Do We Have Fact Checkers or Spin Spoilers?

PolitiFact “fact checkers” may actually be “spin spoilers,” according to Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. He said that the so-called fact checkers “barely touch the talking heads on cable television anymore” although they once had “a serious tilt against the Fox News hosts in prime time.” However, the “fact checkers” had their knives out for conservative CNN analyst Scott Jennings for his “tough words about Medicaid beneficiaries.” 

“There are like almost 5 million able-bodied people on Medicaid who simply choose not to work,” Jennings said July 1 on “CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip.” “They spend six hours a day socializing and watching television. And if you can’t get off grandma’s couch and work, I don’t want to pay for your welfare.”

Abby Phillip leapt on that immediately, questioning where Jennings found these numbers. Before we get into the “facts” at hand, let’s investigate PolitiFact’s target selection. There is no page on PolitiFact for Abby Phillip. There is one other “fact check” on Phillip’s show, a “True” rating for liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow.

There is no page on PolitiFact for former MSNBC weekend host Tiffany Cross, who smeared U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Phillip’s show on July 8: “We are normalizing a government agency disappearing people. We’re talking about it like it’s no big deal that they are kidnapping people and transporting them to concentration camps, both domestic and foreign.” She said “concentration camps” four times.

New York Post writer Kelly Jane Torrance tried to interrupt her and tell her these terms were inaccurate and insensitive to Jews, but Cross just kept rolling – and Phillip said nothing, unlike when Jennings makes a conservative point.

As usual, the PolitiFact scribe on the Jennings case, Loreben Tuquero, rounded up a congal line of liberal experts – two from the Harvard T.H. Chan School for Public Health, as well as the Brookings Institution, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Urban Institute. None of them are assigned a label. But Jennings cited the “conservative” American Enterprise Institute.

This is one of many ways PolitiFact reads exactly like every other liberal media outlet that pretends that liberals are the most nonpartisan, independent experts you can find.

Tuquero pointed out that the Harvard folks nitpicked Scott’s “almost 5 million” number, claiming the Congressional Budget Office didn’t say all these people “chose not to work,” but that they would lose Medicaid coverage due to work requirements. This is a distinction without much of a difference, but liberal “fact-checkers” pounce anyway.

What Jennings said that really offended the ears at PolitiFact was that Medicaid recipients are sitting around watching TV for six hours a day. Did he mean that as a statement of fact, or was he making a rhetorical point? Because people make a lot of rhetorical points on CNN that don’t get “fact-checked.”

The experts t PolitiFact tried to aggressively dismiss the idea that there were many “able-bodied” Medicaid recipients. Tuquero concluded that “the majority are women” who have “a high school education or less” with the “average age” of 41. This state raised a question about the expectation of “women over 40 [being] expected to meet work requirements.”

Graham concluded that liberal outlets have “spin spoilers” more than “fact checkers” who are “offended by the tone of conservative commentary” that must be discredited “even if the points are rhetorical.” The obvious conclusion is: “Conservatives probably shouldn’t impose work requirements or suggest people who don’t meet them are lazy.”