A critique of Wikipedia’s treatment of the “Brooks Brothers riot”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot

Completeness: D
At minimum, a fair account of the Brooks Brothers riot must acknowledge two competing narratives. Ideally, it will not favor the obviously false narrative over the true narrative. The introductory paragraph contains grains of truth and finishes by repeating unsubstantiated claims of violence and encourages the reader to commit the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: “After demonstrations and acts of violence, local officials shut down the recount early.”

The “Background” section of the article does acknowledge Miami-Dade decided to limit its recount to the nearly 11,000 undervotes and move the recount to a smaller room on the 19th floor to speed up sorting out the undervotes from the other ballots. Unfortunately, the significance of those choices gets lost when the story lacks mention of 102.166 of the 2000 Florida Statutes, requiring the board at that stage to recount all ballots and stipulating that “Any manual recount shall be open to the public.” It’s fair to note that the media almost totally failed to mention those legal requirements while constructing its narrative about the Brooks Brothers riot, and Wikipedia’s editing rules forbid reaching conclusions not specifically spelled out in media reports. But the media failure was almost total. Not total. The Talk page has an editor rejecting John Podhoretz’s New York Post story mentioning the illegality of Miami-Dade’s actions as justification for including the text of the law in the article.

It’s impossible to understand the Brooks Brothers riot without the knowledge that Miami-Dade was skirting Florida election law on Nov. 22, 2000.

Competency: D

The article would count as superficially competent as to following Wikipedia policy if not for the resistance to the inclusion of information supporting the true narrative about the Brooks Brothers riot. The article cites Paul Gigot’s story in the Wall Street Journal. And Gigot did accurately invoke the law: “GOP lawyers also pointed out that the law--recall that quaint concept--required that any recount include all ballots.” That line should have opened the door to including the text of the relevant statute in the article. But it didn’t.

Scholarship: C

I cut Wikipedia a break on the scholarship because of its taboo on original research. On the other hand, I reached out to an editor asking for help in following Wikipedia policy to tell the true story about the riot and was asked to never again attempt contact. That could count as an attitude resistant to thorough scholarship. The weakness at Wikipedia apes the failure of the media at large: The best reporting on the Brooks Brothers riot took place during the first 24 hours or so. Later reporting settled in on a false narrative that dominated virtually all later reporting. A focus on day-of news reports and video from the event likely would have led to the truth.

Neutrality D

Wikipedia’s fundamental rules often make neutrality impossible, case in point. Wikipedia presents both sides as told by the skewed media lens. In truth, Miami-Dade was illegally restricting public access to the manual recount, the GOP protested, Miami-Dade relented in about an hour, and the county was put back to square one with a recount it could not possibly finish by the deadline. Those elements all occur in news reports of the event, but they’re buried by years of false narrative repetition.

Currency F

The key elements of the story were all there from the start. The resilience of the false narrative keeps the truth at bay. Editorial intransigence keeps Wikipedia from re-examining the early core facts and allowing the not “trusted” sources who got the story right to have the true narrative placed alongside the false narrative for fair comparison.

Simplicity: D

Simplicity here counts as the enemy of the truth, in that vague statements about the event, such as “the recount” when there was more than one recount method in Miami-Dade, end up failing to communicate accurately. On the other hand, the suppressed true narrative about the riot counts as a classic example of applying Ockham’s razor. The shaky traditional narrative needs things like Roger Stone machinations to power its explanations. The suppressed narrative explains everything simply, albeit it requires explaining how the third day of Miami-Dade’s recount differed from the first two days in terms of the applicable law.

Correction Sept. 9, 2026: Expunged a stray “re” from the lead paragraph.

The IFCN does not now inform the complainant whether it will forward the complaint to the assessor who reviews an organization’s compliance with IFCN standards. The IFCN doesn’t even publish any regular report providing transparency about its accountability system. We have two, at most, “annual transparency reports” from the IFCN since that publication was announced in 2020.’

The IFCN, likely in response to our efforts to hold the IFCN accountable, has instituted a limit of three complaints per year per complainant, ostensibly to reduce abuse of the system.

On May 29, 2026 Zebra Fact Check sent a formal complaint about PolitiFact to the International Fact-Checking Network. We noted PolitiFact had altered a transcript, resulting in a misleading narrative about President Trump. The elision failed to follow AP style, giving readers no clue at all PolitiFact had removed much of Mr. Trump’s answers to the journalist’s question, in effect changing his answer.

Altering the context contributed to PolitiFact treating Trump’s claim that Thom Tillis “no longer a Senator” by hiding an obvious clue that Trump was not making a literal claim.

In accord with IFCN guidelines, our email complaint identified the problems and their correspondence with two parts of Code of Principles the IFCN identifies as hard requirements. It included attachments showing two different version of the relevant transcript as well as .pdf images of emails showing our effort to bring the issue to PolitiFact’s attention and PolitiFact’s standard acknowledgment of receipt. The text of our email includes a hyperlink to a page at the Internet Archive Wayback machine tracking changes to the PolitiFact fact check, showing no apparent attempt to correct the problems.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for example, posted to X “Trump’s hand-picked Supreme Court is silencing Black voters.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) posted “Trump's Supreme Court is dragging us back to the dark and ugly days of Jim Crow.”

These and other claims were flagged on X using #PolitiFactThis, a hashtag PolitiFact has said it follows to help find fact check topics.

Disclosure: Zebra Fact Check applied the #PolitiFactThis hashtag to the listed claims, plus a few others.

Was PolitiFact avoiding obviously sketchy claims from Democrats deliberately? That’s the hypothesis that first appealed to us, but after reading PolitiFact’s fact check of Republican Byron Donalds’ explanation of the origins of the Voting Rights Act, it more appears that PolitiFact takes for granted that the SCOTUS gutted the Voting Rights Act (bold emphasis added):

The 1965 Voting Rights Act has long been considered a landmark Civil Rights era achievement that aimed to end discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote.

But a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling largely gutted the law, and many Republicans — including U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the GOP frontrunner in the race for Florida governor — celebrated the court’s decision.

Those two paragraphs open the fact check of Donalds. Note carefully what PolitiFact did. It correctly noted the VRA attempted to end discriminatory practices against Blacks’ ability to vote. Right after, PolitiFact states as fact that the SCOTUS “largely gutted” the VRA.

Whether our readers agree or disagree with that statement, we aim to show PolitiFact had no business claiming it.

See how PolitiFact helpfully gave us a hotlink highlighting the word “gutted”? That URL leads to an opinion article in The New Yorker. What makes a fact checker think that serves as an appropriate anchor for a key claim in a fact check? The New Yorker has the story paywalled, though it claims registering provides access. I say “claims” because we registered and were only able to glimpse the story before it was replaced with the announcement that our window was closing. That happened a number of times. That means it’s tough to verify whether the opinion piece nails PolitiFact’s claim down as a fact. But aside from that, PolitiFact sows its own seeds of doubt.

The Mismatch Between the VRA’s Purpose and the ‘Gutted’ Claim

We noted that PolitiFact explained the original aim of the VRA. Later in the fact check PolitiFact offered more specifics:

The Voting Rights Act was created to combat discriminatory practices against Black Americans who tried to vote, including literacy and property tests, grandfather clauses, poll taxes, voter roll purges, intimidation and violence.

PolitiFact’s logic doesn’t fit.

If the SCOTUS “largely gutted” the VRA, shouldn’t we expect some specific erosion of one or more of the protections PolitiFact says the VRA was intended to establish?

Did the SCOTUS open the door for literary and property tests? Poll taxes? Violence? Any of it?

PolitiFact offered not a shred of evidence that’s the case.

The SCOTUS decision means government attempts to use racial gerrymandering will receive strict scrutiny when they come before the courts, making the actions much harder to justify. And it said racial gerrymandering shall not serve as an appropriate means of implementing the Voting Rights Act.

PolitiFact doesn’t mention it, though it’s loosely implied in the rating Donalds received, but the Voting Rights Act doesn’t address gerrymandering. Reading the high court’s decision, which isn’t overlong, explains it.

“Racist Gerrymandering”

We didn’t recall ever seeing the term “racist gerrymander” in a news story before. The term “racial gerrymander” occurs commonly, though, likely stemming from its neutral connotation. “Racist gerrymander” counts as a term of moral judgment and thus should not occur in objective journalism unless it’s coming from a quotation.

“Racist gerrymandering” occurs three times in PolitiFact’s story, likely intended to distinguish the approved practice of using racial gerrymandering to increase Black and Democrat representation in Congress from the disapproved practice of deliberately diluting Black votes.

Diluting non-Black votes to benefit Democrats is okay, you see. It’s a racial gerrymander, not a racist gerrymander.

The Donalds fact check serves as a textbook case of allowing ideology to suffuse ostensibly neutral journalism. It’s appropriate to fact check whether the Supreme Court’s decision “largely gutted” the VRA, not present it as fact backed by an opinion article.

It seems PolitiFact avoids fact-checking whether the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act simply because PolitiFact uncritically regards it as true.

Trump’s claim received a “False” rating.

Sanders’ claim received a “Mostly False” rating.

In both cases the politicians’ use of tense drove the rating. Senator Thom Tillis would stay a member of the Senate presumably through the end of his current term, so the tense of Trump’s claim jumped the gun.

The Sanders case showed a similar disregard for tense. Sanders said 15 million Americans lost healthcare as a result of the GOP “Big Beautiful Bill,” whereas the CBO estimate providing the bulk of that number came from a 10-year projection. PolitiFact said “That’s premature.”

But PolitiFact could have easily justified using the same reasoning in both cases. PolitiFact could have said 15 million haven’t yet lost health coverage and awarded Sanders a “False” rating. Or PolitiFact could have said there was “an element of truth” to Trump’s claim, Tillis leaving the Senate, and awarded Trump’s claim a “Mostly False” rating instead of the “False” rating it received. The Truth-O-Meter’s “element of truth,” lies in the eye of the beholder, that being PolitiFact’s “Star Chamber” group of editors that votes on the ratings.

It’s subjective.

There’s no fact or “element of truth” in either story to objectively move one rating to the other. Both statements were objectively false as to tense (ignoring other flaws in the Trump fact check)

”PolitiFact always justifies its ratings”

It’s a common refrain on Social Media that PolitiFact always justifies its ratings. We suppose that’s trivially true, but the proper test of a justification comes from its logic, cohesion and consistency. PolitiFact editors face an impossible task logically justifying subjective ratings. Subjective ratings by their nature transcend logic. Nobody needs a logical reason for preferring the color green as a matter of subjective taste.

PolitiFact will always produce examples like this until it abolishes its subjective rating system. And the examples will tend to unfairly harm the right/unfairly benefit the left until PolitiFact roots out its ideological bias.

PolitiFact had produced yet another fantastic example of fact-checking done poorly.

We fired off a correction request to PolitiFact, which so far has drawn the traditional non-response. But we noticed PolitiFact had partnered with WMUR in New Hampshire to create a video version of the fact check. Jacobson posted it to X.com.

The partnership offers us ample excuse to seek answers also from Steve Bottari, who put his own reputation in the basket with PolitiFact’s by hosting the segment.

We sent an email message to Bottari on April 23, 2026 with the subject line “PolitiFact and Jacobson massaged the transcript” (bold emphasis for material PolitiFact elided):

Dear Steve Bottari,

Did you get a chance to treat PolitiFact and Lou Jacobson to the skepticism WMUR9 lauds in its news policy?

PolitiFact doctored the transcript. Look at the source transcript PolitiFact linked and it says (bold emphasis for PolitiFact’s omission, see afters for explanation of grammatical inconsistencies):

Maria Bartiromo: “And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? Do you think Thom Tillis is going to give you a vote?

Donald Trump: “Well, we’re going to have to find out. He might not, but that’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a Senator.

It’s improper to take material out of the midst of what the audience sees as a transcript. The bold above and comments Trump made immediately after the rest of the transcript PolitiFact used made clear Trump understood Tillis will have a vote as senator on the Warsh nomination.

PolitiFact’s narrative suggests Trump has no idea Tillis is still a senator. PolitiFact and Jacobson try to emphasize that by contrasting the January comments where Trump said Tillis isn’t a senator but he added comments suggesting the reverse. But it was the same thing this time as it was in January. Trump literally said Tillis is no longer a senator before making remarks in apparent contradiction of his own claim.

Does a fact-checking reporter pick one side of the coin and give that a rating, or report both sides of the coin and note that “not a senator” probably isn’t meant literally? How about airbrushing the evidence to make it look like there’s only one side to the coin?

If you think PolitiFact and Jacobson (and you, in the video version) did defensible fact-checking I’d love to hear why you think so.

So far, it looks like Bottari will stick with the most common fact checker response to criticism: Ignore it.

We’ll update this item if Bottari offers any sort of response.

Afters: As noted above, the quoted transcript segment contains grammatical inconsistencies, specifically punctuation indicating the start of a quotation without any such punctuation indicating the end of the quotation. That’s on me, owing to carelessness. I should have stuck with something very close to the form of the source transcript, but decided to add quotation marks to enhance clarity. The effort to achieve clarity was undercut by my failure to use closing quotation marks for either Maria Bartiromo or Mr. Trump. The overall meaning comes through clear enough, but the result appears sloppy, and I could not fix it using “[sic]” without appearing to blame the problem on the original transcript. Hence this explanation.

Dear Truth-O-Meter,

Your April 15, 2026 fact check of President Trump commits a shocking style failure on the transcript serving as the basis of the fact check.

The fact check, while ostensibly offering a version of the linked source transcript, elides key portions of the transcript, leaving the audience without the clear evidence Mr. Trump knew Sen. Thom Tillis would, as senator, have an opportunity to vote on an expected upcoming confirmation hearing. Eliding the former of the two sections should have required an ellipsis under AP Style.

The writer and editors may have experienced confusion because of the rule against starting a quotation with an ellipsis. But that rule applies to a single quotation. The fact check leads readers to falsely believe they are reading a full transcript, which would count in toto as a quotation of your source. So there’s omitted material in the midst of that quotation with no cue to the reader.

And of course it was misleading to make the specific focus of the fact check whether Trump was aware Tillis remained active in the Senate when the context clearly shows he was aware.

Maria Bartiromo: “And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? Do you think Thom Tillis is going to give you a vote?

Donald Trump: “Well, we’re going to have to find out. He might not, but that’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a Senator.

Maria Bartiromo: “OK. On the on the AI thing --”

Donald Trump: “You know Thom Tillis is no longer a Senator, right? He quit.”

Maria Bartiromo: “Well, he’s on his way out.”

Donald Trump “Well, no, he quit, but he quit. And I think he doesn’t want the legacy of stopping a great -- a person who could be great. I think Kevin Warsh is going to be great. He doesn’t want the legacy of having an incompetent guy stay there for longer than is necessary. I know Thom Tillis, he’s a good man, I don’t think he’s going to hurt.”

The first part in bold was elided misleadingly using faulty AP Style.

The second part in bold was elided misleadingly. Together, both quotations would render moot the issue posed at the start of the fact check: “They can’t even agree on whether Tillis is still a senator.”

The evidence says both Tillis and Trump recognize Tillis has announced an intention to relinquish his seat in the Senate. And the evidence says both Tillis and Trump foresee Tillis having a say on the Kevin Warsh nomination.These truths do not dovetail with the narrative promoted by your fact check.

Please correct the false impressions created with the selective reporting of facts, and do observe proper AP style with your handling of the quotation/s.

--

Sincerely,

Bryan W. White

editor

zebrafactcheck.com

PolitiFact lists eleven state franchises on its website as of today: California, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

A graph should tell the story pretty well, such as the number of stories generated under each tag per year over the past five years. Though we’ll bear in mind PolitiFact National sprinkles in a story here and there and tags it as though it came from a franchise.

The graph, as expected, tells only part of the story.

All the graphs except one converge near the bottom of the chart in 2025. California’s the outlier, but PolitiFact National pumped California full of ratings from PolitiFact National. The bump in 2025 counts as an illusion.

There are essentially two active state franchises, New York and North Carolina. Jill Terreri Ramos creates the bulk of the content for PolitiFact New York. Paul Specht does the same for PolitiFact North Carolina.

PolitiFact Florida is PolitiFact National Jr now that Yacob Reyes no longer does most of its fact checks.

Some of the franchises represent partnerships with universities. Some of those maintain a type of activity, but it’s always been spotty. Iowa, Michigan and West Virginia count as examples of that.

As for this year, 2026, it’s early but we can expect the numbers to stay well below historical norms. Franchises like PolitiFact California and PolitiFact Texas are now effectively zombie franchises. They’re propped up by PolitiFact National to make them appear active. I’d be surprised if the zombie franchises still pay for the PolitiFact name.

PolitiFact has its franchises listed on a drop-down menu. Clicking on the name may lead to an informational block. What you get varies. The one for New York names its state partner. California’s got nothing. PolitiFact Wisconsin’s confirms its exit in November 2025.

We were scanning PolitiFact’s list of contributors to gauge the strength of its affiliate operations and failed to recognize the typical Wisconsin bylines. PolitiFact Wisconsin remains on PolitiFact’s list of affiliates, but the most recent story with the Wisconsin tag was from August 15, 2025. PolitiFact Wisconsin was credited with 18 stories in 2025, albeit bylines from Amy Sherman and Ciara O’Rourke hint at PolitiFact National seeding the output.

We credit PolitiFact Wisconsin with providing some of the statistical confirmation that bias affects PolitiFact’s average ratings. Early PolitiFact Wisconsin was tilted against Democrats for some reason in the early years.

These days, with the contributions from all PolitiFact franchises reduced to a collective trickle, the editorial voice of the “Truth-O-Meter” PolitiFact National “Star Chamber” (their term) reigns about as supremely as it did in 2007-2008 before PolitiFact welcomed its first franchise to the fold.

Still, the franchises let the cat out of the bag. Different “star chambers” produce different statistical trends.

RIP PolitiFact Wisconsin. Probably.

The automated process didn’t work in our case. A handful of posts appeared with the automated migration. The rest we loaded one by one as drafts, then published those one by one from first to last.

A note about the time stamps: The old website didn’t use timestamps more specific than the publish date. As a result, the a.m./p.m. timestamps are essentially made up. We just focused on making sure the posts appear in their original order.

Along the way we updated quite a few links and images. Some of the images may represent anachronisms. That is, the image may not have been designed at the time it appears in a post.

To cure the .pdf display problem that plagued the old website we’re turning emails into text and linking to the original document where disclosure ethics permit.

It’s not for lack of subject matter, though. Mainstream fact checkers still stink at what they do. The International Fact-Checking Network makes a farce of accountability. And the media seem resistant to our revisionist take on the Brooks Brothers riot, among other things.

No, this was just a matter of WordPress not necessarily migrating smoothly to Substack. I had to review, rewrite and manually transfer posts from over 10 years of publishing. The good news? That work is pretty much finished. Almost all my work from the WordPress Zebra Fact Check site now exists as unpublished drafts. Next I finalize editing the posts to work with the new format, then it’s a matter of publishing them to this site, backdating them to their original publish dates.

To all those who commented at the old site, thank you very much for participating. And whoever was saving my pages to the Internet Archive, I can’t thank you enough. In linking back to WordPress pages I don’t think I encountered a single one that hadn’t been archived.

I tried to update the links and tags, but for sure I missed quite a few. Especially the tags, because Substack often tired of allowing me to add new tags.

Forward, into the past! And once we’re caught up, new material.

Tellingly, when Adair talked about conservative accusations of bias he only mentioned one line of evidence (Chapter 9, Page 156):

Many conservatives said PolitiFact was biased. To reach that conclusion, critics could simply add up our Truth-O-Meter ratings.

Adair’s talking about the common approach of noting that PolitiFact treats Republicans more harshly than Democrats on its “Truth-O-Meter.” Republicans tend to get more of the harsh ratings like “False” and “Pants on Fire.”

In context, Adair went directly to the Lichter and Ostermeier studies as examples. Lichter’s arguably serves as a poor example of the approach Adair described. But of greater concern was Adair’s failure to mention other approaches.

PolitiFactBias.com has existed over a decade. It has published many dozens of fact check critiques and a number of studies. PolitiFact Bias has never adopted the approach Adair identified, and Adair could hardly be ignorant of this.

The “Pants on Fire” bias study

One long-running study from PolitiFact Bias led to two convincing sets of evidence showing PolitiFact’s liberal bias.

The Bias Measure

The study tracks PolitiFact’s “False” and “Pants on Fire” ratings. But the study focuses on percentages instead of raw numbers. Specifically, the study looks at the percentage of false (“False” plus “Pants on Fire”) statements rated “Pants on Fire” and looks at party differences.

Republicans, over PolitiFact’s entire history, are 34 percent more likely to have a false claim rated “Pants on Fire.” Why does that count as a bias measure? Because PolitiFact has never defined the two ratings in any objective way. PolitiFact says “False” claims are not true, and “Pants on Fire” claims are not true and also “ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous,” of course, does not count as any type of objective measure. A researcher might define it to make it so, but there’s no sign that has ever happened at PolitiFact. When PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan was put on the spot to describe the difference between the two rating she offered “(T)he line between ‘False’ and ‘Pants on Fire’ is just, you know, sometimes we decide one way and sometimes decide the other.”

And though we’d like to credit Adair with hyperbole on this, he has said “Lord knows the decision about a Truth-O-Meter rating is entirely subjective.”

Our study concludes that on this subjective decision PolitiFact exhibits a bias against Republicans. Were that 34 percent difference present across the board where bias might affect PolitiFact’s decisions, it might well cancel out the disparity Adair uses as his evidence for Republicans lying more.

The States Vary

The second evidence of PolitiFact’s bias came to our attention incidentally while doing the “Pants on Fire” study. For as long as it made sense, we tracked PolitiFact’s franchises individually. PolitiFact has had state franchises in various states for years, including PolitiFact Texas, PolitiFact Florida and PolitiFact Wisconsin.

PolitiFact National was fairly consistent with its ratios, but the state franchises varied widely. Some even showed an anti-Democrat bias in their “Pants on Fire” ratings.

We count that as a hard evidence of bias in PolitiFact’s ratings.

Notably, PolitiFact ironed out most of those differences over time by making it unclear when a state fact check was done by the staffers dedicated to that state. It is unlikely today that PolitiFact franchises provide their own “Star Chamber” of editors to decide “Truth-O-Meter” ratings.

The charts above, Fig. A and Fig. B, show the contributions of PolitiFact’s state franchises to its pool of false claims. The block representing PolitiFact National counts as a clear minority up through 2014. PolitiFact Wisconsin’s heavy contribution waned and started to mostly favor the Democrats after 2015.

Recall that Adair, without explaining why, limited the data set for use in his book to between January 2016 and June 2021. That window tends to exclude the years where some state operations mediated the marked bias of the rest of the organization.

Of course we’d love to see Adair’s explanation for picking the window he chose.

So, PolitiFact’s pattern of mistakes paints it as biased. Its preference for using the subjective “Pants on Fire” rating on (supposed) Republican falsehoods likewise shows its bias. And the variation from one PolitiFact franchise to the other in treatment of the “Pants on Fire” bias shows different patterns for the franchises.

These lines of evidence all support the hypothesis PolitiFact leans left. Was Adair ignorant of all this, or did he simply choose to ignore it? Neither alternative reflects well on a fact checker.

On August 30, 2024 the BBC published a story about Trump reversing on his support of a proposed “abortion rights” amendment. That amendment would have allowed abortion on demand up through the point of viability and in addition allowed abortion in any case and at any developmental stage where the service provider determined the procedure was medically necessary.

The BBC story failed to accurately describe the far-reaching effects of the amendment, and moreover called it false when Trump said Democrats wanted abortion at any stage of pregnancy:

<Post comes to screeching halt>

This Changes Everything

When I went to an early archived version of the flawed BBC story, I was astonished to discover that the original version had none of the problems for which I sought correction.

Unbelievable.

And to make the story more shocking, the BBC added no notes to the story to indicate updates or corrections. It was stealth-edited into journalistic malpractice.

But, with everything changed, let’s still go back to the version of the article that prompted my complaint.

Correct This, Please

He [Trump] then falsely alleged that Democrats in the US supported allowing abortions at any point during a pregnancy, which he used as his explanation for deciding to vote against the ballot measure in Florida as a voter in the state.

Hmm? What was false about Trump’s allegation?

The proposed constitutional amendment sought by reproductive rights advocates in Florida does not specify a number of weeks, but would protect abortion access in the state until the point of foetal viability, which is about 23-25 weeks of pregnancy.

Given the information in the article I had to wonder: Had the writer and/or the editor read the proposed Florida amendment?

The would-be amendment read: “Limiting government interference with abortion.— Except as provided in Article X, Section 22, no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”

The amendment text after the word “viability” allows abortion at any stage of pregnancy at the discretion of the patient’s healthcare (abortion) provider and makes that provider the judge of what constitutes the protection of the patient’s health.

Put another way, the amendment allows abortions at any point during a pregnancy. So what Trump said was true even though the BBC said it was false. And Democrats supported the proposed amendment, as shown on this Ballotpedia page.

The story’s description of the proposed amendment admits it doesn’t specify any number of weeks, but then cues the reader to expect the number of weeks to match the time frame for fetal viability, near 24 weeks. But the amendment’s permission for abortion would extend to any number of weeks up through delivery.

Correction Request, Round One

We fired off our initial correction request pointing out the text of the amendment supported Trump’s claim. We noted the BBC could significantly remedy the misleading nature of its story by merely including the text of the amendment, not knowing at the time that the BBC had removed that language mere hours before.

I received a confirmation email on Sept. 1, 2024, saying in part “Our normal aim at this stage is to reply within 10 working days (two weeks). We hope you will understand that sometimes it may take us longer. If we think that will be the case here, we'll try to let you know in advance.”

I received a follow up email on Sept. 9, 2024. In summary, “We wanted to let you know that we have referred your complaint to the relevant people and are still looking into it.”

Hours later the BBC responded with something more substantive:

We are sorry to read of your concerns, feeling that the report incorrectly states Donald Trump "...falsely alleged that Democrats in the US supported allowing abortions at any point during a pregnancy".

Reading the report in light of your complaint it provides context stating "Abortion laws vary widely in states across the US, but procedures after 21 weeks of pregnancy are rare and are often related to foetal anomalies or threats to the mother's life, according to the non-profit health organisation KFF" also adding that "The proposed constitutional amendment sought by reproductive rights advocates in Florida does not specify a number of weeks, but would protect abortion access in the state until the point of foetal viability, which is about 23-25 weeks of pregnancy".

Overall, we know that not everyone will agree with our choices on which stories to cover, the level of detail in any one report or the order in which they appear. Our news editors make these complex decisions, based on the editorial merit of all the stories at hand. We accept that not everyone will agree with each decision – various factors are at play and there’s often debate in the newsroom too.

However we understand you felt our report should have further analysed the intent of Donald Trumps claims and explained how that relates to an inferred meaning of the proposed amendment details around decisions made by the patients healthcare provider.

The foregoing response, from “BBC Complaints Team,” said little, and I still don’t see how it was supposed to address my complaint. Democrats don’t favor abortion at any stage of pregnancy because third trimester abortions are rare? Is that logic?

And saying that the bill protects abortion before viability won’t make readers think the unspecified number of weeks is going to be 23-25 weeks?

Did the complaints team notice that the story had been stealthily edited?

Correction Request, Round Two

I responded to the BBC that same day, concluding “In a nutshell, the response ignores the fact that the original reporting inaccurately paraphrases the proposed amendment by completely ignoring how the amendment goes way beyond protecting abortion prior to fetal viability. There's no excuse for such a twisted paraphrase.”

I next heard from the BBC on Sept. 17, 2024. In essence, “This is to inform you that although we normally aim to investigate and reply at this next stage of the complaints service within 20 working days (around four weeks), we are currently dealing with a higher than normal volume of cases.”

On Oct. 29, 2024 the BBC touched base to communicate further delay. The message also gave me the option of referring “this delay and the substance of your complaint to the BBC’s regulator Ofcom.”

But before I got around to considering that option an Oct. 30, 2024 reply arrived in my inbox. At the bottom it was credited to “Linda Lewis.” Skipping to the meat of the response, such as it was:

I have looked carefully at the article. I appreciate you would have preferred us to go into the details of the Florida amendment, however this article focused on Donald Trump and how he was intending to vote over a ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would protect abortion rights after facing backlash from conservative supporters.

We reported:

The former president's announcement came one day after an NBC News interview in which he appeared to support the measure - a statement that caused anti-abortion activists to openly criticise him.

On Friday, Trump told Fox News that he still thinks Florida's ban on abortions after six weeks is too strict. There was certainly no intention to mislead readers. Rather we homed in on the fact that Trump appeared to be continuing to support Florida’s near total abortion ban which his rival Kamala Harris said was “so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant."

I trust this response provides some reassurance and an explanation as to why we covered the story in the way we did, in line with our commitment to accuracy and impartiality.

I have responded in as much detail as I am able to.

With respect to Lewis, my recommendation for including the language of the proposed amendment was as an antidote for the BBC’s misleading description. Lewis’ message didn’t own up to any deficiency at all in that description. Nor did it address the BBC saying Trump “falsely” said something true. How then does it address my complaint? One might summarize her message as “We really tried to do a good job and we think we basically got it right. Run along, now.”

Did Lewis uncover the stealth edits associated with the story?

Lewis concluded by telling me her message concluded Stage 1 of the BBC’s complaints process. I’d need to contact the Executive Complaints Unit if I still wasn’t satisfied.

Correction Request, Round Three

The ECU confirmed receipt of my complaint on Nov. 15, 2024. That email contains the text of my complaint, fairly summarized in the opening paragraph:

The initial (and subsequent) responses from the BBC conspicuously failed to address the point of the original complaint, that the BBC said Trump "falsely alleged that Democrats in the US supported allowing abortions at any point during a pregnancy" when Florida's Democrat-supported amendment would have done exactly that, limited in the amendment only by the discretion of would-be abortion providers.

The ECU’s message said the ECU would aim to reply wihtout 20 working days of receipt, though they target 35 working days for more complicated responses.

It’s been well over 35 working days, unless the UK has added quite a few secret holidays to its calendar.

Perhaps this is a job for … Ofcom!

Correction Request, Round Four

I sent my complaint to Ofcom early on Feb. 20, 2025.

I’ll look forward to updating this saga with new material from either the ECU or Ofcom. Hearing from both would make it even better.

Adair clothes his central idea with tales surrounding a handful of figures such as Nina Jankowicz, highlighting the way GOP lies led to harm for her and others. That has the effect of an appeal to emotion, perhaps intended to distract from the fact that Adair can’t back up his central claim that Republicans lie more.

Adair’s Evidence

Of course Adair used PolitiFact and Washington Post Fact Checker ratings to confirm his suspicion that Republicans lie more. What else should we expect?

Adair’s methodology made a nod toward fairness by excluding Donald Trump from its dataset. But Adair neglected to explain why his investigation only used ratings between January of 2016 and June of 2021. We’ll address that shortly.

Adair (Ch. 9, Page 146 of our digital copy):

Our hunch about the partisan divide was right. For PolitiFact, the results confirmed our hypothesis regardless of whether my team combined the claims into a “false-ish” category (those rated Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire) or we looked at those ratings individually. For Democrats, false-ish ratings accounted for 31.3 percent of all the claims; for Republicans, the share was significantly higher—55.9 percent.

In the book’s preceding paragraph Adair admitted to part of the problem with his evidence, while excusing “Truth-O-Meter” ratings as “the best data available”:

It’s important to note that our data has limitations. Although the ClaimReview database provides a new and creative way to analyze political falsehoods, it is a product of journalists, not social scientists. The articles were created for readers based on the daily decisions of editors and reporters about what is newsworthy and relevant to check. It is not a random sample. Still, it has been used by other academic researchers because it’s the best data available for analyzing the accuracy of politicians’ claims.

“It is not a random sample.”

An objective approach to the question of party truthfulness should start with a random sample. A convenience sample, or whatever we want to call fact checker editorial judgment, must count as suspect. But Adair, fact-checking expert, doesn’t see it that way.

Adair (Page 159):

But weighing all the complaints—I’ve read and considered lots of them since I started PolitiFact in 2007—I have never seen sufficient evidence that we missed enough False or Pants on Fire claims by Democrats to make a difference. Selection bias doesn’t cause the difference. Our ratings simply reflect what’s happening in the real world.

Adair treats his skepticism as a methodology sufficient to defend his interpretation of PolitiFact’s rating data. But a researcher’s doubt that selection bias affected the findings counts for nothing, including as an excuse for poor methods. Competent researchers use randomized samples partly to avoid having to make such embarrassing statements.

If Adair’s attempt to extinguish concerns about selection bias failed, his approach to concern over fact checkers issuing biased ratings failed even more miserably.

Biased Fact Checker Ratings?

Adair followed the playbook described by fellow fact-checking expert Lucas Graves (from Graves’ book “Deciding What’s True”):

One strategy is responding [to criticism] only minimally or in carefully chosen venues, and always asserting their balance, often by showing the criticism they receive from the other side of the spectrum. Fact-checkers make this point constantly.

Adair takes that approach in his book (Chapter 9, Page 158):

I believe it’s probably true that fact-checkers, like other journalists, are more likely to be liberal. But all political journalists are expected to put aside their own viewpoints, and it seemed ours always did. We made it clear they were expected to be nonpartisan in their work—and I found they were.

It’s important to note that Democrats and their own allies in the media saw an opposite reality about our work. They said fact-checkers were so afraid of being called biased that they awarded unwarranted False or Four Pinocchio ratings to show they were balanced.

He’s received criticism from the right and from the left. So is he biased against one, or biased against the other? Adair implicitly asks “Who knows?” Jeff D. correctly identifies that as a middle ground fallacy (I expounded on that here).

Maybe Adair should just stick with answering the criticism instead of using whataboutism to avoid it? Of course, that only works when one has a way of plausibly answering the criticism. In our experience, Adair lacks those answers. Instead of telling us how left-leaning fact-checkers avoid things like confirmation bias, Adair simply tells us they’re expected to exhibit non-partisanship and he thinks they succeed at it. Let’s not ask whether Adair himself is biased, eh?

A Handwave for the Critics

Two academic researchers looked at bias in PolitiFact’s ratings. Adair gave both a brief hand wave.

Eric Ostermeier of the University of Minnesota noted PolitiFact’s comparatively harsh treatment of Republicans in 2011, suggesting that selection bias may explain the disparity.

Robert Lichter of George Mason University looked at PolitiFact ratings during a 2013 news cycle that was unkind to Democrats and found PolitiFact remained tougher on Republicans regardless.

Adair dismissed both studies as lacking in detailed analysis (Chapter 9, Page 157): “But like Lichter, Ostermeier did not offer any significant analysis to back his allegations.”

Readers of Adair’s book may well wonder what allegations Adair was talking about. From his description we doubt Adair understood Lichter’s study. And Ostermeier’s study made the gentle criticism that PolitiFact’s ratings serve as a poor measure of party truthfulness without ruling out that selection bias accounts for the difference.

We doubt Ostermeier would find Adair’s personal assurance adequate.

In Part II, we will support the proposition that PolitiFact is biased in a way that may well account for the ratings disparity.

PolitiFact fact-checked a claim on Threads saying “Abortion is never medically necessary in the last trimester. Literally never. They just do a C-section.” PolitiFact offered the following definition of abortion:

An abortion is a medical intervention designed to terminate a pregnancy before birth.

Certainly a pregnancy ends if the fetus dies before birth. But the definition does not say “terminate a fetus before birth.” One may imagine the transplantation of a fetus from one womb to another, in which case PolitiFact apparently says the original host had an abortion leading to the pregnancy of the second host.

And then one of PolitiFact’s cited experts, Dr. Deborah Bartz, has to toss a spanner in the works:

"If, for example, preeclampsia develops in the third trimester and the pregnant person's high blood pressures become life threatening, a delivery (and thus, abortion delivery) of a nonviable fetus is needed. If this induced delivery results in death, it is considered an abortion," Bartz said.

Bartz strayed from PolitiFact’s definition. If abortion is a medical intervention designed to terminate a pregnancy before birth, how can the live delivery of a fetus that dies during birth or later count as an abortion?

It can’t. And when fact checkers don’t notice a fairly obvious self-contradiction like this in the middle of their work, credibility suffers.

How about the time PolitiFact rated “False” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ claim about post-birth abortions? The same PolitiFact fact checker, Samantha Putterman, had this to say way back then (July 2023, bold emphasis added):

Killing an infant after birth is infanticide and is illegal in all 50 states. Situations resulting in a fetal death in the third trimester are exceedingly rare, and involve emergencies such as fetal anomalies or life-threatening medical emergencies affecting the mother. 

Sometimes, labor is induced, followed by palliative care, for babies with very short life expectancies. Some families choose this option when faced with life-threatening diagnoses that often limit their babies’ post-birth survival to just minutes or days after delivery, experts said.

Apparently even if third trimester abortions are “exceedingly rare” there’s no “Half True” or “Mostly False” option if someone claims it literally never happens. As if we needed another reminder that PolitiFact’s “Truth-O-Meter” ratings are exercises in subjectivity.

As for the central issue of the fact check, PolitiFact ruled it “False” that abortions are never medically necessary in the third trimester. We found one example convincing, where an abortion might save the life of one conjoined twin.

Did the “Riot” Stop “the” Recount?

There were multiple recounts in Florida following the election. Failing to distinguish between them led to some of the resulting confusion in media accounts. By law, Florida conducted two machine recounts required by the closeness of the election. Bush led following both of those recounts, though his lead shrank by “more than 1,400 votes in the recount.” The third recount consisted of a set of separate recounts requested in a handful of Florida counties, Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. Each county leaned Democrat.

On December 8, the Florida Supreme Court handed the Gore team a loss by ruling against the selective county approach, but also handed them a win by ordering what we will call the fourth recount, a statewide (more or less) recount of undervotes.

The Recount in Miami-Dade

The Miami-Dade manual recount comes from the set we call the third recount. Gore requested the recounts justified under Chapter 102.166 of the 2000 Florida statutes. That section describes procedures for a protest of election returns. The law permitted the Board to grant a recount request by doing a sample recount, after which the Board would decide whether those results justified additional action.

Miami-Dade decided against proceeding at first. The sample recount yielded only six votes for Gore, so the Board concluded its count wasn’t justified. They later reversed. The Chicago Tribune reported the Board chairman, David Leahy, estimated the count might be completed by December 1.

A New Deadline

On Nov. 21, 2000, a case involving the other three counties Gore had selected gave all four counties a definitive limit on their recount deadlines. The Court’s ruling in Palm Beach County Canvassing Board, v. Harris said the manual recounts could run through 5 p.m. on Nov. 26, 2000 unless the Division of Elections was closed that Sunday. Otherwise the recount results were due by 9 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 27, 2000.

Recall Leahy said Miami-Dade’s recount would take until Dec. 1.

On Nov. 22, 2000 the Board changed its procedures in an effort to speed things up and hopefully meet the court-ordered deadline. First, it would focus exclusively on undervotes. Undervotes were ballots where the machine counter registered no vote for president. Miami-Dade had about 11,000 of those.

Second, the Board moved the recount to a smaller room. The Board had a vote-counting machine specially programmed to separate undervotes from other votes, but that machine was on the the 19th floor, not the 18th where the board had originally done its counting. Accordingly, the Board agreed to move the limited manual recount to a smaller room on the 19th floor to allow faster access to the machine.

The Miami-Dade Canvassing Board vacated what it had done to that point on the full hand recount, planning to submit the results of its limited recount ahead of the deadline, if possible.

Republicans Object

Republicans objected to Miami-Dade’s strategy for speeding up the recount. Media accounts from that time did an adequate job of conveying the nature of one of the GOP concerns.

CNN, via Jane Stutton/Reuters:

Leahy said the votes that could not be machine read would be read by the three-member board which can get through about 300 ballots an hour.

"I think its do-able. I think we could accomplish it," Leahy said.

The decision was made over the objections of the Republican Party, which said the county should recount all or none of its ballots and which hinted a legal challenge could follow.

CNN correspondent Frank Buckley (from rush CNN transcript):

Once they went up there to the 19th floor, Republicans began a very loud and raucous protest on the 19th floor, saying they couldn't have proper access to observe. They were Saying, [sic] let us in, they were saying cheaters, they were saying the whole world is watching.

The GOP, then, objected to recounting only undervotes and moving the hand recount largely away from public observation.

What’s the Problem?

Why were Republicans so against what at least one Democrat called “reasonable, rational and appropriate” measures by the canvassing board?

Both measures ran afoul of Florida election law:

• 102.166(5)(c): Manually recount all ballots

• 102.166(6): Any manual recount shall be open to the public

The Miami-Dade Canvassing Board circumvented Florida election law. That led to the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot.” Media accounts nearly always omit that key fact. We plan a series exploring the various ways media outlets, especially our most trusted sources, misreported the event.

Obliterated Narratives

The facts recounted above destroy a number of popular narratives about the Brooks Brothers riot.

1. Pre-planned: Pre-planned for the only one of the four counties that tried to skirt the law?

2. Intended to shut down “the” recount: The illegal recount, yes. Otherwise, no.

3. Intimidated the Board into abandoning the full manual recount: The Board said it could not complete the full manual recount in the allotted time. The Board’s explanation fits the facts. Anything else is a conspiracy theory.

Instead of reporting the full truth about the Brooks Brother riot, legacy media wove a misleading narrative that depended on leaving out one of the biggest parts of the story.

Afters

Via C-SPAN, Republicans cheer the announcement that the recount will move from the 19th floor back to the 18th floor (0:49).

<iframe width=512 height=330 src='https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?c4920882/brooks-brothers-riot' allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' frameborder=0></iframe>

Also via C-SPAN, full version of previous video (6:39): Reporter says Republicans considering suing the Board for only counting undervotes instead of all the ballots:

<iframe width=512 height=330 src='https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?160729-1/miami-afternoon-news' allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' frameborder=0></iframe>

The post Fixing our .pdf problem appeared first on Zebra Fact Check.

The files demand quite a bit of memory and were affecting site performance in many ways. The display files are temporarily deactivated. We do have a strategy for moving forward by transferring the body of the text to the normal text display method (no embed) and linking to the stored .pdf file.

But it’s going to take some time.

Is there a particular .pdf you want to see? Drop us a gmail note at zebrafactcheck@ and we’ll prioritize it.

Update June 12, 2024: We far underestimated the amount of work needed to reformat .pdf cut & pastes into the regular format. Moving forward, in most cases we will simply link to the .pdf file instead of embedding it.

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