First of all, I should say what may not be clear from the rest of this diary: I am thankful to independent fact-checking outlets such as UPenn's FactCheck, St. Petersburg Times' and CQ's PolitiFact, and WaPo's Fact Checker. There is no doubt that they have improved the public's ability to separate fact from fiction in political campaigns. Furthermore, I have no reason to think anything but the best about their motivations and desire for impartiality.
However, nothing is perfect and, unfortunately, the professional fact checkers are not immune to what I call the "balance anxiety" of the mainstream media. Their desire not just to be impartial, but also to protect their reputation for impartiality, becomes conflicted when the two sides they monitor are in fact grossly unbalanced in their respect for truth and facts, as I explain below the fold.
Balance anxiety is understandable. What are fact checkers to do when one side spits out lie after lie, making up completely baseless "facts" or even contradicting its own earlier statements, with utter disregard for truth and consistency, while the other side merely engages in the usual interpretative bias inherent in advocacy and advertisement? If they consistently present one side as pathologically lying, and the other as basically honest (albeit biased - but that is expected, even necessary, in partisan politics), the fact checkers will appear - to superficial observers - to take the latter campaign's side. To avoid such appearance of partisanship, they can artificially balance their reporting, thereby sacrificing objective impartiality.
I have criticized FactCheck.org several times on my blog. For example, how was Obama misleading the voters by quoting a "dated" McCain statement about the economy's strong fundamentals, when McCain repeated it just as FactCheck was chiding Obama for taking it out of context? That was in August, and now we know that McCain didn't learn better by September 15, when he was still repeating the same mantra even as the financial markets were unraveling.
A few days later, I debunked FactCheck's "debunking" of "false Internet claims and rumors" about Sarah Palin. My basic conclusion was this:
Scoreboard: of the five "debunked" rumors,
one is completely true,
one is generally true (and well-documented), but one detail turned out to be false despite testimonies,
one is based on a true story, but FactCheck focused on a prank inspired by it,
one is false but based on an understandable mistake,
and one is false and potentially harmful, but came from a conservative source, and Palin herself contributed to its creation.
Since I wrote that, the outpour of lies from the McCain campaign has not abated, and the fact checkers' balance anxiety seems to continue.
On Sept. 18, FactCheck called out Biden for "giv[ing] a twist to McCain's words" because Biden had said McCain wouldn't help "small borrowers" suffering in the mortgage crisis but would "fight for those that lost their ... real estate investments." The analysis uses two McCain quotes to support their conclusion that
Biden made it appear as if McCain was only going to work on behalf of those with "real estate investments"
However, they completely missed the most obvious source of Biden's comment - McCain's Convention speech:
I fight for Americans. I fight for you. I fight for Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan, who lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market. Bill got a temporary job after he was out of work for seven months. Sue works three jobs to help pay the bills.
The context amplifies the message of fighting for investors first - exactly the one to which Biden responded. This was the first of the three concrete examples in the speech of real Americans for whom McCain fights. It was conspicuous that he chose to talk about someone who lost real estate investments while millions of Americans are losing their primary residences. I heard it as a shout-out to the upper middle class and a slap to the working class, and Biden's comment obviously zoomed in on that part of McCain's message. How that would qualify as twisting McCain's words is beyond me, so I must call FactCheck's BS once again.
Then there was a pair of articles, on Sept. 19 and Sept. 20, criticizing Obama's Social Security ad and a related statement. Now it is true that Bush's Social Security proposal would not have risked current retirees' benefits and even the young workers would only have a small amount invested in the market by now, but FactCheck uses this to debunk a straw man. One could interpret Obama's statements as implying that Bush's 2005 plan, for which McCain voted, would have sacrificed the current elderly to the gods of Wall Street, but that is only one of many possible interpretations. Obama said no such thing explicitly - at least there is no such statement among the quotes that FactCheck provided. On the other hand, Obama's "if my opponent had his way" can fairly be interpreted as a hypothetical "if Bush/McCain had designed the system from scratch" and then the conclusions follow logically. After all, McCain has said that the pay-as-you-go nature of Social Security is "an absolute disgrace", so Obama doesn't have to rely on pure speculation as to how McCain would have created Social Security if he had been in charge.
The latest FactCheck's dubious analysis calls a foul on Obama for using McCain's own words on health care against him. To be sure, there can be a legitimate discussion about what exactly McCain meant and what constitutes a fair argument against his plan. I am hardly on board with every criticism aimed at McCain. But that is not the kind of debate FactCheck should be entering; their mission is in checking factual claims, not in deep analysis of the merits of political issues. Their arbitration in this case is premised on a very narrow interpretation of what McCain wanted to convey with his unfortunate comparison:
Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.
Of course, McCain submitted the article long before the banking crisis reached its present state, and he brought up the analogy in the context of removing state barriers to insurance (hardly an innocuous proposition, but that's beside the point). But his choice of the analogy reveals much about his general policy views and reinforces the picture of him as "fundamentally a deregulator", so it is at least arguably fair to interpret his words as a signal that his approach to health care would be based on deregulation. Is there still a leap from that to the analogy with Wall Street in Obama's ad? Perhaps, but even so, Obama only uses a loose analogy rather than "falsely claims" as FactCheck characterizes it.
FactCheck.org is run by the nonprofit Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania and doesn't have to worry about the entertainment value of its articles or keep its writings below 8th grade level, or whatever the standard is for commercial media. (I am only guessing here, don't factcheck me, please.) That's why they simply say what they have to say, without attempting to measure the intensity of lies. The other two major fact-checking outlets belong to commercial media, and they catch the readers' attention with their quick measures of lies, PolitiFact's Truth-O-Meter and Fact Checker's Pinocchios. I happen to think that such quantification of lies is a good idea because it avoids mixing the merely biased with the truly outrageous. Most of the time, they do a pretty good job, too. Sometimes, however, the subjectivity of such measurement shows its fickle face.
PolitiFact parallels FactCheck in two cases already discussed in this diary: it calls Obama's characterization of McCain's health plan "half-true" and his hypothetical about McCain's way on Social Security "false". I've already said enough about those statements. But let's look at three other stories from the last few days; you can then decide whether they hold both sides to the same standard.
John McCain:
Barack Obama got more campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac "than any other member of Congress, except for the Democratic chairmen of the committee that oversees them."
PolitiFact calls this one "mostly true" because of the contributions Obama received from Fannie and Freddie's employees. Those are people who contributed as individuals and who just happen to work for Fannie and Freddie. I would say calling those "contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac" is just as misleading as attributing contributions from gas station employees to "Big Oil". Would that be "mostly true"?
Obama:
McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm is "the architect of some of the deregulation in Washington that helped cause the mess on Wall Street."
"Half-true", says PolitiFact, because Gramm is a former adviser and not quite the architect of deregulation (he "only" had a "prominent role" in it). PolitiFact actually okays the "helped cause the mess" part, so the nuances of language (by the way, it seems far from clear that Gramm's involvement with McCain is over) are the only reasons Obama's statement is only "half-true" - i.e., more misleading than McCain's about Fannie and Freddie contributions?!
Obama:
McCain "voted to cut education funding, against accountability standards. He even proposed abolishing the Department of Education."
Verdict: "barely true". OK, I actually agree the statement is almost grotesquely one-sided, and PolitiFact's explanation how you can always find vulnerabilities in a long-serving senator's record makes a lot of sense, but cherry-picking is, to me, virtually a definition of "half-true" and I fail to see what additional falsehood downgrades this to "barely true". And I am still not sure which is the more misleading between this and the "mostly true" McCain statement above.
This diary is already very long, so I won't say much about WaPo's Fact Checker. It is a smaller operation than the other two; as far as I can tell, it consists of one person (Michael Dobbs) and perhaps some unnamed research assistant(s). (By contrast, FactCheckhas 3 directors and a staff of 8.) Consequently, Fact Checker publishes fewer articles, and probably tries to limit its attention to the most egregious claims. That's why it can be informative just to count how many jabs it takes at each side. I haven't kept any statistics, but I think, to Dobbs's credit, that he has consistently written more about McCain's statements than Obama's, which has (of course) made him a target of McCain-supporting readers' attacks. Yet, his attempts at balancing can be annoying. From what I've already written about the Social Security ad, you can imagine what I think about the three Pinocchios Dobbs awarded to Obama.
I'd like to conclude the same way I started: those fact-checking outlets provide a valuable service and their net contribution is positive by any measure. But they are not perfect, nor are they immune from the same kinds of pressures that drive most American media to manufacture balance even when the facts are clearly partisan. Please read the fact checkers, but read them critically, and keep in mind the reality of Balance Anxiety.