So what’s new in DuhSantistan?

Oh I have no idea about any of that. The narrow claim that I was addressing was that more fact checks must indicate a negative bias. I believe this claim requires justification.

 

Fact-checkers were the worst during ‘Covid.’ Their sole purpose was to intimidate contra-government talking points. They were in fact government-sanctioned disinformation.

 

Doesn't require justification at all. Proof is this site fact checks R's more than D's. 4 different comparisons. All in favor of R's. Since you think it isn't a negative bias, then look at the number of trues compared to falses by D's versus R's. I'm sure you will be surprised to know according to down the middle politifact that R's lie more than D's LOL.

 

Especially when they debunked myths like the efficacy of an anti-malarial drug and an anti-parasitic drug as effective treatments for Covid.

 

All claims require justification. I would have thought you to be with me on that.

And I never said anything indicating that I believe that there is no negative bias. I was simply agreeing that your conclusion doesn’t necessarily follow from your premise.

And when assessing whether more fact checks is indicative of bias, we cannot use the existence of more fact checks as a proof of the bias. That just assumes the very thing we were trying to test in the first place.

The new test you are now proposing of comparing the average ratings of each side is a bit more promising, I think, but it requires that we overcome at least two non-trivial methodological challenges: 1) identifying properly sized and matched samples for comparison, eg just comparing Trump to Beto will obviously not be very meaningful, and 2) producing an appropriate null hypothesis, eg should we assume a “non-biased” fact check system will always recover the same average truthiness for the two parties? This could be a fun project, but it definitely wouldn’t be easy.

 

Oh really?

Desantis seems like a typical GOP hack at best, one who has maybe learned a few things from the unprecedented skulduggery of Trump.

 

An appointee to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ new oversight board in control of Disney’s special tax district called homosexuality “evil” last year and shared a baseless conspiracy theory that tap water could be making more people gay.

DeSantis appointee to new Disney oversight board suggested tap water could turn people gay | CNN Politics

 

This is why I was saying we need to tell Ron red tide makes people gay

 

Disagree. The easiest example is that somehow politico decided to fact check DeSantis's book but not one from our President or VP. That tells me all I need to know. My justification was already answered, probably shouldn't have said I don't need justification. But to me this is the biggest problem with sites like politico. They are "trying" to act like they are down the middle but their actions show they are not even close to down the middle. I can't think of a single reason to fact check DeSantis's book but not the one from our current President and VP and doubt anyone else can come up with a valid reason.

 

Nah. I think the vast majority of people in Congress suck and are entirely self serving. But they don't play for the same team. And it's something I have to live with daily in my job. At bare minimum, judges matter a lot, especially these days when Congress doesn't do shit. And the two parties put VASTLY different people on the bench.

 

They do play for the same team, team capital. But that team has different masters to serve, and those masters are often in competition and conflict. But when it matters they usually come together (to bailout the economy or fund the military machine).

 

Finding this one data point sounds to me like a very low bar to prove a persistent bias. One of the journalistic standards is to always seek comment from all parties before publishing. I’d definitely want to seek Politico’s comment before just assuming that this was a leftist plot. It also seems like a large inductive leap to use one of Politico’s investigations into a single individual as evidence of persistent biases in Poltifact’s checking of other politicians. Are those two companies even related?

I think if this is all the evidence we need, then we could probably prove many different, and probably contradictory, biases among different organizations. If you review the published scientific studies of media bias, you’ll find that they are more consistent with a holistic approach, like the one I was trying to outline above.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-040811-115123

 

It's not just one data point. I compared DeSantis to Newsom, Trump to Biden, Sanders to Romney and then the fact DeSantis's book being fact checked to 2 books by Biden and Harris who are far more important and famous than DeSantis. When looking at those 4 data points, it is painfully obvious that politico is far left leaning. Can you point out where politico leans right or down the middle?

 

Yeah, back to "only Republican's lie" garbage. Back to partisan takes LOL.

 

The judges appointed by the Democrats do lean more towards the corporatist side than I'd like. Although, to be fair, Biden has actually done a better job of appointing people who aren't former corporate lawyers or prosecutors. But putting that aside, Democratic appointees interpret voting rights broadly, see the Constitution as protecting LGBTQ folks, don't do mental gymnastics to rule against people of color who have been harmed by the government, and interpret our civil liberties in a far broader manner than Republicans (except for the Second Amendment).

 

You do that just fine all by yourself.

 

I haven’t attempted my own analysis, but I’d want it to answer the challenges outlined above. I am not convinced that your study does so.

First, are we talking about Politico or Politifact? Politifact describes that processes here, which state outright that they are more likely to fact check politicians in power. And since they are located in Florida, it wouldn’t be too surprising if they were more likely to fact check politicians in this state.

For your attempt at matching, first I would suggest that the sample size is fairly small. The noise to signal ratio can be quite high with an n of 3. Also the comparisons themselves come with likely confounders. Eg:

1. DeSantis vs Newsome - the Florida thing
2. Trump vs Biden - Trump was president longer, and I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that he much more frequently made verifiable claims than Biden or almost anyone ever
3. Sanders vs Romney - As noted above, Romney was once the Republican’s nominee, and Sanders is only somewhat even a democrat.

I don’t know how any large of an effect that any of these issues might have, let alone any of the unseen confounders and the impact of random noise, but these kinds of issues are why this type or study is so challenging to conduct. And why the results of which should never be viewed uncritically.

Personally, I do think we have some reason to believe that such organizations are likely biased to the left (notably the censuses of the personal politics of the reporters that work for those organizations), but it’s always difficult to confidently ascribe particular actions to bias. Just as it is with police actions allegedly caused by racial bias.