PolitFact's Partisanship

I see a number of folks are now coming on board with the realization that the website known as PolitFact, an arm of the St. Petersburg Times, is in practice a deeply partisan operation. I first looked into PolitFact in October 2009, where I asked the question "Why should I trust PolitFact?"

Their answer? "Because we say so!"

We are an independent, nonpartisan news organization. We are not beholden to any government, political party or corporate interest. We are proud to be able to say that we are independent journalists.

I'm sorry but it is possible for people to be corrupted by their own personal ideological motives. In fact, self-interest is kinda the number one way in which truth gets perverted. Now we know from surveys of the profession that self-identifying left leaning journalists outnumber right leaning journalists by almost two to one and are way out of proportion when compared to the American population as a whole. This being true, why is it safe for me as a reader to just assume the bunch of journalists at PolitiFact are playing it straight? The fact is it isn't safe.

I then proceeded to show how PolitFact operates, with innuendo, distortions, and by largely deferring to those of the political left. In the cases I looked at, if the Obama administration said something was so it was not to be questioned. To question was to "lie" in their book.

Things haven't changed in a year. Concerning PolitFact's look at Obamacare Karl at Patterico's place finds:

Then there are those “independent health care experts” PolitiFact consulted. One of them is ”Princeton University professor Uwe Reinhardt, an expert in health care economics.” PolitiFact leaves out his $2,300 donation to Barack Obama. Here’s a bit more of the wit and wisdom of Uwe, to give you a flavor of how impartial he is on the subject of government-run healthcare.

Next up is Jonathan Oberlander, “a professor of health policy at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.” Oberlander is in fact a political scientist who has written a great deal on the politics of the health care issue — which makes him about as much of an expert as I am. (At least Uwe Reinhardt has a Ph.D in economics.) Oberlander’s opinion that a single-payer government financing of health care is not “socialized medicine” tells you what his politics are.

PolitiFact also quotes Maggie Mahar, author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. Well-known among those who follow the issue as a market-hating health care expert, I am not exactly shocked that she told PolitiFact what PolitiFact so obviously wanted to hear. PolitiFact neglects to mention that Maggie Mahar is a fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. (They also fail to mention that Mahar’s educational background is in English literature.)

In contrast, PolitiFact dismisses the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute as conservative groups repeating a “lie” [Aside: Cato is libertarian, but we must all look alike to PolitiFact]. Thus, PolitiFact chose not to seek the advice of any experts affiliated with those groups, like Cato’s Michael Cannon, who argues that ObamaCare is a government takeover of the health care system.

This certainly seems to work hand-in-hand with my assessment of PolitFact as being vulnerable to same variety of ideological group think commonly seen in journalists as a whole.