Politifact is biased

Background All errors are lies. Understand that PolitiFact and others in the fact checking business call any false statement a lie, whether there was an intent to deceive or not. Thus if you took a school test and scored 80%, then you lied about 20% of the questions. That meaning of lie as any falsehood has made it into the dictionary, so I don't question it here. Just important to understand the hyperbolic prose. there is some tendency to reserve the word lie for what fact checkers think is a major falsehood, but none attempt to prove an intent to deceive. Politifact has moved sharply left. PolitiFact began as a relatively impartial fact checker. “As a partnership of Congressional Quarterly and the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times) formed in 2007, the outfit won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 2008 election. The partnership dissolved shortly after when The Poynter Institute, the parent company of both outfits sold off CQ. ...The Florida journalists carried on alone, and their liberal tendencies became more obvious as the “Pants on Fire” rulings piled up on one side.” [3. http://www.humanevents.com...] Incidentally, Politifact won it's Pulitzer prize the year after the CEO of Times Publishing was appointed to the Pulitzer board. [4. http://www.americanthinker.com...] Politifact is biased, not crazy. PolitiFact is sometimes correct in their judgements. Nonetheless, they are incapable of being consistently impartial because of their ideological slant. Moreover, to maintain any pretense of impartiality, they have to find some fault with Democrats. No one would believe that there is any large class of politicians that is always truthful. All need to prove is that they are overall biased in favor of Democrats over Republicans. 1. By Washington Post Standards, PolitiFact is biasedThe Washington Post is regarded as one of the three most prestigious newspapers in the United States. They run The Fact Checker [5. http://www.washingtonpost.com...] that rates the truth of political statements much in the manner of PolitiFact. The Post is widely regarded as a liberal paper, though more balanced than the leftist Tampa Bay Times that sponsors PolitiFact. The Tampa Bay Times has not endorsed a single Republican candidate in this century for any of the three most important positions in Florida. [6. http://florida.mediatrackers.org...] The Post's ombudsman Deborah Howell wrote in 2008: " "I'll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Postas well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don't even want to be quoted by name in a memo ... opinion was still weighted toward Obama. It's not hard to see why conservatives feel disrespected.” [7. http://www.washingtonpost.com...] The Post has a mix of liberal and conservative columnists, and while they endorsed Obama in both 2008 and 2012, they have endorsed some Republican Congressional candidates running for office in Virginia. The Fact Checker rates the two Parties overall as equally likely to lie. PolitiFact rates Republicans twice as likely to lie as Democrats. [8. http://washingtonexaminer.com... ] The Fact Checker finds Democrats more likely to tell big lies than Republicans. They award Pinocchios based upon how extreme they they rate a falsehood, with four Pinocchios the worst. "... 61% of Democratic statements also received three or four Pinocchios (the least truthful categories), compared to 48% of Republican statements." That's not a major difference, but The Fact Checker thinks Democrats are more likely to tell big lies than Republicans.PolitiFact awards its "Pants on Fire" ratings to statements which it judges not just false, but ridiculous. "In the three years since the end of the partnership with CQ [Congressional Quarterly], PolitiFact has found a total of 323 conservative claims to be untrue, with 119 of those getting Pants on Fire. In the same time, it’s found 105 liberal claims to be untrue, with just 13 deemed Pants on Fire," [3 op cit] So Politifact thinks Republicans are nine times more likely to tell a big lie than Democrats, compared to The Fact Checker assessment that Republicans are about 20% less likely to tell a big lie. It's not plausible that the Washington Post has an extreme Republican bias. Politifact is therefore biased.2. Politifact uses biased interpretationsPolitifact shows its bias by interpreting what someone "really said" without proving what was intended.a. "By 2010, PolitiFact was giving False ratings to statements that were true, such as U.S. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky saying that federal workers make an average of $120,000, compared to a private sector average of $60,000. Paul used total compensation figures, which PolitiFact found misleading. The arbiters arbitrarily decided that salary alone is the valid figure, which would be news to the Internal Revenue Service." [3]b. "When a Republican Congressional candidate in Oregon named Rob Cornilles said his opponent “votes 98 percent of the time with the Democrats,” he was ready for a challenge by PolitiFact Oregon, which is run by the Portland Oregonian. Cornilles’ source for the figure was the Oregonian’s own “Your Government” website, which tracks floor votes. Nevertheless, ... PolitiFact Oregon reporter Janie Har managed to find the claim just Half True, because “voting with your party 98 percent of the time doesn’t mean you necessarily voted against the other party.” The claim was 100% true, the "fact checker" decided that is was supposed to imply something other than claimed.c. PolitiFact ruled that Republican references to President Obama initial sequence of foreign policy speeches as a "apology tour" were completely false because a formal state apology require an explicit expressed statement of apology. [9. http://www.politifact.com...]. Politifact doesn't question that the President implicitly apologized by renouncing past policies and promising to change to new policies that avoided the errors of the past. PolitiFact did not quote any Republican as claiming that Obama made formal state apologies, so PolitiFact had to assume that was what was intended, and that therefore an ordinary informal apology did not count. Politifact might have ruled it half true, an informal apology but not an official state apology, but they instead decided that an informal apology is no apology at all.d. "The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare “represents a gross cost to the federal government of $1,762 billion,” or $1.76 trillion, over the next decade, and that the costs will grow over time. Yet PolitiFact still managed to dismiss that bedrock number as something to be dismissed. In critiquing an advertisement that attacked the program’s costs, PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote that “the $1.76 trillion number itself is extreme cherry-picking. It doesn’t account for the law’s tax increases, spending cuts or other cost-saving measures.” On paper, the Obama administration projects that new taxes and Medicare cuts will offset the new program’s costs for a while. But that doesn’t change the cost of “up to $2 trillion.” That would make the statement True, of course. Incidentally, the CBO’s 10-year cost figures will be closer to $3 trillion in a few years, if current forecasts prove accurate." [3]--Comparison to The Fact Checker is enough by itself to establish the bias of PolitiFact. I have given examples to show how that bias affects their reporting.