Fact Checking Biases

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There are many forms of bias when doing studies or trying to analyze data. When Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers, or the filters we put on what's real, it helps to keep a few of those in mind, like: Selection Bias (what they pick), Oversampling (picking the same thing over, or minute variants), Standards Bias (not holding both sides to the same standard), and so on.

There have been a few studies done, on one or another Fact Checking site, that proves that kind of bias for that site -- yet, you can and should probably genericize the results to all Fact Checkers; the problems of bias in journalism are systemic (don't seem localized). These problems are lightly concerning for trusting the validity of a single fact check, but as any single error is localized, it's not a big deal. But New Media (the Internet: Google, Facebook, the flock) is starting to use their own echo-chamber of fact-checkers to validate what is real or FakeNews in general. That is far more concerning -- as they scale their flawed solution, they're magnifying the problem. And they miss the fatal flaw: if all the samples have the same problem, then adding more samples doesn't fix it. This is how the aggregate polls were wrong in the 2016 election, because all the individual polls were wrong in the same way (read Trump Election: Orange is the new black. GIGO: Garbage-In = Garbage Out. Some rubes are doing that with our "news" or putting that herd filter their reality. The Germans, Italians and Japanese did that just prior to WWII, and it didn't work out too well, for the same reasons.


Selection bias

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PolitiFacts worst sin is in how they pick what to review (selection bias). George Mason University Center for Media and Public Affairs did a study (and the NYT ran a piece on it, written by PolitiFact editors), which showed "Republicans lied 3x as often as Democrats" (especially ones PolitiFact doesn't like), according to PolitiFact -- and that was widely quoted by the left leaning media to say "see, Republicans are bigger liars". But the facts are there's no evidence that the Republicans lie any more than Democrats. If you look at actually psychological honesty studies by part, at best, these numbers would be loosely even, and at worse, would skew the other way. (The majority of the Press being biased left, means they hold Republicans to a higher standard and Democrats to a lower one, so by nature of that bias, Republicans learn to be better or the Press will hammer them).

What the study really showed was the PolitiFact was 3x as likely to pick a Republican lie to complain about than a Democrat one. (And/or hold them to a different standard). Even during years where Obama is embroiled in lying about Benghazi, the "fact checkers" were calling Romney pants-on-fire for doubting the President's claim that this was a spontaneous attack by people mad over a video that no one heard of, and happened to be carrying mortars and RPG's with them. So instead of calling Obama's claim false, they called Romney's accusations that Obama lied, unsupported by the evidence at the time -- and never corrected the record later when it proved that Romney was correct and Obama had been lying.

So from the same study, the Democrats heard what they wanted to, that Republican Politicians lie more, and they repeat the mythos. And Republicans and Independents saw a glimpse of the truth, that partisan democrat cheerleaders posing as fact checkers are far more likely to use their jobs to attack Republicans and make excuses for Democrats than to be unbiased purveyors of truth.



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