Strike Three for PolitiFact

Posted by Michael F. Cannon

The annual unveiling of its “Lie of the Year” award garners PolitiFact more attention than anything else. Hopefully, it will garner so much attention that people will recognize this award, which is supposed to improve political discourse, instead degrades it.

PolitiFact’s past three Lies of the Year have been about health care. Not one of them was a lie.

A lie is when a speaker says something that he knows or believes to be false, for the purpose of deceiving others. None of these supposed Lies of the Year even met the threshold test of being false. The first two (“death panels” and “ObamaCare is a government takeover”) were actually, demonstrably true.

The third and latest Lie of the Year—that “Republicans voted to end Medicare”—is arguably true: its veracity depends on what your definition of “Medicare” is. To seniors, Medicare means “the government helps me pay for health care.” The House Republicans’ budget (a.k.a., the Ryan plan) would not end such federal assistance, and would arguably improve access to quality health care. To the Left, “Medicare” means the particular way the federal government helps seniors access health care: a single-payer system. The Ryan plan would end that single-payer system. My leftist friends are right and PolitiFact is wrong: from a certain and valid perspective, this claim is true.

Moreover, even if these three statements were false, the speakers believed them to be true. Therefore, they cannot be lies. Every single Lie of the Year award has gotten that basic fact wrong.

In the process, this award degrades political discourse by implicitly launching—an encouraging others to launch—ad hominem assaults on people who hold legitimate differences of opinion. PolitiFact should find a better way to attract readers.

I have been writing about the flaws in PolitiFact’s business model for some time:
Just Call Me Liar of the Year
Why I’m Boycotting PolitiFact
PolitiFact Just Asked Me to Be a Source, Again. I Declined, Again.
PolitiFact Just Called, Again. I Declined to Help, Again.

I’m glad to see my friends on the Left have taken notice, though I regret the way it happened.

Michael F. Cannon • December 23, 2011 @ 6:26 pm