In theory, factchecking is one of the most important functions of journalism. In practice, systematic efforts by corporate media to “factcheck” political statements are often worse than useless.

Take PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Tribune, and its recent offering “Is Barack Obama Correct That Mass Killings Don’t Happen in Other Countries?” (6/22/15).

The first thing to note is that isn’t what Obama said. The statement that PoltiFact‘s Keely Herring and Louis Jacobson “factchecked” was this:

Now is the time for mourning and for healing. But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. And it is in our power to do something about it.

It’s generally understood that when people make a series of statements, they’re referring to the same reality in each statement—so you interpret their statements so that they make sense as a whole. But that’s not how PolitiFact interprets statements; instead, it analyzes each sentence in isolation. For example, it says it rated Obama’s statement as “Mostly False,” because—taken on its own—Obama’s statement that “this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” is not true. Never mind that “the White House argues that Obama’s second sentence qualifies the first,” as PolitiFact acknowledges; that’s how ordinary people interpret language, not media factcheckers.

PolitiFact also has doubts about the other part of Obama’s remarks—that mass violence “doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency”—because if you take the number of people killed in mass violence and divide by total population, you find that there’s a handful of countries—notably Norway, where 67 people were killed in a single mass-shooting incident—where people have died at a higher rate in shooting sprees between 2000 and 2014:

“The fact that three other countries exceeded the United States using this method of comparison does weaken Obama’s claim that ‘it doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency,'” PolitiFact says.

Now, it seems to me that PolitiFact is confusing the ideas of frequency and rate: One would normally say that murders happen more frequently in New York City than in Indianapolis, because New York has more murders in a year, and that Indianapolis has a higher homicide rate than New York City, because Indianapolis has more murders per year per person. That, I submit, is the ordinary way that English-speaking people use those terms.

But whether or not it’s possible to use “frequency” as synonymous with “rate,” it’s obvious that that’s not how Obama was using the word. It’s clear that he was using a common definition of the word (“the number of times that something happens during a particular period”—Merriam-Webster) to indicate that mass violence occurs much more often in the United States than in other advanced countries. Which it does, as the chart above demonstrates—22 times more often than any other country listed.

Again, ordinary people understand that words can have various meanings and figure out which one the speaker intends, whereas media factcheckers first decide what a word means and then figure out if what the speaker intends to convey fits with the meaning the factcheckers have decided to use.

This is the approach by which the president can state that mass violence “doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency,” a factchecking organization can turn up data showing that there were 133 mass-shooting incidents in the United States over a 15-year period vs. six in the country with the second-highest number of shooting sprees—and conclude from this that the president’s statement is “Mostly False.”

Obviously, this is not at all helpful to the US public, who have a vital interest in knowing whether mass violence occurs more frequently in their country than elsewhere. It is, however, a big help in maintaining PolitiFact‘s brand as a nonpartisan factchecking service. Fellow media factchecker Brooks Jackson (of FactCheck.org) explained how the gig works (Extra!, 12/12):

Even if we could come up with a scholarly and factual way to say that one candidate is being more deceptive than another, I think we probably wouldn’t just because it would look like we were endorsing the other candidate.

Or as Peter Hart concluded from Jackson’s explanation of how media factcheckers work:

They are people who carefully arrange each chip in an effort to create the illusion that they let the chips fall where they may.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.

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