Scherer's defense is that we cannot reliably compare the deceptiveness of individuals or groups, especially not based on fact checker rulings. He based his defense on comments by the leaders of the fact checking industry during a press conference that Scherer attended. (In fact, the comments responded to a question that Scherer himself asked.)
Evidenced by my previous post on estimating partisan and centrist bias from fact checker report cards, I sympathize with Scherer's defense against frothy-mouthed partisans who are convinced that the other side tells nothing but a bunch of stuff. Yet I disagree with him and the leaders of the fact checking industry that we cannot reliably compare fact checker rulings (notice I don't say deceptiveness) across politicians and political groups.
To make my point, I'll condense into a list what the fact checking industry leaders and Michael Scherer have said about what Scherer calls the "false equivalence dilemma" (but which should be called the "false comparison dilemma"). For each item in the list, I'll describe the issue, then explain why it's not that big of a deal.
1. "...it's self selective process," says Glen Kessler from The Fact Checker at The Washington Post.
Kessler argues that fact checkers cherrypick the statements that they fact check. No, not out of centrist or partisan bias. In this case, Kessler's talking about a bias toward the timeliness and relevance of the statement. Kessler says that he decides what to fact check based on how much he thinks the fact check will educate the public about something important, like medicare or health insurance reform. He shies away from mere slips of the tongue.
Wait a while. If the only bias fact that checkers had was to fact check timely and relevant remarks about policy, that would make Malark-O-Meter's comparisons more valid, not less. Far more concerning is the possibility that some fact checkers have a fairness bias. Which brings me to...
2. "...it would look like we were endorsing the other candidate," says Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org.
This comment raises one non-issue against comparisons while implying another. Brooks argues that by demonstrating that one politician is more deceptive than another, FactCheck.org would open itself up to accusations of partisanship. From a publishing standpoint, this makes some sense, especially if your organization wants to maintain a nonpartisan reputation. Yet the ensuing controversy might cause the buzz about your organization to get louder. Just look what's happened with Nate Silver's political calculus this week. Or better yet, look what's happened to Internet searches for PolitiFact compared to factcheck.org over the last year. (Among frothy-mouthed right-wing partisans, PolitiFact is the poster child of the liberal fact checking establishment.)
Interestingly, Jackson's comment hints at the separate issue of centrist bias among today's top fact checkers. In the quest to avoid a partisan reputation, frothy-mouthed liberals allege, the fact checking industry is too fair-minded and falsely balanced (the same criticism leveled against Scherer's cover story in Time).
I've already shown that we can use Malark-O-Meter's statistical methods to estimate the likely level of centrist bias (assuming that one exists). In the same article, I made suggestions for how to estimate the actual level of centrist (and partisan) bias among professional fact checkers.
Furthermore, if what we're aiming at is a more informed public, why must we always shy away from ambiguity? Yes, Malark-O-Meter's measurements are a complex mix of true difference, bias, sampling error, and perceptual error. No, we don't know the relative weights of those influences. But that doesn't make the estimates useless. In fact, it makes them something for people to discuss in light of other evidence about the comparative factuality of political groups.
3. “Politicians in both parties will stretch the truth if it is in their political interest,” says Glen Kessler.
Glen Kessler argues that comparing politicians is fruitless because all politicians lie. Well, I statistically compared the factuality of Obama, Biden, Romney, and Ryan. While all of them appear about half factual, there are some statistically significant differences. I estimate that Rymney's statements are collectively nearly 20% more false than Obiden's statements (I also estimated our uncertainty in that judgment). So yes, both parties' candidates appear to stretch (or maybe just not know) the facts about half the time. But one of them most likely does it more than the other, and maybe that matters.
4. "...not all deceptions are equally deceiving, and different people will reach different judgements about which is worse," says Michael Scherer.
Scherer goes on to ask:
Do you think it was worse for President Obama to claim that Romney supports outlawing abortion even in cases of rape and incest, when Romney does not? Or for Romney to claim that Obama plans to give welfare recipients a check without any work requirement, when he does not?
Which brings me to the straw man of the false equivalence dilemma:
5. We can't read someone's mind.
Much of the fact checking industry leaders' commentary, and Michael Scherer's subsequent blog entry, assumed that what we're comparing is the deceptiveness (or conversely the truthfulness) of individuals or groups. This opened up the criticism that we can't read people's minds to determine if they are being deceptive. All we can do is rate the factuality of what they say. I agree with this statement so much that I discuss this issue in the section of my website about the caveats to the malarkey score and its analysis.
I contend, however, that when words come out of someone's mouth that we want to fact check, that person is probably trying to influence someone else's opinion. The degree to which people influence our opinion should be highly positively correlated with the degree to which their statements are true. No, not true in the value laden sense. True in the sense that matters to people like scientists and court judges. So I don't think it matters whether or not we can tell if someone is trying to be deceptive. What matters should be the soundness and validity of someone's arguments. The fact checking industry exists to facilitate such evaluations. Malark-O-Meter's comparisons facilitate similar evaluations at a higher level.
Lastly, I want to address one of Michael Scherer's remarks about a suggestion by political deceptiveness research pioneer, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who works with Brooks Jackson at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which runs FactCheck.org.
[Jamieson] said what you really wanted to measure was consequential deceptions, meaning the level of deception that moved voters. One way of doing this would be to score every campaign ad that runs in a cycle for deception, and then weight the ads by the number of people who see them. It’s a fine idea, but difficult to do in real time, when the reputational cost is the highest for the campaigns.
Second, most fact check rulings are of timely and relevant statements, and they are often a campaign's main talking points. So I would be interested to see what information all that extra work would add to a factuality score.
Third, while it is difficult to do in real time, it isn't impossible, especially not in pseudo real time. (Why do we have to do it in real time, anyway? Can't people wait a day? They already wait that long or more for most fact checker rulings! Moreover, didn't we once believe real time fact checking was so difficult, and yet that's what PolitiFact did during the debates.)
Anyway, for any given campaign ad or speech or debate, there's usually a transcript. We often know the target audience. We can also estimate the size of the audience. Come up with a systematic way to put those pieces of information together, and it will become as straightforward as...well...fact checking!
In sum, so long as fact checkers are doing their job fairly well (and I think they are) people like me can do our job (oh, but I wish it actually were my job!) fairly well. That said, there is much room for improvement and innovation. Stay tuned to Malark-O-Meter, where I hope some of that will happen.