow me below the fold if you're interested in yet another take on this controversy.
Here are the opening four paragraphs of Adair's "we're the fact checkers, y'all are just a bunch of ignorant partisans, and that settles it" screed:
At a Republican campaign rally a few years ago, I asked one of the attendees how he got his news.
"I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox."
My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.
This is life in our echo chamber nation. We protect ourselves from opinions we don't like and seek reinforcement from like-minded allies.
Did you notice what Adair did - and more importantly, what he didn't do - in his opening statement? As someone who spent 20+ years in journalism, including many years copy editing other peoples' work, I caught it immediately.
Read again this paragraph, in which Adair puts within quotation marks a statement made by a specific person he talked to at a specific place and time - an attendee at a Republican campaign rally a few years ago:
"I listen to Rush and read NewsMax," he said. "And to make sure I'm getting a balanced view, I watch Fox."
Now read this paragraph in which Adair fails to put in quotation marks a statement not by a specific person made at a specific place and time, but about a group of people in general:
My liberal friends get their information from distinctly different sources — Huffington Post, Daily Kos and Rachel Maddow. To make sure they get a balanced view, they click Facebook links — from their liberal friends.
This is a classic example of an attributed statement versus an unattributed statement - the first offers an interview subject's opinion or observation about the story's topic, the second offers the writer's opinion or observation about said topic.
Why do I find this revealing? Consider how Adair describes the response to their "Lie of the Year" selection:
... We've received about 1,500 e-mails about our choice and only a few agreed with us.
Why did PolitiFact receive so many e-mails on this particular call? And why did "only a few agree with us?" If you believe Adair, this explains it:
In reality, fact-checking is growing and thriving because people who live outside the partisan bubbles want help sorting out the truth. PolitiFact now has nine state sites run by news organizations around the country that employ more than 30 full-time journalists for fact-checking. We've inspired many copycat sites around the nation and roughly a dozen in other countries.
And yet, for many of our readers, the love for PolitiFact has always been conditional. They love us when we confirm their views that the other side is wrong — and they hate us when we don't.
Much has been made in all the writing about this controversy of the idea of equivalency - Democrats lie just as much as Republicans; Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, Daily Kos and MSNBC are just as partisan as Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, NewsMax and Fox.
Hunter challenged the fact-checkers to prove that. I would add another challenge: Prove to us that liberals are just as insulated and closed-minded as conservatives, that liberals live in a "partisan bubble" to the degree conservatives do, and that liberals universally cheer fact-checking outfits like PolitiFact when they call out conservative lies and always - always - react negatively when they call out liberal lies.
I can't - and won't - speak for everyone here. I would agree that there are some liberals who live in that "partisan bubble," and that there are some liberals who will only read pundits and watch political TV that confirms their views. But there is a mountain of evidence based on polling that conservatives are far more likely to believe things which are provably untrue - that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, that the Affordable Care Act created "death panels" or that it represented a "government takeover of health care," that the stimulus "didn't create a single job" or that their taxes have gone up since Obama took office in 2009.
Is there a reason, perhaps, that Adair was able to directly quote a conservative saying he got all his news from Rush Limbaugh, NewsMax and "fair and balanced" Fox, but had to generalize about liberals getting their news from Huffington Post, Daily Kos, Rachel Maddow and Facebook links from their liberal friends?
I can only speak for myself. I am a voracious reader and political junkie, having spent most of my 20+ years in journalism covering local government issues. It might surprise Bill Adair to learn I get most of my news from The St. Petersburg Times - yes, most conservatives consider that newspaper part of the "liberal echo chamber," but would Adair agree with them? Somehow I doubt it.
How do I decide who, in the realm of punditry, to trust? I look at their track record. I trust and regularly read or listen to pundits who have been consistently right in their predictions (no one in this regard is more trustworthy than Paul Krugman) and tend to take the writings of those who have been consistently wrong in their predictions (George Will) with a grain of salt (not that I don't read them when they are writing about a topic that interests me).
It might also surprise Bill Adair to learn that I don't always agree with Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann or Jon Stewart (who is second to none in the realm of media criticism but also falls occasionally into the false equivalence trap). Nor do I always automatically assume PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" ratings portraying statements by Republicans as True and those portraying statements by Democrats as False are wrong. I read their reasoning and make my own judgments based upon what I know or can learn through independent sources I trust about the topic at hand.
What I've found in reading PolitiFact fairly regularly is that, while most of their rulings are solid, they have an annoying habit of sometimes bending over backwards to give Republicans the benefit of the doubt and doing the same to prove Democrats to be liars. They do this in one of two ways - by cherry-picking statements to remove the context, or - as they did in the case of their latest "Lie of the Year" - using semantic pretzel logic to come to a conclusion opposite from the one most reasonable people would reach.
In the case of the "Republicans voted to kill Medicare" ruling, Adair all but admits this in his defensive op-ed:
Some of the response has been substantive and thoughtful. The critics said we ignored the long-term effects of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan and that we were wrong to consider his privatized approach to be Medicare. In their view, that is an end to Medicare.
We've read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011.
In the first sentence, Adair admits there have been "substantive and thoughtful" arguments against their ruling. But how does this square with the idea that those objecting to it are simply reacting in a partisan way to their side being called out in a lie? It doesn't. But fear not - Adair, who to my knowledge has never publicly admitted that maybe, just maybe, he might be wrong about something, has a way to dismiss those "substantive and thoughtful" arguments in his next sentence:
We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.
As I and others have pointed out in comments about this story here and elsewhere, how can one judge a statement about the Ryan plan as false without first judging the merits of the plan upon which that statement is based? I would submit that no reasonable person could.
But then, I'm not a "fact-checker." I'm just a liberal living in his partisan bubble with his echo chamber.