PolitiFact: Well, here we go again

By Scott Moore of Portland, Oregon. Scott is the Communications Director for Our Oregon and was a political reporter and news editor for the Portland Mercury. Previously, he contributed "Trivial Pursuit: That's Some Har-ible Reporting"

Just a day after having to do an embarrassing about face on a truly bizarre ruling, PolitiFact Oregon is back with a new entry that’s even more troubling.

Today’s PolitiFact Oregon criticizes the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for saying that “Rob Cornilles supports privatizing Medicare.” Actually, what the DCCC said was that Cornilles supports “turning over some of Medicare to private insurance companies”. In a partially rephrased Tweet, the DCCC asked “Did you know Cornilles said he'd support turning parts of Medicare over to private insurance companies?”

Reporter Janie Har and PolitiFact Oregon ruled these statements “Mostly False.” But in order to do so, they had to utterly conflate the statements to absurd levels, claiming that Democrats said Cornilles wants to turn Medicare entirely over to private companies and cut government out.

The fact is, Cornilles wants to open Medicare to private insurance companies in order to increase competition with the public program. By its very definition, turning over some of Medicare to private insurance companies IS increasing the privatization at the program. This should be obvious to any reasonable observer.

But Har made up a new argument -- that Democrats are contending that Cornilles wants to completely remove government from Medicare, and then ruled it “Mostly False.” The real controversy between the campaigns centers on Cornilles' claim that he is strongly against privatization while being in favor of proposals that do just that. PolitiFact’s problem is their unwillingness to focus on the real issues of the campaign and then actually fact-check them. Of course, it’s hard to be an objective referee for a fight you are participating in, which seems to be the main problem with the Oregonian these days.

Seriously, what is going on over there at PolitiFact Oregon? This isn’t fact checking; it’s weird semantics and word games to the benefit of the Cornilles campaign. And coming literally a day after the embarrassing reversal they had to make on another strange ruling, you’d think Har and her editors would be more vigilant about checking actual facts.

It’s not Oregon-specific, but New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has joined the chorus of voices pointing out the increasing bizarreness of PolitiFact:

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage. In the case of Obama’s job statement, Politifact first called it only half true, then upgraded that to mostly true, not because Obama said anything factually incorrect, but because Politifact perceived Obama as trying to imply that he was responsible for the gains.