His campaign might fading, but Newt Gingrich is still wowing the New York Times (2/10/12). Reporter Trip Gabriel writes:

Mr. Gingrich is well known as the candidate of big ideas, hatched from a deep knowledge of politics and policy. But he is less recognized for his warehouse of everyday facts, the kind of small-bore knowledge useful in winning bar bets--or in impressing voters and arguing down skeptical reporters.

And:

Mr. Gingrich appears to have a steel-trap mind and would make a dangerous opponent at Trivial Pursuit.

Praising Gingrich's intellect isn't new, but it's a reminder that Gingrich isn't always dazzling people with his brains:

But what about Gingrich's misstatements? According to PolitiFact, at one debate Gingrich claimed that Sarah Palin was right about the "death panels" in the healthcare law--which earned him a "PANTS ON FIRE" from the site.

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, though--the healthcare law is not precisely "history." Perhaps the same goes for his claim that the stimulus bill "is anti-Christian legislation that will stop churches from using public schools for meeting on Sundays, as well as Boy Scouts and student Bible study groups." To be fair, that was in 2009--way before he was the smartest presidential candidate in the room.

But PolitiFact also gave Gingrich a "PANTS ON FIRE" for his his Twitter claim that the United States spends less on its military (as a percentage of GDP) than at any time since Pearl Harbor. A historian might be expected to know something about that.

There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you're going to find that there's truth on both sides.

PolitiFact, a political factchecking project based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been criticized for taking the latter approach. An item it posted yesterday (1/9/12) is further evidence of its preference for the appearance of evenhandedness over its reality.

The item addressed Rick Santorum's assertion in a January 4 town meeting that as a result of the 1996 welfare law, "Poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for...one of the areas that had the highest level of poverty historically, which is African-American children." PolitiFact concluded that the statement was "Half True," since "Santorum is right that poverty rates declined after the reform’s passage. But opinions differ on the primary cause."

As evidence that "opinions differ," the factcheckers turned to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, best known for his argument that the poor aren't really poor because they have microwave ovens and the like. Unsurprisingly, since he works for a group set up explicitly to promote conservative ideas, he does indeed have the opinion that the 1996 welfare law caused a drop in child poverty. But does this opinion have any basis in fact?

PolitiFact allows him to make his case at length, but the gist of it is this: "Since welfare reform, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004." And PolitiFact helpfully gives you a link to a U.S. Census chart that shows that those numbers are almost accurate. But looking at the numbers for yourself, you see that there's no indication that the 1996 law had anything to do with them: Poverty among black children peaked in 1992, at 46.3 percent, and declined steadily from then until 2001, when it hit a low of 30.0 before moving upward.  1996 does not seem to have impacted the poverty trajectory at all; a naive reading of the numbers would indicate that black child poverty goes up when someone named "Bush" is in the White House.

Here's a graph of child poverty by race from Mother Jones (9/29/11--by raw numbers, not percentages) that illustrates the utter unremarkability of 1996 for black child poverty:

PolitiFact goes on to give equal space, and equal rhetorical weight, to sources who say economic growth is actually what drove child poverty down in the '90s: "While Rector maintains that the economy played only a secondary role in reducing poverty, other groups says it’s the main driver." But none of these sources directly rebut Rector's arguments, or point out how dubious it is to give a 1996 law credit for a decline that began four years earlier.

So it's true that "opinions differ" on whether the 1996 welfare lowered poverty for black children. A real factchecker would point out that the advocate for that opinion offers selective and misleading figures to back it up. But then, if you did point that out, you might look like you weren't being evenhanded.

(Thanks to Neil deMause for bringing PolitiFact's report to my attention.)

Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won't have much to say about Obama's foreign policy (partly because it doesn't much differ from what a Republican president might be doing).

The New York  Times' Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, "Republican Candidates Aim at Obama Foreign Policy."

So what exactly is the Republican case against Obama's foreign policy? That it's too soft on the Hezbollah menace on our southern border.
Seriously.

Oppel writes:

A small but revealing episode unfolded in the closing minutes of the last Republican presidential debate. After the candidates were asked to name the national security issue they most worry about, which had not yet been discussed, Rick Santorum cited radical Islamists in Central and South America.

Mitt Romney agreed, saying that Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group in Lebanon that is backed by Iran and Syria, was working in Mexico, Venezuela and throughout Latin America, posing an "imminent threat." Earlier in the night, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas warned that Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that controls Gaza, also were working in Mexico.

That the candidates would cite the same threat--one denied by the Mexican government, and which seemed to contrast with a State Department report that there are no Hezbollah-related operational cells in this hemisphere--was not a coincidence.

Oppel adds that  "a major thrust of the Republican foreign-policy argument" will include this kind of rhetoric about Obama being "too soft" on the likes of "Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians."

If a journalist is looking to inform voters, it might help to give them a sense of whether what these candidates are saying is grounded in reality. PolitiFact judged  Romney's Hezbollah comments "Mostly False," pointing out that the claim appears to come from a paper by former Bush assistant secretary of state Roger Noriega--and that the paper argues that most of the activity in Latin America is related to fundraising--criminal activity that funnels money back to Lebanon.

The Times judges the accuracy of the Republican charges in passing--the candidates' claims "seemed to contrast with a State Department report." ` The piece is far more concerned with the political strategy at work, and how Republicans might be trying to appeal to some Jewish voters with a message about Obama being soft on Islamic terrorists. It's a strategy that will likely be a lot more successful if reporters aren't going to call them out.

The New York Times today (11/29/11) has a somewhat cheeky piece about Republican candidate Newt Gingrich's background as a historian--which, according to reporter Trip Gabriel, means he's unusually smart:

In an election season rife with factual misstatements, deliberate and otherwise, Mr. Gingrich sometimes seems to stand out for exhibiting an excess of knowledge.

I don't know whether he really "sometimes seems" to have an "excess of knowledge"--whatever that might be. The point seems to be that he comes across as smarter than, say, Michele Bachmann. Well, sure.

But what about Gingrich's misstatements? According to PolitiFact, at one debate Gingrich claimed that Sarah Palin was right about the "death panels" in the healthcare law--which earned him a "PANTS ON FIRE" from the site.

Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, though--the healthcare law is not precisely "history." Perhaps the same goes for his claim that the stimulus bill "is anti-Christian legislation that will stop churches from using public schools for meeting on Sundays, as well as Boy Scouts and student Bible study groups." To be fair, that was in 2009--way before he was the smartest presidential candidate in the room.

But PolitiFact also gave Gingrich a "PANTS ON FIRE" for his his Twitter claim that the United States spends less on its military (as a percentage of GDP) than at any time since Pearl Harbor. A historian might be expected to know something about that.

The Times adds:

Fellow historians are generally pleased that Mr. Gingrich brings history into the national conversation, even if some dispute his insights.

It would be odd for historians to be pleased by this--which might explain why the Times can't offer much in the way of evidence for it.

Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC's This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show.  A completely uncontroversial comment from Bill Clinton, for instance, was determined to be "true," though no one would suggest that it wasn't. Defense Secretary Bob Gates' somewhat tendentious criticism of Wikileaks (for releasing a video of civilians being killed in Iraq by U.S. forces) was determined "Mostly True," though their reasoning was pretty unconvincing.

The right-wing Media Research Center has tallied up PolitiFact's scorecard so far, and they are pleased with the results:

After nearly three months, the results show far more Democrats and liberals earning a "False" rating, with most of the "True" ratings going to Republicans and conservatives. The discrepancy remains even if you take into account that about two-thirds of the evaluated statements came from Democrats in the first place.

From April 11 through June 20, PolitiFact has handed out seven "False" statements--six to Democrats/liberals, one to a Republican. During that same time, seven "True" labels were handed out--four for Republicans/conservatives, just two for Democrats (one, ironically, going to former President Bill Clinton). 

If I were a right-wing media critic, this couldn't be better news: According to a non-partisan study of one Sunday show, liberal and Democrats are more often telling whoppers.

Of course, this only points to the problems inherit in PolitiFact's approach. As FAIR noted in May, George Will has made claims that demand some sort of fact-checking--but the site, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to show much interest in evaluating the statements of one of the show's regular panelists.

As Arianna Huffington recently pointed out (7/5/10), during one of her This Week appearances  she declared that Halliburton had "defrauded the American taxpayer"--a comment that right-wing panelist Liz Cheney strongly (and unsurprisingly) found objectionable: "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on, but it's not facts." PolitiFact decided that this was worth a look. After a relatively thorough accounting of Halliburton's problems with overbilling and underperforming on its military contracts, they determined that Huffington's statement was "Half True." The reason? Apparently Huffington was not fair to the company, which may have merely overcharged the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars due to "waste and inefficiency."

In his stint as interim host of ABC's This Week, Jake Tapper has arranged for the fact-checkers at Politifact to review what the guests say on the ABC Sunday morning show. An idea worth applauding, it came to Tapper via NYU's Jay Rosen. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz asked NBC Meet the Press anchor David Gregory if he'd consider a similar arrangement for his show:

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."