Brendan Nyhan

Here’s a great example of how the media fails to adequately fact-check deceptive statements. Today, John McCain made a misleading claim about Social Security that the AP reported as follows:

McCain took a jab at AARP, the lobby for older citizens, which has been buying television and newspaper advertisements in cities Bush is visiting to oppose his idea to let younger workers divert some of their payroll taxes into private investment accounts.

“Some of our friends, who are opposing this idea, say, `Oh, you don’t have to worry until 2042.’ We wait until 2042 when we stop paying people Social Security?” the Arizona Republican asked rhetorically at the Social Security event here.

The Social Security trustees have said 2042 is the year when the trust fund will be empty and the program will have only annual payroll taxes to pay benefits.

The AP’s clarification of McCain’s statement (if you can even call it that) is difficult for the average reader to understand. The wire service should have pointed out explicitly that his implication is false — if no action is taken, the trust fund is projected to be able to pay out about 73 percent of promised benefits in 2042 (declining gradually to 68 percent in 2078). Given how often this canard has been put out there over the last few months (see here and here), it should be easy to do.

Update: Media Matters notes that the Washington Post reprinted McCain’s quote without any clarification at all. For shame!

John Edwards sent an email (PDF) to supporters today that made this claim:

While poverty is all around us, the first step in eradicating it is to shine a bright light on it. Here’s what we know: 36 million Americans live in poverty today, which is 13 million more than 30 years ago.

However, if you look at the Census poverty statistics that are the likely source of this data (lagged to 2003), you’ll see that Edwards is playing an obvious statistical trick. The percentage of the population in poverty in 2003 was 12.5%, virtually identical to the 11.1% in 1973 — the difference is that the US population increased from 208 million to 288 million over that time period. Is it frustrating that poverty hasn’t gone down? Of course. But there hasn’t been a dramatic increase in poverty, as Edwards implies.

FactCheck.org has published another terrible article about AARP and Social Security. (For details on the last one, see my previous post.)

This time, Factcheck focuses on metaphors used by the AARP in a recent ad. The obvious problem, however, is that metaphors are deeply subjective. There are no facts to check – the whole issue comes down to a matter of perspective. It’s exactly the sort of ideological issue that we went to great lengths to not take a position on at Spinsanity. (We did analyze the most outrageous PR-influenced attempts to twist language and manipulate the public, but this ad hardly falls into that category.)

Here’s the AARP ad in question:

Plumber: Yep, looks like the drain is clogged. Only one way to fix it. We’re going to have to tear down the entire house.
Woman: What?!!!
Plumber: Go ahead, guys!
On Screen: Demolition crew wrecks house with sledgehammer, jackhammer, backhoe, wrecking ball.
Announcer: If you had a problem with the sink, you wouldn’t tear down the entire house. So why dismantle Social Security when it can be fixed with just a few moderate changes?
Reform is necessary, but diverting money into private accounts is just too drastic, could add up to two trillion dollars in more debt and lead to huge benefit cuts. For more visit AARP.org. Paid for by the AARP.

That’s it. Pretty outrageous, huh?

Here’s Factcheck’s analysis — subjective claim #1:

Comparing Social Security’s problems to a clogged sink understates matters considerably. In fact, as we’ve often noted, the current Social Security tax structure can’t support all the benefits that have been promised. According to Social Security’s chief actuary, the current level of Social Security taxes will be able to support only 73 percent of the currently promised level of benefits when the systems trust funds become exhausted. That’s currently projected to happen in the year 2042. A new report is due out later this week, which may revise those numbers up or down slightly. Either way, that’s more serious than a clogged  drain.

Note that this depends entirely on accepting the assumptions underlying the 2042 estimate. The Congressional Budget Office projects the trust fund won’t be exhausted until 2052. And if the economy does well, the date could get pushed back even further. There’s just no right answer to whether the “clogged sink” is the right metaphor or not.

Subjective claim #2:

The ad further claims that the current system “can be fixed with just a few moderate changes.” In fact, fixing the current system will require some fairly sizeable tax increases, cuts in future benefit levels, or some combination of the two. For details, see our earlier article  and decide for yourself how moderate such changes seem.

  

This all depends on how you define “fix” and “moderate,” as I explained earlier. Why we should assume that Factcheck’s definitions of those terms are the right answers?

Subjective claims #3-5:

Creation of individual accounts would be a big change, but would hardly “dismantle” Social Security as the AARP ad claims. As proposed by the President, the individual accounts would be voluntary. Those who choose not to participate would remain in the current system, and so would all who are currently age 55 or older.

Also, individual accounts wouldn’t by themselves “lead to huge benefit cuts” as the ad claims. Future benefit levels will indeed have to be reduced unless taxes are increased to pay for them, something the President has said he’s against. But that’s true regardless of whether or not individual accounts are created.

It is also true that those who choose to participate in individual accounts would have to accept a reduction in the level of their own guaranteed future benefits, but that would be their choice, and it would be in exchange for the chance to get a higher level of future benefits overall should the investments in the accounts yield returns higher than three percent a year above inflation.

Again, note the highly subjective definition of “dismantle.” But the middle paragraph above really takes the cake. It is true that “individual accounts wouldn’t by themselves ‘lead to huge benefit cuts’” and that “Future benefit levels will indeed have to be reduced unless taxes are increased to pay for them … regardless of whether or not individual accounts are created,” but both statements are almost willfully obscure.

Let’s review. The AARP stated that private accounts “could … lead to huge benefit cuts.” The operative word is could. In fact, this is a reasonable claim, although AARP doesn’t back it up in the ad. First, President Bush has explicitly proposed private accounts as a sweetener to make it possible to change the way benefits are calculated for everyone (see the Wehner memo if you don’t believe me). That calculation would have the effect of reducing benefits from what was originally promised by as much as 40%. It is true that we could create private accounts and not implement benefit cuts, but that would make the situation worse, as Wehner himself points out.

Moreover, private accounts require massive borrowing that will put enormous pressure on the federal budget over the next several decades. That borrowing will make income tax increases more likely, and make it harder to increase Social Security revenue through higher payroll taxes. If more of the burden of alleviating the shortfall has to be borne by benefit cuts, then the potential for “huge” ones is higher.

The culmination of the absurdity comes when Factcheck purports to try to propose the “correct” metaphor:

Both sides are using exaggerated metaphors in this debate. Where AARP presents Social Security as having nothing worse than a stopped-up drain, the other side has depicted  it as a doomed Titanic about the strike an iceberg and sink to the bottom. Neither picture is accurate.

What would be an accurate metaphor? Since others are having so much fun with this, we’ll give it a try.

The kitchen-sink metaphor is wrong because Social Security’s problems grow steadily worse over time and threaten the entire benefit structure. The entire house is crumbing from within, so delaying a solution only makes the eventual repair more difficult and expensive. We would compare the problem to a termite infestation rather than a clogged sink or a sudden collision with an iceberg.

Furthermore, individual accounts by themselves don’t constitute a wrecking ball as the AARP implies, any more than individual accounts alone would save the system as the President’s supporters claim. It is true as the AARP ad says that substantial borrowing would be needed to create such accounts. So we would characterize the creation of such accounts as adding a new wing to that termite-infested house, while taking out a new mortgage to pay for it. The new wing may or may not be worth the expense, but the termites are still there.

We’re not sure that the image of building a new addition to a slowly deteriorating home would make a very good TV ad, but it would give a better picture of reality than either sides’ ads have shown so far.

I don’t even know what to say about this. It demeans the term to call it factchecking. What a mess.

According to the LA Times, Bill Frist’s home video-based “diagnosis” of Terry Schiavo has drawn a rebuke from medical experts:

Frist’s comments raised eyebrows in the medical community.

Although there are no official rules against the practice, ethicists said, it is generally considered unprofessional for a doctor to make or question a diagnosis on the basis of incomplete information.

“In general, physicians would consider it unprofessional for doctors to take clinical stands on issues without adequate clinical data,” said Dr. Neil Wenger, head of the ethics committee at UCLA Medical Center.

William J. Winslade, a bioethicist and law professor at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, was more direct. Frist “has no business making a diagnosis from a video,” he said.

In his comments on the Senate floor, Frist said that based on the videotape of Schiavo and court records, she “does respond” to outside stimuli. “That footage, to me, depicted something very different than persistent vegetative state.”

A Frist spokeswoman said Monday that the majority leader was not offering a diagnosis of Schiavo. “What he’s saying is, it seems like there is a lot of gray area about whether she is in a persistent vegetative state,” said Amy Call.

Michael Williams, chair of the ethics committee of the American Academy of Neurology, was among those taking exception to Frist’s comments.

“For Dr. Frist to make a statement like that — it’s like me making an off-the-cuff statement about a heart transplant patient,” said Williams, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.

From Tuesday’s Washington Post, here’s Rep. Bill Thomas (R-CA):

“The one thing people should not be concerned about is that in creating personal accounts you are going to exercise any significant risk,” Thomas said at a town hall meeting at California State University at Bakersfield. “It will be structured in a way that you can get the benefit without a serious risk of losing money.”

And here’s the Post’s report on an analysis of Bush’s plan by Yale economist Robert Schiller:

Nearly three-quarters of workers who opt for Social Security personal accounts under President Bush’s “default” investment option are likely to earn less in benefits than those who stay with the traditional Social Security system, a prominent finance economist has concluded.

A new paper by Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller found that under Bush’s default “life-cycle accounts,” which shift assets from stocks to bonds over a worker’s lifetime, nearly a third of workers would bring in less in benefits than if they remained in the traditional system. That analysis is based on historical rates of return in the United States. Using global rates of return, which Shiller says more closely track future conditions, life-cycle portfolios could be expected to fall short of the traditional system’s returns 71 percent of the time.

No serious risk of losing money, huh? Of course, Thomas left himself an out because he can claim that he meant a negative return on investment, rather than lower benefits than those offered by traditional Social Security. But it’s still deceptive as hell.

Back at Spinsanity, I wrote a lot about the way Republicans used the phrase “political hate speech” to try to silence criticism of President Bush by equating it with racism (here and especially here). This is one of the many PR-influenced tactics that politicians and pundits now use to try to achieve a blatantly undemocratic goal: suppressing speech they don’t like.

Now Democracy for America, the influential liberal group founded by Howard Dean and run by his brother Jim, has picked up on the term. DFA executive director Tom Hughes sent an email (PDF) to supporters today (also posted on the DFA blog) that was as blatant an attempt to silence speech as I’ve seen in a long time:

A couple of weeks ago a right-wing front group called “USA Next” made national news when it started its anti-Social Security campaign with a bigoted, hateful ad. Immediately, tens of thousands of DFA grassroots supporters created a backlash so strong that USA Next spent the next few weeks licking its wounds.

But now they’re back. USA Next is set to go on the air with its political hate speech in the next two weeks. Please act now — petition media outlets to keep bigotry and distortions off the air:

http://www.democracyforamerica.com/StopUSANext

First of all, it’s questionable whether the original USA Next ad, which attacked the AARP by falsely suggesting that the group supports gay marriage, constituted hate speech. Though it clearly appealed to anti-gay sentiment, it didn’t say anything explicitly hateful.

But it doesn’t actually matter what you think of the original ad. Watch how this works — in the online petition, DFA leverage a single example of disreputable speech to condemn all forthcoming USA Next ads as “hate speech” and demand that they be kept off the air:

Stop ‘USA Next’

The right-wing fringe has declared war on Social Security — and USA Next, a front group for radical conservatives who want to dismantle Social Security, has led the fight with bigoted, hate-filled ads.

You won’t be surprised to hear who they hired to publicize their efforts: the same team of hatchet men that ran the swift boat smear campaign against John Kerry. Now they are targeting the AARP, a group that millions of seniors rely on to defend their interests.

We must stop these people … now.

This petition will be delivered by DFA Meetup groups to every TV station that tries to air the USA Next attack ads.

I demand that you keep political hate speech and false claims off the air.

Signed, (…)

Note the claims being made in the petition above: (1) USA Next poses a dire threat that must be “stopped” by silencing the group and (2) that DFA already knows that the as-yet-unpublicized USA Next ads contain “political hate speech” and “false claims.”

This is exactly what Republicans did in 2003-2004 — use isolated examples of outrageous attacks on President Bush to try to delegitimize all criticism of him. Ironically enough, DFA is working right out of the GOP playbook, but they’re not alone. In fact, they’re just one of many liberal groups that are increasingly adapting the worst tactics of conservative spinners (see the conclusion to All the President’s Spin for more). The potential for the downward spiral of distortion grows every day…

The political abuse of statistics continues.

In an action alert sent to its email list today, the liberals at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting claim that Iraqi civilian casualty estimates of 16,500-20,000 offered by the network newscasts, including NBC’s Brian Williams, were too low:

NBC’s Williams seemed to be referring to an estimate of Iraqi civilian casualties that none of the networks saw fit to mention: According to a study published in the respected British medical journal The Lancet (10/29/04), about 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the war. The majority of deaths were due to violence, primarily as a result of U.S.-led military action. One of the researchers on the project said that the estimate is likely a conservative one (New York Times, 10/29/04). It’s certainly a more scientific estimate than the Iraq Body Count figure cited by ABC, which is, as that project’s website notes, a “compilation of civilian deaths that have been reported by recognized sources…. It is likely that many if not most civilian casualties will go unreported by the media.”

Saying that “about 100,000 Iraqi civilians” have died vastly overstates the precision of the number that was found. As Fred Kaplan explained on Slate, the 95% confidence interval of the Lancet study extended from 8,000-196,000 deaths. That means that the researchers are 95% sure that the true figure lies between those two vastly different numbers. While the Iraqi Body Count estimates may indeed be too low, can you blame the networks from avoiding such a shaky estimate?

My advice: don’t trust FAIR (or any of the supposed media watchdogs) without checking the facts yourself.

(For more, see Ben Fritz’s 2002 Spinsanity column on the pattern of distortions from FAIR and the Media Research Center.)

Update 3/22: As a result of an Instapundit link, there’s a very useful comment thread below that’s worth reading and includes a number of helpful links. A few key points: (1) Many analysts believe Fred Kaplan’s article is deeply flawed. I was citing it mainly to support my claim that the study has a very wide confidence interval. That is correct. His other critiques of the methodology used in the Lancet study may not be valid, so I’ve deleted a statement referring to them above. (2) Critics point out that the breadth of the confidence interval does not mean that each point within it is equally likely. That is also correct, and I did not mean to imply otherwise. As I wrote in a comment posted below, I would have no objection to the networks saying that the Lancet study suggests that the total casualty figure is higher than 20,000 (and possibly much higher), but the wide confidence intervals attributable to the cluster sampling survey design make it understandable that they didn’t. (3) The study estimates the total number of “excess deaths,” not civilian deaths. Thus FAIR’s claim is doubly wrong. Finally, here is a link to the Lancet study (PDF).

I’ve been offline and/or traveling for most of the weekend, so I haven’t weighed in on the shameless exploitation of the Schaivo case by Congressional Republicans. But to make an obvious point, it is indeed shameless.

Maybe the most ridiculous aspect of the whole charade has been people pretending to diagnose Schiavo from afar. Here’s Amy Sullivan laying the beatdown on Bill Frist at WashingtonMonthly.com for abusing his medical authority:

STOP THIS MAN BEFORE HE DIAGNOSES AGAIN….I wasn’t going to comment on the Terry Schiavo case, mostly because it seems that any attention just feeds directly into what conservatives are hoping to achieve: a trumped-up culture war. (See Ed Kilgore’s comments for my general take on the issue.) But Senator Frist’s recent diagnosis—via a home-made video, it’s important to note–that Schiavo is not actually in a persistent vegetative state, compels me to write…

[W]hat’s really appalling about Frist’s latest I’m-not-a-neurologist-but-I-play-one-in-the-Senate routine is that he does this all the time. For at least eight years, Frist has been making medical pronouncements on all manner of medical issues outside his speciality (he’s a heart surgeon), and his message is always the same: You can’t trust all those other doctors, but you can trust me because I am a doctor.

Last December, when asked by George Stephanopoulos whether HIV could be transmitted through saliva or tears, Frist refused to say that it could not, stalling three times before finally admitting, “It would be very hard.” That’s putting it mildly. In October 2001, after a letter containing anthrax was sent to Senator Daschle’s office, Frist assured his fellow senators that the anthrax wasn’t powerful enough to kill anyone, even though several people had already died in Florida and postal workers who handled the letter in D.C. subsequently died. And in 1997, when the Senate was debating the “Partial-Birth Abortion Ban,” Frist claimed on the Senate floor that D&X, the abortion procedure they sought to ban, was a “rogue procedure” that was not taught in medical schools, a claim that would come as a surprise to many teaching hospitals.

Frist is a doctor, yes. But he is not a neurologist, he is not an infectious disease specialist, he is not a biological agent expert, and he is not an obstetrician. He uses his “Dr.” title as a smokescreen to make politically-motivated pronouncements. The only reason he gets away with it is that people are intimidated by his certainty, reminded (because he repeats it all the time) that he is the Senate’s only physician.

Except he’s not. Now that Tom Coburn is the junior senator from Oklahoma, Frist is merely the Senate’s only not insane physician. Who are you or I to question his medical judgment? When it comes to diagnosing neurological function on the basis of watching a home video for an hour, you and I are just about as qualified as Frist.

Update 3/21: Good news! The public isn’t buying it at all. See this ABC News poll, which shows overwhelming majorities opposed to Congress getting involved to keep Schiavo alive (via Think Progress and Kevin Drum).

Update 3/21: The national media has noticed that Bush signed a law in Texas that is blatantly inconsistent with his stand on Schiavo. (Bonus highlight if you read the story: Scott McClellan denying this obvious fact.) Also, don’t miss Dahlia Lithwick’s devastating article about the GOP intervention into the case on Slate.

Update 3/22: The Note claims that the law isn’t inconsistent with Bush’s stand on Schiavo because it offered increased protection compared with previous law. Well, so what? It still would have allowed Schiavo to be unplugged. I’m unconvinced.

Correction 3/23: The New York Times completely botched the second quote above, which according to a correction published today was (a) incorrectly attributed to Bill Kristol and (b) omitted the part where the speaker, Fred Barnes, attributed his views to a neurologist who spoke wtih Frist. As such, I’ve deleted the paragraph referring to Kristol and taken him out of the headline. Apologies for the error.

Update 3/23: See also the Washington Post’s article on Frist’s boundary-crossing.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a series of Seinfeld-esque observations on human behavior, but why is everyone walking around with their cell phone earpieces in even when they’re not on the phone? I see this a lot now, especially at airports. Maybe people want to look important, but to me they look ridiculous — like walking telemarketers, or OfficeMax employees. (If you have ideas on what’s going on with this, definitely leave a comment.)

Jon Chait asks the question in the latest New Republic:

I have always believed that Ari Fleischer is a duplicitous genius. During his tenure as White House press secretary, he elevated the mundane practice of misleading reporters and avoiding their questions into an art form…

I’m not sure exactly what I expected from Fleischer’s new book, Taking Heat. I hoped it would offer some insight into the mind of a brilliant con man. At the very least, I figured it would be interesting as propaganda. But it was maddeningly dull propaganda… This is the mastermind I had held in such awe?

While I was slogging through the book, I happened to be e-mailing with a conservative I know. My correspondent thought my Ari-as-virtuoso theory was silly: “When Ari worked on the Hill he was widely considered to be a moron even by other press secretaries, who are mostly a bunch of ignorant dolts themselves.” But how, I asked, could he have run circles around the Washington press corps? “Ari is a genius like the [Peter] Sellers character in Being There,” he replied. “He was too stupid and too ignorant to know he was telling lies.”

He examines a press conference transcript of particular Fleischer genius, and concludes:

When I first saw it, I thought it was a tour de force of propaganda–a master dissembler effortlessly running circles around his bewildered and overmatched adversaries. But it’s also consistent with the Chauncey Gardiner hypothesis. Perhaps Fleischer was simply spouting legislative jargon in a random, nonsensical fashion–foiling logical queries by utterly failing to grasp them. It’s impossible to tell.

Dumb Fleischer and Genius Fleischer are observationally equivalent!

To me, this is like the question of whether Reagan was dumb. In some ways, he was very poorly informed for a president, but he was also a brilliant communicator, and his lack of knowledge often aided him in spinning more effectively. The true answer, then, is more subtle. I suspect the same is true with Fleischer.

(By the way, Chait’s 2002 profile of Fleischer is a classic deconstruction of arguably the greatest spinner in modern Washington history. Unfortunately, it appears to be behind the TNR Digital firewall.)