@Lash,
Motherfucking Jones says WaPo is full of **** about Bernard Effing Sanders.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bernie-sanders-medical-bankruptcy-washington-post-fact-check-878120/
Excerpt:
The Washington Post has a political fact checking department, and the aim is admirable — to hold candidates accountable and call them out when they’re playing fast-and-loose with the truth. But, as the Post’s recent check of Sanders’ medical bankruptcy stat underscores, the paper’s pursuit of facts can at times go off the rails.
The Post piece gives the Sanders “Three Pinocchios” for the claim on medical debt, which is the paper’s shorthand for “mostly false.” (An aside: What is it with the multiple Pinocchios? The Pinocchio didn’t self propagate when he lied — his nose grew.)
To have earned Three Pinocchios, we must assume Bernie’s claim is a real doozy, one wooden puppet short of a “whopper” per the Post. So what’s the matter with the statistic? As it turns out: Nothing much at all.
Sanders’s team told the Post that the Vermont Senator was relying on an estimate published in a medical journal that found that 66.5% of bankruptcy filers cited either medical bills or missed work due to illness as a reason they went broke. The journal itself said this was “equivalent to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually.”
At first glance, it appears Bernie understated the problem by rounding down. The checker did an admirable thing and reached out to the author of the study, Dr. David Himmelstein, a professor of public health in the CUNY system and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. “When we asked Himmelstein whether Sanders was quoting his study accurately,” the fact checker reports, “he said yes.”
Himmelstein went on to unpack for the fact checker that, even if you were to adopt a more limited measure of bankruptcies that were “very much” linked to medical debt, the number of people going broke is still north of 500,000 a year, because a single bankruptcy typically affects multiple people in a family unit. “Even if you use that restricted definition, then Sanders’s statement is accurate — or an underestimate,” Himmelstein said.
To review: the Post fact checker, going straight to the source, a Harvard lecturer, found that Sanders’ was sticking to close to the facts, and if anything understating the problem.
So why didn’t the Post give Bernie a coveted “Geppetto Checkmark” for truthfulness. (Yes, it’s really called this — you can’t make this **** up.) Who knows?!?
The author spends the rest of the 1,600 word piece splitting hairs and then tying them into knots. He takes it upon himself to not simply fact check Sanders, but the medical journal that Sanders relied on. And it turns out that, if you dig down far enough, you can uncover a minor-league academic beef about bankruptcy statistics, with professors arguing about the extent to which one can say the contributing factor of medical debt is actually what “caused” the bankruptcy.
Despite his pageant of pedantry, the fact checker doesn’t get to the bottom of anything. He doesn’t prove that one side in this ivory tower debate is in fact right, while the other is actually wrong. More important, he doesn’t offer any evidence that Sanders was aware of this teapot tempest or that he in any way set out to deceive voters. Instead author proudly presents the unholy tangle he, himself, created to conclude: “The omissions and twists are significant enough to merit Three Pinocchios for Sanders.”
The process by which the Post fact checker transmogrified a basically true statement into a ruling of “mostly false” is a case study in the uselessness of the political fact-check as it is often practiced.
Subjecting political speechmaking to this kind of nitpick is folly. The entire nature of the political enterprise is looser than that. Politicians speak to broad systemic problems. If they’re sharp and persuasive, they have statistics at hand. And if their staff is any good, those statistics have reputable studies to back them up. By any meaningful measure what Sanders said is accurate for the purposes of the project. If citing a study accurately enough to satisfy its author still gets a “mostly false,” it’s hard to know what could possibly pass muster.
