If you take the history of the Minnesota Poll as any indication, yesterday’s numbers on the Marriage Amendment might be encouraging for amendment supporters:

The increasingly costly and bitter fight over a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage is a statistical dead heat, according to a new Star Tribune Minnesota Poll.

Six weeks before Election Day, slightly more Minnesotans favor the amendment than oppose it, but that support also falls just short of the 50 percent needed to pass the measure.

Wow.  That sounds close!

But as always with these polls, you have to check the fine print.  And the “Minnesota Poll” buries its fine print in a link well down the page; you don’t ever actually find it in the story itself.  And it contains the partisan breakdown (with emphasis added):

The self-identified party affiliation of the random sample is: 41 percent Democrat, 28 percent Republican and 31 percent independent or other.

That’s right – to get this virtual tie, the Strib, in a state that just went through photo-finish elections for Governor and Senator, and has been on the razor’s edge of absolute equality between parties for most of a decade, sampled three Democrats for every two Republicans to get to a tie.

If you believe – as I do – that the “Minnesota Poll” is first and foremost a DFL propaganda tool, intended largely to create a ‘bandwagon effect” to suppress conservative turnout (and we’ll come back to that), then this is good news; the Marriage Amendment is likely doing better  than the poll is showing.

What it does mean, though, is that they are working to build a narrative; that the battle over gay marriage is much more closely-fought than it is.

And the narrative’s players are already on board with this poll.  The Strib duly interviews Richard Carlbom, the former Dayton staffer who is leading the anti-Amendment

Actually, here’s my bet; the November 4 paper will show a “surge of support” that turns out to be much larger than any that actually materializes at the polls.

More At Noon.

UPDATE:  I wrote this piece on Sunday.  Monday morning, all of the local newscasts duly led with “both ballot initiatives are tied!”.

If you’re trying to find a construction job in Minnesota, you can get a job putting siding on the DFL’s narrative.

UPDATE 2:  Professor David Schultz at Hamline University – no friend of conservatism, he – did something I more or less planned to do on Wednesday; re-ran the numbers with a more realistic partisan breakdown:

Why is the partisan adjustment important? The poll suggests significant partisan polarization for both amendments, with 73% of DFLers opposing the marriage amendment and 71% of GOPers supporting. Similar partisan cleavages also exist with the Elections Amendment. If this is true, take the marriage Amendment support at 49% and opposition at 47%. If DFLers are overpolled by 3% and GOP underpolled by 6%, and if about 3/4 of each party votes in a partisan way, I would subtract about 2.25% from opposition (3% x .75) and add 4.5% to support (6% x .75) and the new numbers are 53.5% in support and 44.75% against. This is beyond margin or error.

If one applies the correction to the Elections Amendment there is about an 80% DFL opposition to it and a similar 80% GOP support for it. Then the polls suggest approximately 56.8% support it and 41.6% oppose.

Which brings us very nearly back to the 3:2 margin  for the Voter ID amendment, and the tight but solid lead for the Marriage Amendment that every other poll – the reputable ones, anyway – have found.

The grandfather – great-grandfather? – of the “Fact-Check” industry, “60 Minutes whitewashes for Obama:

Tonight, CBS aired a 60 Minutes interview with President Obama. But curiously enough, the news magazine show did not air a clip of Obama admitting to interviewer Steve Kroft that some of his campaign ads contain mistakes and that some even “go overboard.”

Anyone remember when “60 Minutes” was the “gold standard of journalism?”

I know – that never really meant anything.

But anyone who doubts that “60 Minutes” is anything but a geriatric propaganda mill for the left has been asleep for half a generation.

…that the only network to actually try to vet the President, and to throw him a pitch with even the eeeeeensiest bit of heat on it…

…is Univision?

Have you noticed something?

No “Minnesota Poll” yet this cycle.  Ditto the Humprey Institute.

Usually by this point in an election cycle, they’ve run a poll showing the Republican candidate down by some absurd amount that turns out to be many times greater than the eventual margin of victory (or defeat) for the DFLer.

Now, I’ve been writing about the HHH and Strib “Minnesota” polls for quite some time.  I noted that since 1988, the Strib Minnesota Poll has consistently shorted Republicans by a consistently greater margin than Democrats in their pre-election polls – and that the discrepancy is even greater in elections that end up being closest.  I noted that the HHH poll is even worse – but that in polls where the DFLer appears to be in no danger, their polls end up being more accurate.

It is my contention that the Strib and the Humphrey Institute are allied – at least at the executive level – with the DFL, and use their polls to further the DFL’s ends; everyone involved is certainly aware of the “Bandwagon Effect” – the phenomenon by which voters who believe their candidates have no chance of victory will stay home.

So we’ve seen no “Minnesota” poll so far this cycle; Amy Klobuchar – perhaps the greatest beneficiary of media bias in the history of Minnesota politics, as the daughter of a former Strib columnist – seems to be in no great danger, so the polls say, from Kurt Bills (not to say I won’t do everything I can, personally, to fix that).  I’ll bet dimes to dollars the Strib polls wind up pretty darn close to the election totals, in fact!

———-

But the “Bandwagon” effect is going nationwide; Minnesota in 2008 and 2010 showed that it can keep juuuuuuuuust enough people home, if it’s relentless enough, to tip a close election.

And so you see the mainstream media already declaring the election over, based entirely on polling that is entirely based on the Democrats getting turnout they didn’t even get in 2008.

It is, in fact, the flip side of the “Low Information Voter” strategy they’ve run on their own side – convincing the ill-informed, the querulous and the not-bright that there’s a “war on women” and Obama “stands with the 99%” and “the economy was Bush’s fault but it’s almost back, any day now”; trying to convince people, especially independents, who might be sick to death of Obama and possibly thinking of voting GOP that it’s all hopeless and they should stay home.

Think about it.  Why else would they run polls that are transparently false?  That rely on assumptions that probably didn’t even occur during the post-Watergate election in 1976, much less 2008, much less today?

Because only the high-information voters either dig into the partisan breakdowns (or read the bloggers who do), and the record in Minnesota shows there are just enough incurious, too-busy, ill-informed, and just plain un-bright people to sway the matter if it’s close enough.

The media at all levels – bald-faced cheerleaders like the LATimes and the Strib and the supposedly-ethical ones like NPR alike – are going to be beating the “it’s over” drum constantly ’til the election.

The well-informed people know it’s baked wind.

But it’s not aimed at them.

The “reporting” by “Mother Jones” on Mitt Romney’s “47%” remark is looking, more and more, to be an invocation of the McKay Corolllary (“Any time the liberal media (to say nothing of leftyblogs) “reports” on putative conservative misdeeds, they should be distrusted but verified.  And then, to an almost-mathemetical standard of invariably, distrusted some more.”) to Berg’s Seventh Law (“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”)

When originally presented by David Corn of Mother Jones, there was no disclosure that part of Mitt Romney’s controversial answer about 47% of voters was missing from the tape.

Since only an edited version originally was presented, there was no way to know if something was missing. After all, it was edited, so of course something was missing by definition.

Romney has admitted that the answer on the video, which he didn’t remember except for the video, was “inelegant.” That’s why Romney asked for the full audio/video to be released.

Corn reacted vigorously to Romney’s suggestion that he only provided “snippets,” and then Corn released what purported to be the complete audio/video in two parts. The “complete” version was consistent with the original edited audio/video. Again, there was no disclosure by Corn that there might be something missing. (Corn added an “update” after my original story ran.”

To the contrary, Corn went out of his way to assert that there was no “filtering” and that the full audio/video had been released. As Corn explained to Howard Kurtz of The Daily Beast (emphasis mine):

Is the liberal media making too much of the Romney video? “It feeds into a narrative he’s been fighting all along, that he’s a 1 percenter, not one of us, doesn’t really understand it,” Corn says. And since these are the candidate’s own words, “there’s no filter here whatsoever, there’s no out-of-context argument to be made.”

But there was a filter. As reported in my prior post, Corn has admitted that 1-2 minutes of audio/video are missing. That missing audio/video includes part of Romney’s controversial answer.

Maybe even Berg’s Seventh Law and its McKay Corollary, hitherto nearly airtight, is obsolete and needs strenghening?  Maybe upgrade to the “Sixty-First-Minute Law of Media Bias“; any time the mainstream (to say nothing of overtly liberal) media presents supposedly damaging information about conservatives, they should presumed guilty of dishonest editing or outright manufacturing of evidence until proven innocent”.

When every airport waiting lounge television dial was welded to the CNN channel, I didn’t object because I don’t watch airport television.

But when my Hyundai dealer does it while my car is in for service . . . .

The Legal Insurrection blog goes over the Boston Glob’s defense of Elizabeth Warren’s “Native American” claims…

…which, by the way, inadvertently destroys those claims.

Mark Dayton gave a speech the other day.

John Gilmore at MN Conservatives heard the audio.

And we’ll get to that.  But first, the review:

Gov. Dayton’s first two years have been abysmal. What was it he wanted to do as governor anyway? Wouldn’t a house and senate controlled by republicans offer him the perfect opportunity to lead? To show compromise? To get things done as these political types like to pretend they can? If one was a real leader instead of a lost soul looking for external housing to shore up the inner, yes. But a leader is not who Gov. Dayton is and it is not who he will be in the coming two years, either.

John’s a good friend of this blog.  But I’m not sure whether he’s overestimating Dayton, or underestimating him.

On the one hand, the entire body of evidence that Mark Dayton has ever been that kind of politician is…the body of Mark Dayton’s spoken record claiming it.

On the other hand?  Mark Dayton, his beliefs, his “ideas” and “ideals” and “policy initiatives” – are about as relevant as mine are to the job – because Mark Dayton isn’t really the governor.  Indeed, when they paint Mark Dayton’s official gubernatorial portrait – hopefully in two years – it should look a little like this:

It’s an intercom speaker.  Dayton occupies a seat with the sole mission of repeating, like that intercom speaker, what Alita Messinger and Elliot Seid and Javier Morillo and Tom Dooher to say.

And when he doesn’t have electric cables tied to him, figuratively, to carry their messages, he may as well be that intercom speaker; he’s about as fluent a public speaker as a disconnected intercom.

Back to Gilmore:

Last week the Governor, sounding like a vaguely fascist mandarin, simply insisted without any intellectual depth or sustained engagement that taxes must increase because of his perceived need of all that government must do. His idea of the size & scope of government is not open to discussion. There is no opting out from it because he knows best. What’s that called again?

He made his statement at what, until just yesterday, I had been led to believe was simply a speech reported on by the press. Instead, as MinnPost reported the day before (as did the Pioneer Press), it was a University Lecture. MinnPost polished the knob by saying that the title “university lecturer” could be added to Mark Dayton’s resume. No, really.

Yet what shocked is that this was a lecture grandly titled: “Minnesota’s Future: Challenges and Opportunities” given to the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs Policy Fellows (there’s more intellectual diversity among supporters of Ron Paul by orders of magnitude; the Fellows are the stuff of David Mamet’s nightmares). This was a liberal/progressive/left confab with Little Lord Fauntleroy in attendance.

Now, listening to Mark Dayton speak is, to this speech teacher’s kid, a singularly masochistic thought.  The guy has the diction of Michael Stipe circa 1984.  He’s not a monotone – he’s got two or three tones, really.

And that’s just style points:

I listened to the audio of the Governor’s 25 minute speech. It is appallingly bad. To learn only after the fact that it was a university lecture proper for a set of fellows was mind boggling. He spoke from notes as best from what I could tell. Meandering, at times pointless, at others a non-sequitur minefield, his speech revealed that there is serious trouble with our Chief Executive.

Here’s the problem:

But wait there’s more! The event was closed to the public.

Pardon? Is this possible? Is Common Cause Minnesota on it? From whence shall our help come? Surely the event was taped and surely I will get my hands on it. Try making it private. The entire speech and question and answer session should be posted on the Humphrey School’s website without delay. This event was not a private function.

Huh.  Odd, that.

Where are Common Cause?  The ACLU?  All the usual watchdogs?  MPR’s “Poligraph?”

But here’s the real question:

Why would the press acquiesce in this? Access? Or just the usual hot dish politics? Both?

That’s easy.  For some of the media, it’s access.

For others, it’s that they see themselves as the DFL’s Praetorian Guard.

Remember – after over a decade of hearing about the Governor’s history of alcohol abuse and treatment, of mental illness and concomitant prescriptions for various psychotropic medication, the sum total of the Twin Cities mainstream media’s coverage of Candidate Dayton’s chemical and psychological history was one, single, solitary piece in the Strib by Rachel Stassen-Berger, in January 2010 – roughly nine months before anyone outside the wonk class gave a crap about the election.

Our Governor’s visual performance at this public event is what is being deliberately withheld from the public. What an odd thing to say about Minnesota politics.

Nothing odd about it.

Nothing new, either.

It’s been one gaffe after another for The One this past week.

But you’d never know it from the media.

…but I wonder if any of the major-media “fact check” operations are going to go the new ad from “Alida Buys The Legislature” “A “Better” Legislature” that claims…:

• The Republicans shut down the state government (it was Dayton)
• Republicans protected tax breaks for the wealthy (it was for everyone)
• The GOP “passed a law that raised taxes for 95% of homeowners” (property taxes are local government’s job, and the 95% number reeks of fakeness)
• The GOP blocked a job bill (Er, no – they blocked a Dayton bonding proposal that was nothing but a bone for the public employee’s unions that we couldn’t pay for).

Here’s a job for Minnesota’s “professional fact-checkers”; do a story on Alida Messinger’s entire attack-PR operation.

No, I’m not holding my breath either.

Mitt Romney didn’t actually say “I Can Relate To Black People, My Ancestors Once Owned Slaves”, didn’t get his slogan from the KKK, and isn’t promising to abolish MLK day.

Hard to tell exactly who these meme’s be aimed at: the lower-information end of the Afro-American voter spectrum, or the more-bigoted college-educated white liberals.

It’s September 10.  Not November.

But the media – basking in the afterglow of an Obama bounce they bent over backwards to manufacture – doesn’t want you, conservative reader, to think that.

It’s “Operation Demoralize” [1], the coastal mainstream media’s effort as part of its duty as the Democrat party’s Praetorian Guard, to try to demonize and demoralize Conservatives and Republicans from hitting the streets, opening their wallets, and above all voting in November.

The Democrats are well aware of the research showing the effects of “The Bandwagon Effect“; put briefly, “if you tell people long and loudly enough that their candidates have no chance, they’ll start to believe it.  Like an abusive spouse telling a partner “you’re ugly and nobody but me will ever love you, so don’t bother trying”, it’s a way to browbeat people out of voting.

And you can expect a lot of it.

Prediction:  Expect a Star/Tribune “Minnesota Poll” any day showing Obama, A-Klo and the DFL legislative caucuses with improbably large leads.  It’s their MO, never moreso than with the tight races.  And the Bandwagon Effect, I maintain  with little fear of factual contradiction, is why.

[1] No, it’s probably not a real name, and it’s possible there is no actual collusion among mainstream media outlets.  Anything’s possible.

Call me a cynic, but for me, the prototype of all of the “fact-checking” columns in today’s mainstream media was in this piece here:

With the world breathing a collective sigh of relief following the violence-free passage into the year 2000, an international coalition of terrorists issued a reminder Monday that the new millennium does not actually begin until Jan. 1, 2001. “Technically speaking, we are now in the last year of the 20th century,” said Mahmoud al-Habib, a spokesperson for the terrorist organization Hamas. “Since there was no year zero, next New Year’s Eve is the real time to detonate bombs in Times Square and blow commercial airliners out of the sky.” Speaking from a secret bunker in the Kashmir hills, Osama bin Laden agreed. “We were all set to blow up the Eiffel Tower,” bin Laden said, “when one of my suicide bombers pointed out that it should actually be done next Jan. 1, not this one. I suppose we’ll just have to wait.”

Why, of course it’s the Onion.   But it spells out the model for so many “fact-checkers” in the industry; a relentless focus on the finding “gotchas”.

The piece spells out a key pitfall in the whole idea of “Fact-Checking” the news; it’s entirely possible to be right about “facts” and still miss, or even detract from, the truth.  In the example above?  It was, perhaps, a fact that the millennium didn’t begin until 2001, but that missed the point for the fictional terrorists (check the date-stamp on that piece), for whose purposes “crowds on the street” were more the issue than “having the right date”.

And that’s even when the “fact-checker” isn’t being cynical and exploiting the “fact-check” system to serve as a political editorial.

Takeaway:  It’s possible for facts to be true and still divert the audience from a larger, more important truth.

Takeaway Question: If a fact (“The Millennium begins in 2001!”) diverts the user from a larger truth (2000 is when all those crowds were out on the street, tempting the terrorists of the day), does it advance or divert from the story?

The answer, of course, is a question; “Is your story about Calendar Trivia, or Terrorism?”

Indictment

Last week, Jon Cassidy at Human Events wrote as clear an indictment of the “Fact-Checking” system, or at least of as I’ve seen.

And that indictment ran down not only the top-line biases built into “Politifact”, the national über-fact-check organization…

In 2007 [when Politifact was still affiliated with Congressional Quarterly], PolitiFact was checking numbers thrown around in debates, such as whether 300,000 babies annually are born deformed (False: it’s 40,000), or whether Social Security “is solid through about 2040 without any changes whatsoever” (True, in PolitiFact’s view: the system’s not going broke until 2041).

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.

By 2012, it was “fact-checking” extremely general statements of personal experience like this one by Paul’s father, Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and GOP presidential candidate: “I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early ’60s before we had any government” involvement in health care. “It worked rather well, and there was nobody out in the street suffering with no medical care. But Medicare and Medicaid came in and it just expanded.”

Fact-checker Louis Jacobson tried to disprove Ron Paul’s statement, but eventually admitted his limits. It’s the only example we’ve seen of PolitiFact admitting that the truth was too complex or beyond the scope of the Truth-O-Meter treatment.

…as well as the absurdities of its performance once you get into the weeds with specific stories:

If a conservative advocacy group runs an ad saying Obamacare could cost “up to $2 trillion,” an honest fact-checker would look up the government’s own estimate and see that, indeed, the Congressional Budget Office puts the cost at $1.76 trillion for just the first few years…

…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.

Read the whole article.  And remember it next time someone waves “Politifact” in your face.

Takeaway:  Journalists – really, journalism itself – depend on having some sort of trust from their consumers.  It starts with the little things – did they get the who, what, when, where, why and how correct – and in the bigger things, like “not slanting their coverage to suit some other agenda”.   See Dan Rather.

Meanwhile, Here At Home

I’ve always had a fair amount of regard for MPR News, which is perhaps counterintuitive for a Minnesota Conservative.  While a very close, and admittedly very partisan, listen reveals the odd bit of bias among the reporters and their editorial process, I think it’s fair to say that MPR News makes a game effort at playing the news straight (that is, of course, as distinct from MPR’s and “American Public Media’s” non-news programming, which is designed to afflict the comfortable and comfort the upper-middle-class liberal).

But I have had some questions about MPR News’ “Poligraph” feature this past week (and, let’s be honest, for years).  While I think Catherine Richert does a broadly acceptable job of balancing her “fact-checking”, I’ve taken a closer look at some of her pieces this week.  And I wrote her to ask some quesitons, which led to an interesting interchange between her and her boss, Mike Mulcahy and I.

Richert (as she herself noted in the comment section yesterday) responded, pointing out “Polograph’s” “about” section (which I also posted yesterday), and adding:

As you’ve probably noticed, we check one Democrat and one Republican every week, and occasionally a member of the IP. Once in a while, we switch the schedule up and check two members of the same party in one week. When that happens, we check two members of the other party the following week.

That was good to learn, actually.

 Both the Hernandez and Klobuchar claims from last week meet several of our criteria. Both were “checkable” statements, both were made in debates, which are significant news events, and both are central to major campaign issues.

And that was even better to learn.

And next, we get to the beef:

 Hernandez is adamantly opposed to the bank bailout, which highlights the GOP’s broader campaign theme that government has become too intrusive.

That’s correct.  We talked about this on Tuesday.  I called the fact-check “Obtuse” because while Tony wasn’t literally to-a-point accurate (the bailout didn’t cause unemployment all by itself), he spoke to a larger point that even Richert’s sources agreed with – that government intervention is fouling up the economy.

Question:  As in the “Millennium” example: does analyzing Hernandez’ ad-lib as an absolutely literal statement (“did the bailout literally cause our unemployment rate?”) rather than a general statement of economic principle (“did bailouts harm or help the economy”) or political princple (“are bailouts the right thing to do?”) bring us closer to, or farther from, the larger truth?  That the results of Obama’s (and Bush’s) interventions in the economy are, even if you’re completely non-partisan, mixed at best?

And Klobuchar has made bipartisanship a cornerstone of her political persona; her claim about how many bills she has sponsored with Republicans underscores that part of her campaign message.

And as I pointed out on Wednesday, that’s true in and of itself; it showed Klobuchar’s “bipartisanship” – according to one measure, at least.  It proved that the numbers gave to support her own assertion were in fact correct.  So if your question was “does Amy Klobuchar give out correct numbers to prove her assertions”, she passed with flying colors!

But if your question was “Is Klobuchar really bipartisan?”, there was much more to it; her voting record is 94% Democrat (as Richert noted), and in the leftmost third of the Democrat caucus; put another way, she’s the 17th most-liberal Senator out of 100.

Question:  Which is the more important question, if the goal of ones’ fact-checking is to inform people about the upcoming election: “Does Amy give out valid numbers?”, or “Is Amy’s contention that she’s bi-partisan accurate?”

I’d maintain that while the latter question’s answers are dependent to some extent on one’s political perspective, that that question is the real story.

As I noted yesterday, my most important question – after learning and noting their “ping-pong” format of hitting a statement by both major parties every week, more or less – is “how does a statement get picked for analysis?”  I noted a couple of Betty McCollum statements – one on her views of the Ryan budget, one on the funding for the Stillwater bridge project.  Let’s stick to the former for right now.  It’d seem this fits Richert’s description of Poligraph’s criteria;  it’s “checkable” (I checked it!), it took place at a significant news event (the same debate that Hernandez’ statements came from), and it’s a central part of her campaign (raise taxes, oppose the Ryan budget).

So I asked – why did MPR pick, as the “Democrat” question in the weeks’ ping-pong of statements from both parties, Klobuchar’s self-serving but accurate statement about her bipartisanship, as opposed to McCollum’s completely fact-free statement about the Ryan Budget?

Because that speaks to my second question, way up above – about how a “fact-checker” whose integrity isn’t trusted is just barking in the wind.

Now, it’s entirely possible that MPR News’ management doesn’t see the incongruity; I’ll cop to the fact that my perspective is one that it finely tuned to find bias, and that fine-tuning sometimes warps the perspective.  All that’s a given.

But I thought it was a legitimate question:  for the single, sole, weekly “fact-check” of a Democrat, by what rationale was a self-serving innocuity like Klobuchar’s statement selected (and a very tightly-focused validation given)) over an out-and-out untruth like McCollum’s?

Because given…:

• the growing, documented tendency of “journalistic” “fact-checking” organizations like Politifact, Factcheck and Snopes to operate from a standpoint of political bias, and…
• the fact that we are in an election where peoples’ votes are going to be swayed by the impressions they get from the news, and the “Journalism 101”-level fact that things like ledes and “MISLEADING” graphics tend to be remembered more than the deep-down details about a story, and that…
• looking at both of the stories from this week’s selection of “Facts” checked at that level would lead one to think “Tony Hernandez lied about the bailout, Amy Klobuchar told the truth about being bipartisan, and there’s apparently no news about Betty McCollum”…
• …while allowing that I’m looking at one week’s worth of Poligraph stories in a near vacuum, focusing on a couple of debates and statements of particular importance to me.   I’ll stipulate that that could very well skew my own perception.  I’m more than willing to be set straight on this.  I say that as a matter of intellectual honesty, not because I necessarily believe I’m wrong.

Question:  Did Poligraph’s stories about Hernandez or Klobuchar bring the news consumer closer to the real story – the candidates’ views on the economy and their “bipartisanship”?  Or did they answer the questions by asking the wrong questions, thus missing the forest for the trees? Or did they, like the “Terrorists” “fact-checking” at the top of the post, obscure rather than clarify the issue for someone seeking the truth?

Folllow-up question:  Does MPR’s choice of “facts’ to “check” make you trust their judgment and perspective on covering political news more, or less?

What Obama Said:

“Sometimes they just make things up. But they’ve got a bunch of folks who can write $10 million checks, and they’ll just keep on running them,” he said. “I mean, somebody was challenging one of their ads — they made it up — about work and welfare. And every outlet said this is just not true. And they were asked about it and they said — one of their campaign people said, ‘We won’t have the fact-checkers dictate our campaign. We will not let the truth get in the way.’”

What really happened:

Mr. Obama was referring, as many other critics of the Romney campaign have, to a comment that its pollster, Neil Newhouse, made to reporters at the Republican convention on Tuesday, dismissive of those faulting the campaign’s television ads. What Mr. Newhouse actually said was, “These fact-checkers come to those ads with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs. We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Mr. Newhouse did not say, “We will not let the truth get in the way.”

No, but you can bet your life that hundreds of leftybloggers and leftytweeps will say he did up until the election, and all the way through the 2016 campaign.

Further evidence that the Obama campaign is pinning its hopes on the “low-information” voter – those who vote according to slogans, prejudice, and the last thing they heard.

For years, now, I’ve had questions about how politicians’ statements get selected for MPR’s “Poligraph”.

If you Google the feature, one might be forgiven for thinking the feature should be named “MPR’s Michele Bachmann Bureau”.  That’d be unfair; Poligraph reporter Catherine Richert does spread some of the fact-checking love around among parties.

But I do seriously wonder what a pol has to do to get a statement picked up by Poligraph.

Huge Gaping Factual Hole, Ready For Occupancy

For example, I’ve wondered for years why Richert’s crew have never once checked up on Heather Martens, who has yet to speak her first significant truthful thing about the gun control issue.   This blog has spent years shredding everything Martens has ever said on the public stage.

It’s a big issue to me, naturally.  If I were a real cynic, I’d say it’s because MPR has invested some of its own credibility in Martens, airing an op-ed of hers in which every single one of her fifteen factual assertions – every one – was untrue.

But Martens isn’t an elected official?  Okie-Dokey – Dakota County Attorney Jim Backstrom is an elected official, and every single word he wrote about last years’ “Stand Your Ground” bill over the past four years was a lie.  Every single word.   And he’s elected, ya?   And both of them had Governor Dayton’s ear last session, when he vetoed the “Stand Your Ground” bill, which had passed with a bipartisan majority in the legislature.

Is it because MPR’s target demo doesn’t care about the issue?  I could almost understand it if that were the rationale.  But I don’t suspect a news organization would get behind that as an official alibi, do you?

Checking The Facts

So I wrote Richert over the weekend.  She emailed me back bright and early Tuesday morning.  Since I didn’t specify anything would be on the record (it was late), I’ll paraphrase; she referred me to the “About Poligraph” page, and noted the feature’s ground rules involve picking one statement from each party, each week (or, at times, two from one party one week, and two from the other the next).

The “About” page also notes:

PoliGraph puts the findings into short, clear explanations accompanied with a rating — accurate, misleading, false or inconclusive.

– Accurate: These claims are entirely or mostly true. They include important details and are supported by the facts.

-Misleading: These statements that leave out key information, are exaggerated, or have been taken out of context.

– False: These claims are not true or misleading to the point of being false.

– Inconclusive: This rating typically applies to projections or estimates. While such claims could be true under certain circumstances, more information is needed.

Well, that explains a few things, anyway.

One might hope that this next bit, however…:

If this reminds you of PolitiFact.com, the Pultizer Prize-winning from the St. Petersburg Times, you’d be right. We know good ideas when we see them.

…does not.  The political bias of Politifact (and those of the Pulitzer committee, as well) are a matter worth discussion; if those are “good ideas”, MPR News may see it; I do not.

More about the “Fact-checking” industry tomorrow.

Anyway – that brings us to my question from last Tuesday.

Selection Bias?

Yesterday, we looked briefly at “Poligraph”‘s take on an Amy Klobuchar claim to bipartisanship during her debate with Kurt Bills.    While Klobuchar’s statement was accurate as far as it went – the numbers literally supported the exact letter by letter intent of the Senator’s statement – Richert’s “fact check” focused to exclusion on the numbers, while ignoring the larger context Klobuchar’s statement seems to have been meant to hide.  This earned “Poligraph” a rating of “Cherry-PIcked”

That was their weekly “Democrat” fact-check.

But today’s installment will go back to this past Tuesday’s installment, in which Poligraph hit its self-imposed weekly “GOP” quota.  There, we looked at the “Poligraph” “fact-check” of a Tony Hernandez statement linking the bank bailouts to the unemployment rate.  While Tony oversimplified the issue, there is considerable debate about the question, and Richert herself focused excessively on refuting Hernandez’ words and ignored the broader context of the remark.   Calling Hernandez’ statement “Misleading” rather than “Oversimplified” earned “Poligraph” a rating of “Obtuse”.

But I wondered:  if “Poligraph’s” quota is one article per party per week, why pick the fairly innocuous Klobuchar quote about her record of co-sponsored bills?  The claim was almost as innocuous as the Senator herself (although it covered, I maintain, a much more important context).

But let’s go back to another moment from the State Fair debate.

Check out this segment from the Hernandez-McCollum debate:

(Video courtesy MN CD4 Conservatives blog)

Here’s the money quote from Rep. McCollum:

“The Ryan Budget does nothing to move this country forward.  It only protected tax cuts for the wealthy…[when presented with a putative Democrat budget proposal]…the Republicans said “No, if we can’t have tax cuts for the upper 1%”, which by the way is borrowed money from China, that we couldn’t have the middle-class tax cuts!”

This is an unvarnished lie.  The GOP and Ryan’s plan have been all about tax cuts across the board all along, combined with broadening the tax base so that a broader share of the people are actually paying something.  The Democrats want to use “tax cuts” as a class-warfare-baiting wedge, and seek to jack up taxes on the “wealthy”.

This McCollum statement was devoid of fact.  It contains an absolute absence of truth.  There is no validity to it in any way shape or form.

And yet it passed, while Richert spent a solid day or two vetting Hernandez’ off the cuff oversimplification about the bailout, and giving Amy Klobuchar’s blandishment about her “bipartisanship” a pass.

Why was that?

So I’ll give Poligraph a “Huh?”.

Here’s another one:  :

She says there’s lots of “Federal Highway Money” involved in the new St. Croix bridge project.  But there’s actually fairly little direct federal funding involved; it’s a lot more complex than that.

Now – the standard set with Tony’s oversimplification we looked at Tuesday was that, according to “Poligraph”, “too complex to put exactly that way” is “Misleading”.

So what is this?

We give Poligraph a rating of “Double Standard” for this one.

The question is, why does “Poligraph” pick the statements they pick?

More tomorrow.

Yesterday, I suggested that it might be a good idea for Minnesota Public Radio’s “Poligraph” feature (for whom Cathy Richert is listed as the “lead reporter”) might do well to add an “Oversimplified” rating to its rather cut-and-dried set of verdicts.

I suggested it because at first blush, it might be used to cover Richert’s own “fact-checking” – for example, the sole “fact-check” she did of Amy Klobuchar during the debate with Kurt Bills.

During the MPR debate at the Minnesota State Fair last week, A-Klo claimed that 2/3 of the bills she authored were ‘bipartisan”.  Richert dutifully confirmed that Klobuchar did, in fact, have Republican co-sponsors for 2/3 or so of the bills she wrote (while factually noting that Klobuchar votes with Harry Reid’s line in the caucus a very liberal 94% of the time).

On hearing this odd little juxtaposition – a “bipartisan” record of sponsoring bills versus a very partisan voting record – the curious reader and listener might have a question or two.

So What Did Klobuchar Sponsor?

Richert assures us that once fripperies like Senate Resolutions – which are usually non-controversial – are stripped from the data set, two-thirds of Klobuchar’s bills are, indeed, co-sponsored by Republicans.

And what assortment of bills are these?  I include them all below the jump.  And they are indeed some bipartisan profiles in courage; suspension of duties on plastic children’s wallets, bamboo kitchen utensils and inflatable swimming pools and the like.  Read the list at your leisure; you’ll need it.  There are 75 of ’em.  And right around 50 have a Republican co-sponsor.  And they are, pretty much to a T, innocuous.

The only two bills that Klobuchar has actually had signed by the President?  Neither the “Appeal Time Clarification Act“, co-sponsored by Jeff Sessions, and the St. Croix Bridge legislation, cosponsored by Franken and Wisconsin’s Senators Kohl (D) and Johnson (R), are especially controversial.

But there’s nothing wrong with having an innocuous record, really – is there?

Of course not.  Not everyone is a leader and a trail blazer, a la Paul Ryan.  It’s perfectly fine to claim innocuity as a virtue.

But what if there’s more to it?

Why Pick Such An Odd Figure To Wave Around In A Debate?

Klobuchar has, in fact, been running on the fact that she’s a pleasant enough person who is not averse to “bipartisanship”, but not in a way that risks anything.

But GovTrack shows her well to the left among Senators, with a voting record to the left of Harry Reid and San Francisco überliberal Dianne Feinstein, with only 16 Senators with more left-leaning rap sheets.  And it remained to Richert to point out to the reader and listener – days after the actual debate – that Klobuchar’s voting record is actually 94% in line with the Senate’s Democrat majority.  That is hardly a “bipartisan” record.

So it’d seem that:

• Klobuchar cherry-picked a statistic – a record of milquetoast bill sponsorships – to camouflage her extremely liberal voting record.
• Richert delved into the literal facts of the Senator’s claim and declared it “accurate”, while giving the shortest possible honest shrift one could give to the larger context – noting the top line of Klobuchar’s voting record without giving the faintest hint as to where that put Klobuchar within the Democrat caucus – that could still vaguely qualify as “journalistic balance”.

So there are a couple of questions here.

1. Richert called Tony Hernandez’ claim in the August 28 MPR debate (that the bailouts caused the unemployment problem) “Misleading”, when it could much more accurately be called an “Oversimplification” of a very complex question.  So – given that Richert has oversimplified Klobuchar’s statement, is she “oversimplifying” – my term – or, as she put it, “misleading?”
2. Given that , as I’ve shown, Klobuchar’s actual claim – that’s she’s oh-so-bipartisan – is supported by her co-sponsorship numbers but mocked by her voting record, doesn’t MPR, in the interest of accuracy, need to add a new, snappy “verdict” graphic?  Perhaps “Accurate on its face but intended to mislead the reader given a deeper context?”  It doesn’t fit on a snappy graphic like MPR seems to like, but it is in fact, more accurate, assuming “accuracy” is what “fact-checkers” shoot for.   I’ll run with “Cherry-Picked”.

And there’s another question.   Given all that was said in those two hour-long debates, why did MPR’s Richert pick this assertion of Klobuchar’s to “fact-check” (and oversimply), as well as Hernandez’ statement that we talked about yesterday?

What, indeed, are MPR’s criteria for submitting a politician’s statement to “Poligraph’s” eagle eye?

More on this tomorrow.
(more…)

Watching Melissa Harris-Perry (!)’s meltdown on MSNBC…:

(Which I’ve moved below the jump, to keep it from auto-launching):

(more…)

Over the past week, we’ve seen ample, fairly conclusive evidence that the mainstream media’s “Fact Checking” industry is, to a great extent, part of the Obama Administration’s propaganda mill, part of the mainstream media’s major ongoing role as Praetorian Guard for the liberal establishment.

But what about Minnesota Public Radio?

I’ve acknowledged many times in this space that MPR – at least its news department – has made an effort to at least appear, if not be, relatively non-partisan.   Its programming department – think Keri Miller and Garrison Keillor – are quite another matter, of course, but that’s to be more or less expected of an organization that depends for the bulk of its funding on the Volvo-driving free-range Alpaca-wearing St. Olaf alum set and the insecurity it seem to feel over its own intellectual and political supremacy.

I’ve also acknowledged that American Public Media is making an effort, in its own way, to recognize that conservatives exist and are people too.  That’s all to the good.

But if you’ve followed the news department’s “Poligraph” feature – MPR News’ entrée into the “Fact-Checking” business – you might ask a question or two about their sense of focus or proportion.  To say nothing of its story selection.

Case in point: last Tuesday’s debate between CD4 Representative Betty McCollum and GOP endorsed candidate Tony Hernandez.  Richert jumped on a statement of Tony’s:

“The reason why unemployment is so high right now is because we bailed out the banks,” Hernandez said during the debate. “The reason why the debt shot up $6 trillion since then is because we bailed out the banks.”

Let’s make sure we have the context straight, here; Tony Hernandez, a private-sector guy in the biggest debate of his life (so far), ad-libbed a remark on the deleterious effect of the bailouts, as (I think it’s fairly accurate to say) the rhetorical tip of an iceberg of data showing that government intervention in the economy under all guises has been a disaster during this past four (indeed, twelve) years.

By the way, I realize that if you ad-lib something that’s wrong, it’s still wrong.  Still, I bring it up because what Tony was doing – speaking ad-lib in front of a partly-friendly, partly-hostile crowd – is  harder than it looks.  Want proof?  Just listen whenever MPR people try to do it.  It’s rarely pretty, and they know it; if you watch these MPR debates, or any live MPR event, and you’re used to  the unscripted scrum of commercial talk or sportstalk radio, it’s amazing to see that they do their intros and outros from scripts.  

Anyway, MPR’s Richert has a history of holding off-the-cuff ad-libs – by Republicans, anyway – to a oddly tight, if factually-justified, standard of accuracy, as in this 2010 episode, where Tom Emmer said half of MInnesota’s cities didn’t get Local Government Aid.  In fact, it’s half of Minnesota’s people who live in cities that don’t get LGA; Richert called that statement “FALSE“, where it would be more accurately called “a mis-statement caused by transposing a fact from one category to another.

OK, their game, their rules.  But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

Richert’s Conclusion

Anyway, Richert gave Hernandez’ statement a flat “Misleading” rating, under the headline “Economists disagree with GOP candidate’s TARP claim”.

She promptly qualifies it, of course:

Indeed, there’s a reasonable argument to be made about whether the bailout was effective. Hernandez pointed to three news articles that underscore how the bank bailout and the auto industry bailout were costly and essentially prolonged a process that could have ended quickly if the government had stayed out of the picture.

For instance, in 2011, Bloomberg News reported that the Federal Reserve loaned the banks an additional $7.7 trillion – that was on top of the money banks received from the bailout.

But here’s the rub:  Tony said – in his off-handed remark – that the bailout caused the unemployment.  Richert provides a set of economists that, sure enough, deny that the bank bailout was the sole proximate cause of our national malaise, even as none of them deny that it’s an important contributor. In fact, that’s nearly an exact quote:

Michael Franc, vice president of government studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation agrees with Calabria, and says that while the bailout may have indirectly been one of the reasons for some unemployment, it’s not the reason.

Indeed, every economist Richert mentioned – and both of the economists I’ve personally spoken with about this episode – all agree that the bailout was not the cause of unemployment, but most said, and none denied, that it was an important contributing factor to the larger national economic malaise.   Richert herself notes in rendering her “verdict” that “it’s far more complicated than that”.    Economiist Bruce Bartlett notes that the bailout, and some of the instruments of that bailout, like the payment of interest on reserves, have been contributing to the freeze on lending. Alfred Blinder in the WSJ amplifies this.

To sum it up:

• Tony may have been guilty of oversimplifying an incredibly complicated issue in a brief ad-lib while getting to a larger point
• He may not have gone into the level of detail on the statement it’d take to qualify it to the extent Richert did – with hours (over a day, in fact) to research her response.

In short: while everyone seems to acknowledge that the bailouts were a reason our unemployment rate is high today, Richert labels the statement “Misleading” because it’s not the whole reason.

Perhaps in the interest of accuracy and honesty MPR needs to add a category to its rankings – “Oversimplified”.

And for that reason – the selection of sources that pared away all possible context to Hernandez’ quote, in order to give it a more detrimental “grade” than warranted – we give Poligraph a rating of “Obtuse”.

We’ll come back to this tomorrow, when we go over the reasoning behind one of Richert’s other fact-checks.  Wednesday we’ll look at one she for whatever reason, opted not to “fact-check”.  Thursday?  We’ll see.

Seen at the State Fair (courtesy Andy Parrish):

“Exterminate Christians One Bullet At A Time”.  Photo courtesy Andy Parrish, found at @AndyParrishMN on Twitter.

Now, is this really the Is this the exposed intellectual id of the DFL in action?

No, not really.   Well, not totally – the Twin Cities is home to quite a few Wahhabi Atheists.

No, it’s just that after years not only of dim-bulb leftybloggers posting photos of redneck peckerwoods from Moldy Holler with objectionable signs hanging around the fringes of Tea Party rallies in Chattanooga labelled “This is today’s GOP”, but in fact Minnesota’s state-supported news service doing exactly the same, I figured I was entitled to one humorous fit of pique.

Note To Mr. Hairball:  It’s been tried.  Lots of us Christians are much harder targets than you are – and, let’s be honest, like most lefties, you’re all talk and no delivery, so I’m not exactly concerned.  Nonetheless, in the words of the prophet Callaghan, “do you feel lucky?”

Serious Question For Lefties:  I know, moral equivalence is a one-way street with you folks – but seriously, this is one of your guys, at the fair to espouse one of your key anti-initiatives this fall, in the intellectual center of the upper-Midwest left.  You know damn well if it were a conservative – even one obviously from some trailer park outside Ashland Wisconsin – wearing a “God Hates Fags” T-Shirt, you’d be holding every blessed Republican in Minnesota and Wisconsin answerable.  I mean, you blamed Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs” for the Tuscon shooting, for Stu’s sake.

I’m beyond asking for intellectual honesty from you folks, or the media that serve as your Praetorian Guard.

I’m just pointing it out. . Yet again.  As I’ve done for ten solid years now.

Final Question For “Progressives”: At what point does this become a “Dog Whistle”?  Or, alternatively, a commentary on the entire lefty id?

Either the New York Times, for all of its vaunted excellence in the field of journalism, really is just a bunch of bumbling Barney Fifes who stumble into controversies completely obliviously…

…or they are as excellent as their, er, press claims they are, and they knew full well what they were doing when they put this…

…”Paul Ryan, Son of Satan”, on their front page.

Me?  I have faith in the NYTimes’ vaunted intelligence.  Just like Newsweak’s “Crazy Michele Bachmann” cover last year, they knew exactly what they were doing, and the media is acting as Barack Obama’s Praetorian Guard.

Additional Question:  Wonder if this’ll make it on NPR’s “On The Media” this weekend?

Additional Observation:  The most blatantly cheerleader-y coverage of the convention for the Democrats this year was NPR.  They were more baldfaced about it than I’ve ever heard.

While the WaPo’s “Politifiact” claims impartiality, they are in fact strongly biased to the left.

No, there’s math and everything.

Democrats who a few months back were praising Chief Justice Roberts for his judicial restraint in respecting the intent of Congress are sniveling like stuck cats that the Supreme Court of Minnesota (SCOM) didn’t find a penumbra emanating from Alida Messinger’s visage forcing them to accept their masters’ complaints without question.

The lawsuits by the ACLU, the League of Women Voters and Alida’s Cause Common Cause  claimed on the one hand that the Voter ID law was just too complicated and not clear enough for public-educated Minnesotans to understand, and on the other than Mark Ritchie had the right to make both measures more complicated and less clear.

I may be a cynic, but I’m frankly amazed the judges disagreed.

And now, the pro-gay-marriage and pro-vote-corruption forces need to do something neither has been able to do:

• The anti-Marriage-Amendment forces need to show the voters a case for changing the definition of traditional marriage a little more convincing than “vote no or you are teh bigot”.
• The pro-fraud forces need to convince Minnesotans that while buying cigarettes or getting a job or buying ammunition or starting a bank account requires that we know someone is exactly who they say they are, exercising our supposedly-precious franchise does not.

It’s a good day.

I’ll await the usual logic-free liberal arguments on both.

UPDATE: Mir. D has an excellent piece on the subject at True North and over at the Neighborhood:

I’ll be honest with you — the Photo ID amendment matters a lot more to me. We’ve been round and round on gay marriage and as I’ve written before, this is a battle that ultimately conservatives are going to lose, mostly because young people are being taught that it is a civil rights issue, especially in the public schools. While I don’t agree with that, the view will prevail and most of the constitutional amendments that are passing in the various states will eventually go away, probably within 10-20 years. At that point we’ll begin the unwitting longitudinal study that will eventually reveal, years after most readers of this feature are pushing up daisies, whether or not gay marriage is a good idea or not. My future grandchildren and great-grandchildren (God willing) will get to suss that one out.

The Photo ID amendment is much more important, because it goes the integrity of elections. Voter suppression is the usual charge you hear, but as a practical matter the real issue is multiple votes and illegal votes. The challenge is getting local election officials and prosecutors, who are partisans, to take such things seriously. Minnesota Majority identified 1,099 cases of felons voting in the Franken/Coleman election and over 200 cases have been either adjudicated or are in the process of being investigated. The rest aren’t going to see the light of day because the local prosecutors can’t be bothered. Franken won the election by on 312 votes…Now the amendments go for a vote. I expect Photo ID to win easily. The marriage amendment will be close. Opponents of both amendments will have ample opportunity to state their case. They just can’t depend on Mark Ritchie to keep his thumb on the scale this time.

And there’s the victory for real justice.

And I never believed the SCOM or Minnesota law had it in ’em.

To:  Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and the ACLU of Minnesota
From: Mitch Berg, mere peasant
Re: SCOM Decision

All,

Suck it.

That is all.

(more…)

As Todd Akin discovered this past week, rape is no laughing matter…

…if you’re a Republican pol.

Now, Democrats?  That’s another story.

But before Franken was a senator he was a writer on the TV show Saturday Night Live. Then, he famously joked about raping CBS reporter Lesley Stahl.

As New York magazine reported in 1995, from a writing session that the reporter sat in on:

Franken: “And, ‘I give the pills to Lesley Stahl. Then, when Lesley’s passed out, I take her to the closet and rape her.’ Or, ‘That’s why you never see Lesley until February.’ Or, ‘When she passes out, I put her in various positions and take pictures of her.’”

Hah!  Funny!  Rape ! Hahahahah!

With the national conversation now turning to women’s issues as a result of the bizarre and offensive comments by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin over the weekend, it seems a bit odd that Vice President Biden would take the stage with Franken, considering his own lack of sensitivity to the horrors of rape.

No it doesn’t.  The media only holds sins against PC, intelligence, science, fact, logic and morality against conservatives.

Peggy Noonan on the media’s kid-gloves coddling of Slow Joe Biden:

If it had been a Republican vice presidential candidate who had made those gaffes, one after another, so comically, and all on tape, the subject today of the panel would be how stupid is this person, can this person possibly govern?

They know what matters, though. Romney’s income taxes and holding impromptu on-air conference committees to reconcile the Romney and Ryan budgets, three months before the election and five months before they take (God willing) office.