Top 10 Facts About Politifact’s Lie
Politifact yesterday earned itself a “Pants on Fire” award for declaring the statement that “Republicans voted to end Medicare” is the Lie of the Year. It isn’t. Here’s why.
So much has been written on Politfact’s decision to enter into the world of fake balance and opinion-posing-as-fact journalism. As a publisher and as a journalist, I applaud the words of Steve Bennen, Steve Bennen again, Dave Weigel, Matt Yglesias, Jamison Foser,  Igor Volsky, Paul Krugman, John Hudson, Digby, Jonathan Chait, Jamelle Bouie, Brian Beutler, and Greg Sargent.
Read all their thoughts, if you haven’t already.
Here’s a roundup. The top 10 facts about Politfact’s Lie:
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Matt Yglesias:
“House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has spent the better part of this month running a ballot-stuffing campaign to get Politifact to label Democratic claims that he wants to “end Medicare” labeled as their “lie of the year” and today he succeeded as Politifact be clowns itself.” -
Jamison Foser:
“This is nonsensical hair-splitting. Medicare isn’t a broad concept; it’s a specific, concrete program. Ending it “as we know it” is ending it. Otherwise, ending it would require ending it as we don’t know it, which would be a neat trick.” -
Jamison Foser:
“False balance has the effect of a thumb on the scale in favor of the less meritorious position. Treating a falsehood and the truth as though they are equivalent gives lies — and the people who tell them — an advantage in the marketplace of ideas. It encourages politicians who lie to continue to lie, and those who tell the truth to start lying.” -
Brian Beutler:
“The reaction from Republicans has been muted so far — a sign, perhaps, that they don’t want to reopen this old wound. But back in their districts, when constituents grill them, Republicans will now have a compelling citation. It just happens to be a sham.” -
Steve Bennen:
“Medicare is a single-payer health care system offering guaranteed benefits to seniors. The House Republican budget plan intended to privatize the existing system and replace it with something very different — a voucher scheme. It would still be called ‘Medicare,’ but it wouldn’t be Medicare.It seems foolish to have to parse the meaning of the word ‘end,’ but if there’s a program, and it’s replaced with a different program, proponents brought an end to the original program. That’s what the verb means. I’ve been trying to think of the best analogy for this. How about this one: imagine someone owns a Ferrari. It’s expensive and drives beautifully, and the owner desperately wants to keep his car intact. Now imagine I took the car away, removed the metallic badge off the trunk that says ‘Ferrari,’ I stuck it on a golf cart, and I handed the owner the keys.“’Where’s my Ferrari?’ the owner would ask.“’It’s right here,’ I’d respond. ‘This has four wheels, a steering wheel, and pedals, and it says ‘Ferrari’ right there on the back.'”By PolitiFact’s reasoning, I haven’t actually replaced the car — and if you disagree, you’re a pants-on-fire liar.” -
Greg Sargent:
“I think there’s still a way of persuading Politifact that they erred. Here’s why: Even if you agree with PolitiFact that the GOP plan wouldn’t have “ended†Medicare, the Dem claim that this is the case still can’t be shown to be a “lie.†That’s because this disagreement ultimately comes down to differing interpretations of known facts — and not to a difference over the facts themselves.” -
Jonathan Chait:
“Does the Republican plan indeed end Medicare? I would argue yes. But it’s obviously a question of interpretation, not fact. And the whole problem with Politifact’s “Lie of the Year†is that it doesn’t grasp this distinction. Politifact doesn’t even seem to understand the criteria for judging whether a claim is a question of opinion or a question of fact, let alone whether it is true.” -
Paul Krugman:
“The answer is, of course, obvious: the people at Politifact are terrified of being considered partisan if they acknowledge the clear fact that there’s a lot more lying on one side of the political divide than on the other. So they’ve bent over backwards to appear ‘balanced’ — and in the process made themselves useless and irrelevant.” -
Greg Sargent via Twitter :
“If I bought Politifact and converted it into a direct mail enterprise, and you said I ended Politifact, you would be Liar of the Year.†- Finally, many who have written about this Politifact scandal have cited Politifact’s own reader poll — the one that was ballot-box stuffed by Paul Ryan — and suggested that it was from those top three lies — “elected,” as it were, by the general public, from which Politifact chose their “winner.”Politifact’s editor Bill Adair at 12:01 am on December 20 published “How we chose the 2011 Lie of the Year,” and in the second paragraph from the top clearly states, “How we chose the 2011 Lie of the Year.”Then, Adair spends the majority of the rest of the column detailing the readers’ votes process and results, and strongly suggests — really, leads readers to believe — Politifact chose the “winner” from the readers’ list, not from their total list of finalists.
But now, Adair is walking back that obvious suggestion, and claiming the “winner” came from the finalists list.
Really?
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GOP Governor Ron DeSantis often talks about what he calls “the free state of Florida” but Florida Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody has declared the Sunshine State’s public schools, including its libraries, do not exist to promote the free exchange of ideas, but rather, to “convey the government’s message.”
In a legal brief, the State of Florida argues it has a First Amendment right to remove LGBTQ books, or any book, from public schools and libraries, USA Today’s Tallahassee Democrat reports.
“It’s a contention that First Amendment experts and advocates call extreme and chilling. But the state maintains the books on school shelves represent protected government speech. Public school libraries are ‘a forum for government speech,’ it says, not a ‘forum for free expression.'”
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“Public-school systems, including their libraries, convey the government’s message,” Attorney General Moody (photo) also wrote in the legal brief.
“Like the selection of monuments,,” Moody writes, quoting a legal case: “the government speaks through its selection of which books to put on the shelves and which books to exclude.”
She also argues that the “purpose” of public school libraries “is to support the government’s educational mission.”
Moody also cites the very narrow recent anti-LGBTQ Supreme Court ruling in 303 Creative that was riddled with falsehoods.
Florida’s First Amendment stance has experts calling the State’s claims “authoritarianism.”
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“There’s considerable irony in that those who seek to limit access to books in school libraries often say they’re fighting for parental rights,” Ken Paulson, the director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told the Tallahassee Democrat. “If government speech determines what books can be in the library, the government is essentially saying your children can only see the ideas that the government has approved.”
“That’s not parental rights,” he added. “That’s authoritarianism.”
NYU professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the well-known scholar on fascism and authoritarian leaders, called it “straight-up authoritarianism.”
U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz is urging his fellow Florida Republicans to wait to “render judgment” on Christian Ziegler, the Trump-endorsed state Republican Party chairman accused of rape by a woman he and his wife allegedly had a consensual sexual relationship with.
“Given my experience I tend to wait for the facts to come out before rendering judgment,” Gaetz told Florida Politics. The far-right Florida GOP lawmaker has faced both DOJ and House Ethics Committee investigations into a variety of possible crimes, among them, alleged sex trafficking, alleged sex with an under-aged girl, illicit drug use, and public corruption.
Sarasota police are reportedly investigating Florida GOP chair Christian Ziegler after a woman he has known for two decades accused him of rape. Christian’s wife, Bridget Ziegler, told police she and her husband had a consensual sexual encounter with the woman who is now his accuser.
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“Christian Ziegler is also alleged to have secretly videotaped the sexual encounters between the couple and the woman, sources said,” the nonpartisan Florida Center for Government Accountability reported last week.
Bridget Ziegler is an elected member of the Sarasota County School Board and a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, which is a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated extremist group that opposes LGBTQ equality and has pushed for book bans. “Although Bridget Ziegler has officially left Moms for Liberty, she also still has ties to the group, having been a featured speaker at their national summit. She also helped develop DeSantis’ ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill that Moms for Liberty publicly advocated in favor of,” the SPLC noted in its report on the group.
“A search warrant shows Sarasota Police have footage of Ziegler showing up at the accuser’s apartment, where she told police he came in and forced her to have sex with him,” Florida Politics reports. “Christian Ziegler to date has rebuffed calls for his resignation, including by Florida Republican leaders including Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida Senate President Kathleen Passidomo and Florida House Speaker Paul Renner.”
Christian Ziegler on Saturday sent an email to Florida Republican Party members refusing to resign. “We have a country to save and I am not going to let false allegations of a crime put that mission on the bench as I wait for this process to wrap up,” he wrote, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
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On Thursday, Moms for Liberty posted then removed a statement supporting its co-founder, Bridget Ziegler. It later reposted the statement.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Moms for Liberty and its nationwide chapters combat what they consider the ‘woke indoctrination’ of children by advocating for book bans in school libraries and endorsing candidates for public office that align with the group’s views. They also use their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials, advocate for the abolition of the Department of Education, advance a conspiracy propaganda, and spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.”
The DOJ reportedly told Gaetz’s attorneys earlier this year he would not be prosecuted, but the House Ethics Committee reopened its investigation. Gaetz has denied all accusations.
A federal judge peevishly shot down Rudy Giuliani’s last-ditch effort to avoid a jury trial in a libel suit brought by a mother-daughter pair of Georgia poll workers.
District judge Beryl Howell denied the former Donald Trump lawyer’s request by repeatedly noting that his attorney had missed deadlines in the case filed by Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, and she rejected his argument that mistakes by the pair’s counsel justified a shift from a jury trial to a bench trial.
JUST IN: Sunday night opinion from Judge Beryl Howell, turning down Rudy Giuliani’s belated bid to escape a jury trial on damage in libel suit brought by GA pollworkers. Many brutal shots. She calls one Giuliani argument ‘simply nonsense.’ https://t.co/vN4pI8H2tO
— Josh Gerstein (@joshgerstein) December 4, 2023
“This is simply nonsense,” Howell wrote in a footnote to her order. “Giuliani’s counsel’s two-sentence email cited three out-of-circuit, non-binding cases, dated between thirty and nearly fifty years ago, without any express statement that Giuliani planned to seek a bench trial or that he would do so in reliance on this cited authority.”
Howell found Giuliani liable for defamation in a default judgment August and has ordered him to pay tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees for the two women, and she fined him more than $100,000 in September after he failed to comply.
The jury trial will determine Giuliani’s penalty for falsely claiming Freeman and Moss had engaged in fraudulent activities following the 2020 election, which he claimed had cost Donald Trump re-election and led to a deluge of violent threats toward the two women.
Giuliani is among 19 defendants, including Trump, who have been charged in a racketeering case in Fulton County related to efforts to overturn the ex-president’s election loss.
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