When PolitiFact failed to respond to Zebra Fact Check’s Feb. 22, 2021 correction request, we sent a formal complaint to the International Fact-Checking Network. We called PolitiFact’s failure to correct its mistake a violation of its commitment to scrupulously follow an open and honest corrections policy.
Another Unheeded Correction Request
On Feb. 21, 2021 PolitiFact published a “PolitiFact Minute” video to its Facebook page. The video was intended in part to summarize this fact check of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
The original fact check looked at McCarthy’s claim that the CBO said the $15 per hour minimum wage hike could result in up to 3.7 million jobs lost, which was true of the 2019 CBO report on the hike but not of a new estimate that came out the day before McCarthy’s press release.
But in the video version of the claim, PolitiFact misrepresented what McCarthy claimed. Instead of making clear that McCarthy was talking about a high-end estimate (“up to”), the host of the video claims McCarthy simply said the hike will result in nearly 4 million jobs lost.
No journalist, and certainly no fact-checking journalist, should permit that type of error in a published work.
I pointed out the error to PolitiFact in an Feb. 22, 2021 email, using trimmed screen grabs of the closed-captioned video altering Mr. McCarthy’s claim. After the passage of a week, the video remains with the error entirely intact, contrasting McCarthy’s claim with the CBO’s 2021 median estimate of 1.4 million jobs lost instead of its new high-end estimate of 2.7 million jobs lost.
This medicine is hardly better than the disease it proposes to cure.
PolitiFact’s failure to fix the obvious error or alert its audience to the way it misled them should count as a failure to scrupulously follow an open and honest corrections policy--supposedly required by the IFCN as a prerequisite for verified status as a signatory of the IFCN Code of Principles.
Notice a pattern?
Thanks for your attention to this matter.