Guess I’m not the only one who thinks this flier is misleading. Today Politifact weighed in:

A David Cicilline campaign flier says Brendan Doherty wants to raise the eligibility age for Social Security benefits for anyone born after 1960 “with no regard for the challenges it would cause for people working in physically demanding occupations.”

But the Cicilline campaign provided no evidence that Doherty ever espoused that position.

Attacking someone for what he hasn’t specifically said – that he supports the exemption – defies logic, particularly since Doherty says he does support the Simpson-Bowles proposal, which would include the hardship exemptions if the eligibility age is raised.

We rate the statement False.

• Related: Cicilline flier may mislead elderly on Doherty, Social Security (Aug. 8)

After getting slapped with a Pants on Fire rating from the Projo’s PolitiFact operation, “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart acknowledged his error (“Of course, it’s my fault for trusting something called ‘The History Channel’ with facts about things that happened in the past”) and tried to make amends last night.

Not safe for work or younguns:

On a more elevated note, media critic Dan Kennedy has an interesting critique of PolitiFact and other fact-checking outfits on HuffPo, following up on Ben Smith’s recent examination of them.

Back in August, I wrote a post citing the American Association of Port Authorities to report that PolitiFact Rhode Island was wrong about the distance between the Port of Providence and Europe.

Well, PolitiFact is nothing if not dogged (as well as controversial), and my post led the fact-checking site’s Gene Emery to take another look – and he wound up proving the port association wrong.

Emery’s original item said Rhode Island was fourth-cloest to Europe among major East Coast ports “as the crow flies,” citing Google Maps as a source. My follow-up item said Providence is second-closest when you take into account the fact that cargo ships travel in “designated sea lanes,” not as the crow flies.

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Don’t underestimate the influence of the Projo’s PolitiFact Rhode Island operation.

When its sister PolitiFact in Texas needed to fact check Gov. Rick Perry’s 2010 statement on Fox News that “Social Security is indeed a Ponzi scheme” – apparently the newly minted presidential candidate has been using the line for a while – it cited Cynthia Needham’s Rhode Island version to help explain its conclusion:

PolitiFact Rhode Island later rated False Republican U.S. House candidate John Loughlin’s statement that “Social Security is a Ponzi scheme.” Their analysis zeroed in on the lack of an element of deceit to how the 75-year-old Social Security program takes in money and pays it out. We’d add that Social Security is accountable to Congress and the American people while a Ponzi scheme is a crime.

We rate Perry’s statement False.

This week, national PolitiFact revisited the Texas/Rhode Island rulings on “Ponzi scheme” and stuck with False – giving the Projo a cameo role in the heated back-and-forth of the GOP presidential race.

Last week, I quoted new Providence Economic Development Director Jim Bennett’s assertion that the Port of Providence is “200 miles closer to Europe than any other eastern port.”

Not so much, PolitiFact says:

So we turned to Google Maps, and asked for the distance, as the crow flies, to Dublin (to pick a relative landmark). Here’s the result:

From Providence: 3,030 miles (and a very tired crow)
From Boston: 2,993 miles (37 miles closer than Providence)
From Portsmouth, N.H.: 2,950 miles (80 miles closer)
From Portland, Maine: 2,906 miles (124 miles closer) …

The only way that’s true is if you ignore the ports in every coastal state north of us.

It’s not even true when you consider the major port facilities in New York, which are about 155 miles to our west, not 200.

I’d kind of wondered the same thing but didn’t dwell on it – the old “too good to check” mistake on my part.

Former state Rep. John Loughlin received a dreaded “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact last summer during his unsuccessful campaign against David Cicilline for Patrick Kennedy’s 1st District seat. PolitiFact said Loughlin was wrong to describe it as common for people illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to do so carrying drugs.

Loughlin fired back in Anchor Rising’s comments section over the weekend, saying subsequent events offered further proof for his claim but he couldn’t get a new hearing:

I presented all of this exculpatory evidence to Politi-Fact and was told “well, we already covered that story so we don’t want to go back and re-hash it.” These low-lifes called me a liar and didn’t have the guts to go back and correct their error. I can only conclude it was because Politi-Fact is agenda driven journalism at its very worst.

That seems like a serious charge. I don’t know if Loughlin is right in this case , but new facts come to light all the time, and PolitiFact prides itself on weighing all the facts and providing an unbiased judgment – and has already gained considerably clout by doing so.

I asked Tim Murphy, PolitiFact’s editor and a widely respected journalist in his own right, if he would respond to Loughlin’s claims or shed some light on whether there is an appeals process in the PolitiFact system. Murphy was good enough to call me back, but he declined to comment, citing a general policy against doing so.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think PolitiFact’s judgments are agenda-driven (and yes, I know AR’s contributors will disagree and say that’s because I’m part of the MSM). I also think the site is doing some terrific work – see, for example, Pete Lord’s Feb. 27 piece on pension law. Still, perhaps the project could use a bit more transparency – maybe a blog to tackle critiques of its rulings?

(Double disclosure: Loughlin is a WPRI-TV contributor, and Projo/PolitiFact is a WPRI news partner. So I guess they cancel each other out.)

Update: The Providence Phoenix’s Dave Scharfenberg weighs in with his thoughts, and wonders whether judging hyperbolic statements like Ken McKay’s represents “the best use of PolitiFact’s time.”

Projo columnist Ed Achorn says wealthy Rhode Islanders are leaving the state in significant numbers because of high taxes. NEARI official and Rhode Island’s Future contributor Pat Crowley says that’s dead wrong.

This debate has been going on for ages, and I for one would like to know who’s right – or, if both men have some of the facts on their side, what those facts tell us about economic migration. But I’m afraid I don’t have the time to really examine their claims as closely as I would like.

This, then, would seem like a perfect job for PolitiFact Rhode Island, The Journal’s new fact-checking site. I realize it might be a little awkward for Tim Murphy and his team, since Achorn is their colleague – but hey, all the more reason to show that PolitiFact weighs claims and issues judgments without fear or favor.

So how ’bout it, PolitiFact? Rhode Island turns its bleary eyes to you.

Update: Justin Katz says I mischaracterized Achorn’s (and his) concerns.

The Projo’s new PolitiFact Rhode Island site started up only three months ago – a blink of the eye in the history of a newspaper founded in 1829. But the site (and its patented Truth-O-Meter) have already made an outsize impression on the state’s political class.

For the uninitiated, PolitiFact is a fact-checking initiative started by the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times in 2008, during the heat of the presidential campaign. The site’s reporters examine the veracity of statements, claims and allegations made by candidates and officeholders, then rate them on a scale of “True” to “Pants on Fire!” The project won a Pulitzer Prize last year, and there are now local PolitiFacts up and running in seven states.

For a newspaper that has been struggling to find its footing in the Internet era, licensing PolitiFact and giving it a staff of three represented, as top editor Tom Heslin put it, an effort by The Journal to embrace “new journalistic forms that have value in the 21st century.”

We got the first taste of candidates’ wariness about the site during our WPRI congressional debate in July, when Democrat Anthony Gemma referenced PolitiFact on stage as he tried to answer one of Tim White’s questions. (Full disclosure: The Journal and WPRI are news partners, and sometimes we run segments based on PolitiFact articles.)

Since then, I’ve noticed PolitiFact referenced more and more in conversations, usually on background, with candidates and their campaign aides. “Don’t PolitiFact me!” a number of them have said to me, only half-jokingly, after I questioned a budget figure or some other statistic – not as an admission of lying, but just an acknowledgment that they weren’t 100% certain about the topic under discussion.

Those in the political arena also have honest concerns about the PolitiFact model – that some assertions aren’t black-and-white, and that candidates should not be held accountable if they cite an errant figure in off-the-cuff remarks. (PolitiFact says it only tackles statements made multiple times.) And it’s hard to judge whether the site is having any impact on the actual actions of candidates and campaigns.

Still, there’s no doubt PolitiFact’s impact is being felt after only three months on the scene. It will be interesting to see how it develops over time.

PolitiFact Rhode Island has an item up about congressional candidate and state Rep. John Loughlin’s statement about President Reagan’s 1981 tax cut and the nation’s subsequent economic growth, judging the statement “barely true.”

PolitiFact does a decent job, but the explanation of tax policy during the Reagan years is a bit more muddled than it needs to be.

Luckily, Bruce Bartlett – the dissident Republican economist who served as a senior policy analyst in the Reagan White House – recently reproduced this handy chart showing all the tax cuts and tax increases Reagan signed into law during his two terms from 1981 to 1989. (The information came from the first President Bush’s 1990 budget.)

Basically, by 1988 the 15 tax laws signed by Reagan had reduced federal taxes by $275.3 billion on the one hand and raised them by $132.7 billion on the other – so combined, Reagan cut taxes by a net $142.6 billion.

In practice, that undid 46% of the original 1981 tax cut to which Loughlin referred. Still, a $142.6 billion reduction in federal taxation was nothing to sneeze it, regardless of how it stacked up compared with Reagan’s initial program. Among other things, the 1981 law lowered the top marginal income tax rate from 70% to 50%.

Later, PolitiFact notes that the country fell into a deep recession “immediately after the 1981 [tax] cuts.”

True, but that’s a bit like saying the country went to war in Afghanistan after a series of shark attacks – it’s not factually incorrect, but it leaves out a key piece of information. In this case, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised interest rates to a jaw-dropping 20% in June 1981 (compared with less than 0.25% currently), plunging the country into a painful recession that lasted from July 1981 to November 1982. After Volcker lowered rates again, the U.S. economy grew for almost eight straight years. (In fairness, PolitiFact alludes to this later on.)

Here’s a chart showing the annual percentage change in U.S. GDP from the start of the Eisenhower administration, in 1953, through the end of the first Bush administration, in early 1993. You can see Volcker’s monetary policy helped cause the sharpest contraction in GDP, and then one of the strongest rebounds, seen during the Cold War era:

Also, the chart shows economic growth was quite strong and sustained (though not “exponential”) after the other reduction mentioned by Loughlin, the Kennedy/Johnson tax cut enacted in 1964, though once again correlation does not mean causation. (Notably, Loughlin’s ad does not mention the tax cuts he might actually vote on if elected to Congress in November – the two rounds signed into law by the second President Bush in 2001 and 2003 that are soon to expire.)

(image credits: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, St. Louis Fed)

A reckoning for "Reckoning"?

The Projo’s PolitiFact Rhode Island has an item today calling out EDC Executive Director Keith Stokes for describing video games as “a growth industry,” a statement he made while defending the $75 million loan guarantee the agency has agreed to provide 38 Studios, Curt Schilling’s video game company.

PolitiFact says the statement is “barely true,” since video game sales fell in the U.S. last year (as well as back in 2005). And indeed, the NPD Group, my trusted source on such matters, said U.S. game sales dropped 8 percent in 2009 compared with 2008. The decline was also 8 percent when you add in the other two top game markets, the U.K. and Japan. Here’s the crux of PolitiFact’s beef:

By all accounts, the video gaming industry has grown substantially since the 1990s, topping more than $46 billion worldwide. But the sharp drop in U.S. sales in 2005 and 2009, combined with last year’s minimal increase in global sales — or decline, depending on who’s giving you the numbers — show that, at least for those years, the growth in the industry has not been consistent. Strategy Analytics, in its report to the EDC projecting double-digit growth over the next five years for the type of game 38 Studios plans to develop, noted as much.

Stokes could have said that the overall trend in the video gaming business has been strongly upward despite a downturn or two. But he didn’t. He said growth in the industry was clear and consistent. So we rate his comment as Barely True.

These questions are tough, I think. The U.S. economy was likely in recession for at least half of 2009, and U.S. retail sales were down 6.2 percent across the board last year, so it may have been an outlier. (Considering Rhode Island’s unemployment rate averaged 11.2 percent last year, let’s hope it was an outlier.)

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