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When it comes to articles on abortion, the Providence Journal helps advocates to distract from the substantive issues.
PolitiFactRI is so obviously biased and has made so many blatantly wrong ratings that flew in the face of plain truth that, for me, it has achieved the status of a pathological liar. So I wonder sometimes whether it is even worth calling them out. You don’t bother to call out a pathological liar, you simply ignore everything he says because he has no credibility.
But then I remember that they have as a platform the state’s largest newspaper, the Providence Journal, which inexplicably continues to damage its own reputation for accuracy, perpetuate serious misinformation, promote bad government policies and squander valuable journalistic resources by hosting a mini-Pravda.
With that reminder, then, let’s take a look at today’s rating and the bias therein.
A Rhode Island conservative can only be grateful, I suppose, that PolitiFact RI — the long-standing shame of the Providence Journal — managed to get the word “true” somewhere in its rating of the following statement from the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity:
Rhode Island will become just the second state to mandate the vaccine … and the only state to do so by regulatory fiat, without public debate, and without consideration from the elected representatives of the people.
The brief summary under the “Truth-o-meter” reading “Half True” on PolitiFact RI’s main page emphasizes: “Pretty flexible for a despot.” That’s a reference to the most weaselly part of Mark Reynolds’s quote-unquote analysis, which reads as follows:
[CEO Mike] Stenhouse labels the policies in Virginia and Rhode Island as mandates. But Jason L. Schwartz, an assistant professor at the Yale University School of Public Health, says you can’t call policies with such liberal exemptions mandates.
At best, this is an example of the frequent PolitiFact tactic of finding somebody whose opinion the writer prefers and treating that as the authoritative fact. One wonders, though, what rating PolitiFact RI would give its own newspaper. On July 29, the day before the Center released its press release with the challenged statement, the Providence Journal ran this headline at the very top of its front page: “Rhode Island to mandate HPV vaccine for 7th graders.” (Note: The online version adds the word “all” before “7th.”) The article itself uses the word “mandatory” five times.
Lesson learned, I guess: Never trust the headlines or reporting of the Providence Journal.
As for the PolitiFact rating, there are three relevant premises:
The fact that PolitiFact considers the awareness of the ACLU to be “public debate” — as opposed to hearings and a floor debate by the public’s elected representatives — is one of two highly disturbing aspects of Reynolds’s essay. The other is the latitude that it gives to government officials to adjust the truth to suit their needs. Days after the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity helped drum up actual public debate and concern about the HPV mandate, the Dept. of Health came forward to assert that the exemptions are so broad that its mandates should really be considered something more like suggestions.
The Providence Journal should end this fraudulent, government-propaganda feature. It distorts public awareness and undermines the political process.
I was named in Sunday’s Providence Journal, in a PolitiFact article finding a tweet from my organization, the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, “Mostly False.” PolitiFact turned to the research director of the left-wing Economic Progress Institute (formerly the Poverty Institute) for help proving the Tweet something other than “True,” and I’m included by name because I pointed out that the EPI research director’s statement was simply false. (Yes, the only plainly false statement in the whole thing was from the reporter’s go-to source for contrary evidence.)
How can one respond to such absurdity except with a parody song? Herewith, Justin Katz and His Out-of-Tune Piano with “PolitiFact Can” (to the tune of “The Candy Man,” by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley,” from the film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory).
PolitiFact Can
Who could take a true thing
Sprinkle it with spin
Cover it with context ’till the truth is wearing thin?
PolitiFact. PolitiFact can.
PolitiFact can because they write it like it’s news
And make the bias sound good.
Who can take a fact check
Put it to a vote
Help out politicians who are rowing the same boat?
PolitiFact. PolitiFact can.
PolitiFact can because they write it like it’s news
And make the bias sound good.
Those reporters pick ev’ry little trick
From pedantry to omission
You could say it’s just their mission
We all know they’re really always out there fishin’
Who can troll on Twitter
For Sunday’s front-page spread,
Make you think their beat is building talking points instead?
PolitiFact. PolitiFact can.
PolitiFact can because they write it like it’s news
And make the bias sound good,
And the bias sounds good because the media thinks it should.
The Dept. of Housing and Urban Development is very concerned about fairness, and its definition falls within Mike Stenhouse’s characterization of it.
… the subject of a column that I just posted to R.I. Taxpayer’s website. Here are the first couple of paragraphs.
A browse through HUD-in-the-news items turns up some interesting and instructive items. First of all, there are several instances of HUD cracking down on municipalities or other public authorities who have taken HUD money but failed to comply with the requirements that accompanied it. Certainly, on the one hand, this is as it should be. Government dollars must be spent as stipulated. On the other, it belies the assurances of advocates of RhodeMap RI that there is nothing to fear about the plan. Significant portions of it would almost certainly have to be implemented with HUD money, at which point, HUD would suddenly have a great deal of power and authority over local land use laws and property rights. Let these HUD crack downs elsewhere be an object lesson, accordingly, to both cities and towns in Rhode Island and to state and local officials who would consider accepting HUD monies, whether under the rubric of RhodeMap RI or not. Be prepared to comply with HUD’s requirements or don’t take the money.
And the latter is exactly what officials in the coincidentally named city of Hudson, OH, did less than two weeks ago, in our next interesting HUD-in-the-news item.
By the way, did anyone else notice that HUD’s letter to Westchester County contains the word “roadmap”??? Towards the bottom of the first page.
… HUD provided the county with a roadmap to coming into compliance …
A HUD “Roadmap”. “RhodeMap RI”. Isn’t that a little too similar to be a coincidence? Or do I need to be talked off the conspiracy ledge?
Both a statement from Attorney General Peter Kilmartin and a related review by PolitiFactRI leave out important context that should have affected the Truth-o-meter rating.
PolitiFact’s election season coddling of Clay Pell raises points about its own biases and his worldview.
On a personal note, I’d like to sincerely thank PolitiFact RI for starting my day with a big smile this morning, though perhaps they would not be altogether pleased at the reason.
In today’s Providence Journal, they’ve rated a statement by the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity (hereinafter “the Center”) pertaining to the $224.5 million in wasteful spending identified by the Center in the governor’s proposed 2015 budget. PolitiFact is not questioning that the state gave away the $5,000 example offered by the Center of an expenditure item in the Governor’s Workforce Board from a prior year. PolitiFact is only saying that the Center did not fully explain what the $5,000 in hard earned taxpayer dollars was spent on.
The journalists at PolitiFact RI appear to be okay with military presumptions against Americans provided it’s in opposition to the Tea Party.
Ever since Rhode Island Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello invited accusations of ignorance by questioning whether there had ever been slavery in the Ocean State, the pendulum has been swinging the other way.
Rhode Island can’t afford to have its capital city gain a reputation as an unsafe place to live, work, or play.
Congratulations to those nominated for judgeships in Rhode Island. It’s unfortunate that they have to be endorsed in such a reductive way
Emphasizing the importance of having judges who look like the people who appear before them, Gov. Gina Raimondo on Monday announced nominations to six judgeships across the state judiciary in what is likely the most diverse pool of nominees ever in Rhode Island.
Maybe I’m old fashioned, but it feels kind of like our culture spent centuries moving away from the superficial ideas that we should judge people by how they look and that looking alike has some sort of legal relevance, yet here we are.
President Donald Trump rightfully came under fire when he stated that a judge with Mexican heritage would be biased against him while hearing a case, with Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan saying, “Claiming a person can’t do the job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
This is exactly what Raimondo is doing, with her rhetoric about these prospective judges.
A local political analyst for public radio uncritically promotes a Facebook post slandering the United States with no analysis anywhere to be found.
Jeff Jacoby has a great column in the Boston Globe about the reasonableness of doubt about extreme climate change claims:
Yet for all the hyperventilating, Pruitt’s answer to the question he was asked — whether carbon dioxide is the climate’s “primary control knob” — was entirely sound. “We don’t know that yet,” he said. We don’t. CO2 is certainly a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, but hardly the primary one: Water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of greenhouse gases. By contrast, carbon dioxide is only a trace component in the atmosphere: about 400 ppm (parts per million), or 0.04 percent. Moreover, its warming impact decreases sharply after the first 20 or 30 ppm. Adding more CO2 molecules to the atmosphere is like painting over a red wall with white paint — the first coat does most of the work of concealing the red. A second coat of paint has much less of an effect, while adding a third or fourth coat has almost no impact at all.
This paragraph reminds me of the time I spent my half hour lunch break from construction sitting in my van on a snowy day arguing back and forth with a PolitiFact journalist about his bogus rating for Republican Congressional Candidate John Loughlin related to global warming. I forget the specifics, but key was the notion that 94% of greenhouse gases are natural, most of it water vapor. It’s a notion I first encountered in this 2007 Anchor Rising post by Monique (which she raised as a reminder for years afterwards, as you can see by searching “6%” here).
The reporter took much the same rhetorical approach as those who’ve attacked Pruitt and (I’m sure) Jacoby: dismissal, mockery, and scorn. As fun as DMS may be, it isn’t science, and it shouldn’t be a basis for public policy that affects people across the globe.
You know, when the story you pick as the top one for the whole year just happens to coincide with one national party’s talking-point needs of the moment in December, you don’t do the credibility of your review any favors:
The pounding taken by fact and truth in public life from the rise of fake news and propaganda is the 2016 National Story of the Year, according to the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.”The Story of the Year identifies the most important narrative to emerge in public life in the previous 12 months,” said G. Wayne Miller, a Providence Journal reporter, visiting fellow at the Pell Center, and director of the Story in the Public Square initiative.
Sorry, but that’s a joke, made LOL funny by this amazing coincidence with the standalone running gag that is PolitiFarce:
“Because of its powerful symbolism in an election year filled with rampant and outrageous lying – PolitiFact is naming Fake News the 2016 ‘winner,'” they added.
Others would be defensible, but in my opinion, the national story of the year was Hillary Clinton’s email fiasco, both on its own merits and for generating additional stories and even dovetailing with the whole “fake news” thing. Unfortunately, partisan organizations like most mainstream news productions and universities couldn’t pick a story that reminds people of the corrupt core that gives all of the other stories weight and plausibility.
I’ve long harbored the hope that journalists with integrity at the Providence Journal were quietly embarrassed by their paper’s dabbling in PolitiFact. In the past, I charted PolitiFact’s bias, and I even wrote a parody song about it. In PolitiFact, the mainstream media has the perfect representation of the pretense of objectivity being used as a partisan political weapon.
With its coverage of this year’s partisan conventions, the Projo appeared to have committed the entire paper to the PolitiFact aesthetic. With today’s front page, it appears to have taken up its method, too:
The “news” of this story is that Donald Trump, (sadly) the Republican nominee for president, is habitually dishonest. Disliking Trump, myself, I’m not inclined to object to such investigation, but I still find it shocking to see it as such a prominent report in the Providence Journal, partly because it is inconceivable that the paper would give similar treatment to the similarly dishonest Hillary Clinton.
In fact, take the analysis a bit farther and open the paper to its “Campaign 2016” coverage. The headlines are:
Pay special attention to the bullet in the middle, because it may indicate why the editors felt it necessary to land so hard on Trump’s honesty today. The “lack of filter” story is used as an envelope around an inset about the latest Clinton-related revelations, which I mentioned this morning, and that story is couched in terms of “Trump pounces.”
A search of the last fifteen days of the Providence Journal turns up no other news reports including the words “Clinton Foundation email.” In other words, for the paper’s only reporting of emails that raise ethical questions about the Democrat nominee for president, it minimized the find (excluding, notably, the Obama Justice Department’s killing of FBI requests to investigate the foundation further), presented it in terms of Trump’s response, surrounded by a story about Trump’s wild speaking habits, next to a story about a U.S. senator calling him a kook, within an issue fronted with bold declarations of Trump’s habitual lies.
This is a newspaper attempting to affect the outcome of an election along predictable party lines, pure and simple. Few remain so naive as to believe in mainstream objectivity in the post-Bush era, and I personally think we need less regulation of speech, not more. Nonetheless, while this may do little more than show my age, I’m still shocked by the tabloid-esque brazenness.
Much of the visceral reaction to PolitiFact is, I think, a function of the Truth-o-Meter — partly its operators frequently attempt to apply it to statements that are open to interpretation (rather than statements of fact) and partly because it clicks from truth to Pants on Fire in just a few stages. When I’ve brought this up with PolitiFact practitioners, they say the meter is the gimmick that grabs the eye.
The Rhode Island Republican Policy Group’s new Waste-o-Meter, although a gimmick, isn’t quite the same thing:
“Our press corps has done a great job of exposing wasteful practices and spending in our state government,” said state. Rep. Patricia Morgan, R-West Warwick, citing a series of stories that have appeared in The Providence Journal.
“They report findings and citizens fume about the waste. After a few days, the frustration dies down and the people of Rhode Island continue with their busy lives, forgetting about the latest assault to their wallets. … Those in charge are not held responsible for the waste and so it continues, without corrective action,” Morgan said, “no one is held accountable.”
So, “we have constructed a visual reminder for citizens and for our policy makers. The Waste-O-Meter is a giant thermometer which will track the instances of waste in government. Every two weeks, we intend to add to the thermometer as we uncover more examples of wasteful spending,” she said in a statement, prepared for release at a 1:30 press conference in the House minority office at the State House.
A continual frustration for folks who follow this stuff is that it all becomes noise after report after report of waste and abuse. Visuals are definitely helpful. Maybe there should be a scandal board somewhere at the State House, too.
Comparing Donald Trump to Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini should cause a giant light bulb to go off for liberal journalists about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The latest news out of the Rhode Island government-media spin machine is that “HPV vaccination rate ‘extremely encouraging’,” as Richard Salit’s Providence Journal article puts it. The lede or secondary headline was: “First year vaccine is required for seventh graders.”
It’s enough to make a well-informed Rhode Islander scream at the computer, tablet, or dead-tree newspaper. Readers may recall that the HPV vaccine became controversial in Rhode Island because the state government presumed to make Rhode Island one of only two states to mandate inoculation against the sexually transmitted disease and the only one to do so by regulatory fiat.
Here’s the “extremely encouraging” news:
As of Sept. 1, with data compiled on 85 percent of the seventh graders in public and private schools, 72.5 percent had received at least the first in a series of three recommended doses of HPV vaccine.
That’s pretty good, right? Vindication for the mandate? Not really. Read a bit farther and do some math:
Because it’s a new mandate, the only previous Rhode Island statistic to compare that to is one from 2014 from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). It estimated that, among those ages 13 to 17, 76 percent of girls and 69 percent of boys had the first dose of the HPV vaccine.
Average those two percentages, and you get… 72.5%. Public school enrollment data for the 2014-2015 school year shows that there are more boys, so the overall percentage based on the two numbers given would be 72.3%, but the percentages themselves are rounded, and private schools may very well shift the balance back toward equal numbers.
In other words, the government diktat that all students must put this drug in their body changed the vaccination rate almost not at all. It did, however, create a new precedent for the bureaucracy’s little dictators. On the positive side, it may have sparked some enduring backlash and eroded confidence in the government, inasmuch as the number of religious exemptions for vaccines jumped from “about half a percent for the 2014-15 school year to 4.47 percent for 2015-16 year.”
Any push-back against the state government in Rhode Island is good news, as far as I’m concerned, especially when the local news media tends to simply pass along the government’s spin.
Last week, it turned out that $200,000 of the $64-100 million total that the Republican Policy Group proposed to reprioritize for road and bridge infrastructure might not be available from a Woonsocket museum. For those without a calculator near at hand, that’s between 0.2% and 0.3% of the whole proposal, which means it’s pretty much dispensable.
The correction, however, presents a lesson on the degree to which our system is tilted toward ever-greater government spending. Even taking actual news media bias out of the equation, a systemic bias exists. Each cut or restraint has people paid (usually by us) to advocate for their positions, and they have all sorts of direct information not readily available to the public. That means:
One of the more stunning pieces of information in the Republicans’ proposal is also relatively small, although more than double the museum line item. Using numbers directly from the state Office of Energy Resources, it turns out that the surcharge that the state imposes on energy consumers to fund public support for renewable energy special interests costs taxpayers $526,000 indirectly through the cost of state government, including public higher education. That’s on top, obviously, of whatever we pay total for our own energy usage, which is probably much more.
With its being accurate, the incentive for Rhode Island insiders is to ignore that little fact, not to defend it, to keep it out of the public consciousness as much as possible. No green-industry lobbyists will come forward to tell Rhode Islanders what they’re getting for their half-million dollars. Bringing news media bias back into the equation, PolitiFact will not likely be analyzing the shocking number and finding it “True.”
So, the beat goes on. People who take our money do so quietly (and lie when they’re caught), while those who seek to stop the theft are constantly in the spotlight for any for any small error.
Whether the appointment of illegal immigrants to California city commissions or whitewashing corrupt crony deals in Rhode Island, insiders who refuse to enforce the rule of law must be reminded that power resides with the people
The Providence Journal so liked its PolitiFact about John DePetro’s being wrong on a union requirement for the 195 land that Mark Reynolds went back for another bite via the news department yesterday:
Concerns about the misrepresentation of an economic development opportunity for Rhode Island have prompted the chairman of the 195 Redevelopment Commission to issue a public statement to emphasize that developers who pursue projects on the former Route 195 land are under no obligation to hire union laborers.
“The 195 Redevelopment Commission does not have and has never had a requirement for developers to hire union approved contractors,” said the commission’s chairman, Joseph Azrack.
Having not done a thorough review of all of the relevant policy and law, I can’t say whether there’s some sly, maybe indirect, way in which DePetro is correct in substance, if not in immediate fact. I wouldn’t be surprised to find such a catch, but then again, I wouldn’t be surprised not to find it. The hoops that Rhode Island sets up for businesses and developers are so ridiculous that the addition of required unionization isn’t really necessary, even as it seems obvious that the state might do such a thing.
But then, turn back the newspaper a few pages, and read this article by Linda Borg:
A private emergency medical service claims that its employers, some of them Coventry firefighters, were threatened if the company provided coverage to the Coventry Fire District on an emergency basis.
In a letter by Carol Mansfield, CEO of Coastline Emergency Medical Services, Mansfield wrote, “as a result of deciding to help the residents of Coventry, we have gotten threats of harm to our personnel and equipment by the Union and its members …. The Union is forcing those firefighters [who work for Coastline] in MA and R.I. to resign. As an employer of over 20 employees, I cannot let my firefighter employees to lose their jobs with us…”
A fire district hires firefighters. Largely because of labor’s big investments in state politicians, the union comes to see those as their jobs, and the organization’s reason for being is to protect those jobs and make them pay as well as possible. If the people of the district can’t see their value and attempt to rein in the cost, then it would seem that the union wants to make their choice between the high costs and a dangerous lack of services.
My construction career never overlapped with any union workers, but some of my coworkers had had experience with cut power cords and pneumatic tubes and other damaged or missing equipment. The goal of those incidents, obviously, was to drive up the cost of being a non-union carpenter on a site that the union wanted to claim as its property.
Does the 195 Commission require developers to use union labor (or to increase their costs to match, if not)? The chairman says not. But does DePetro’s misstatement (if it was that) really rate on the list of things about which Rhode Islanders must be informed?
Soon after I put up my post, this morning, on Ed Fitzpatrick’s Providence Journal column, the man himself responded to my Twitter link that he’d criticized Sen. Whitehouse for commentary on the floor of the Senate in which he raised the specters of the French Revolution, the Nazis, and Southern lynchings in a column back in 2009.
That column didn’t appear in my search of the Providence Journal’s archives because they don’t go back that far, but Fitzpatrick was good enough to send me the text. Rereading the 2009 column, while I would have definitely included it in my earlier post, I’m not sure it changes my criticism at all.
For instance, I suggested that Fitzpatrick should have tried to understand why Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia would have such strong sentiments toward his court, and if we look back to the 2009 column, it’s practically slathered with sympathy for Whitehouse’s heat. Fitzpatrick presents it as a response to Republican ire, emphasizes that Whitehouse “gave voice to the Democratic anger and frustration” (with examples), and gives the senator space to contextualize his comments.
If I may paraphrase the impression the column gives, it’s that: Whitehouse was only responding to the bad Republicans; he has a lot of company in how he feels; and after all, he’s got underlying reasoning, which Fitzpatrick validates with a “good point.” None of these qualities are present in the Scalia column. Indeed, here’s the point of actual criticism of Whitehouse:
Perhaps it’s good for Rhode Island to have a fiery, outspoken senator to go with the understated Sen. Jack Reed. Perhaps there is some political utility to such speeches. If Palin is going to be using her Twitter account to perpetuate the “death panel” idea (PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year”), maybe Democrats need to do more to fire back.
But I don’t see why Whitehouse had to go all Judgment Day on the GOP when he knew they’d lose the vote. Why not just watch them wail and fail?
Scalia didn’t even go as far as “all Judgment Day,” and he was, in fact, issuing a warning about the actions of the victorious majority. In Scalia’s case, though, Fitzpatrick is on the side of those who want to insist that there’s nothing wrong, or even questionable, about the outcome or process by which they redefined marriage and likened traditional values to pure bigotry.
As the progressives march across the country trying to put pizza parlors out of business, prevent businesses that receive this treatment from using online tools to collect donations, and grab tax exemption away from churches and charities, one can only hope that liberal columnists prove to object to government oppression, not just reference to oppression from the past.
UPDATE (7/2/15 2:35 p.m.)
In response to the suggestion that I didn’t do an adequate job presenting Fitzpatrick’s objection to Whitehouse above, here’s another statement from the 2009 column, which was what Fitzpatrick put forward as the summary of his criticism in his tweet:
But in the end, Whitehouse only added to that toxicity. He accused the Republicans of going too far and, in the next breath, he went too far himself. Quoting Lord Acton and using vivid literary allusions didn’t save him from venturing down the well-worn path that ends with someone accusing an adversary of being like the Nazis.
I didn’t exclude this paragraph to downplay Fitzpatrick’s criticism of the senator; I just didn’t see that it added anything not covered in my descriptions or quotations. The context also brushes away much of the criticism. The paragraph before quotes somebody who liked Whitehouse’s outburst (as pushback against Republican “toxicity,” and the paragraph after notes references inappropriate Nazi references by Lyndon LaRouce (not labeled as a Democrat, though) and Rush Limbaugh.
According to Rhode Island law, cities and towns are never allowed to decrease the amount of money that they supply to their public school systems. If enrollment goes down, they can calculate their “maintenance of effort” on a per-student basis, but that requires a projected decrease.
By way of example, budgeting for the 2013-2014 school year, the Tiverton school department projected enrollment of 1,899. It turned out to be 1,873 in October. For the 2014-2015 school year, enrollment was 1,871, yet the department is now projecting that it will rebound to 1,890.
This is a side note, though, to my latest post on Tiverton Fact Check.
I recently discovered another area of student projections that has significance for school funding. For this year’s budget, the schools asked for an increase in their budget for out-of-district expenses for special needs students. Last year, there were 93 such students, and it appears that the district projected at least as many. It turned out, though, that there were only 77 such students, so the district transferred exactly $600,000 out of that account.
The projection for next year goes down by another 10 students, so the schools may be returning to their prior ability to project this part of their budget accurately. Still, the schools’ local funding increased by $546,014, this year, presumably on the strength of the incorrect projection, so that money is baked into the budget.
I’ve confirmed with the Department of Education that the state’s view is that the district cannot return the unneeded money, even if the aggressive school committee that recently sued the town for much less were to vote to do so.
From the 2001-2002 school year to the one we’re currently in, the Tiverton school department’s budget, from state and local funding, has gone up 65%, from $17.7 million to $29.3 million. Meanwhile, enrollment fell 16%, from 2,219 to 1,871. It’s as if two full grade levels disappeared from the school, but we’re paying for another five.* And word has it that the district is about to come forward and ask local taxpayers for millions of dollars for necessary spending on the school buildings, which will certainly require more debt.
The people who support such trends (probably because they profit from them) are quick to accuse anybody who finds them disconcerting of “hating the schools.” To the contrary, it doesn’t take but a dose of common sense to see that something is seriously out of whack, here.
* Preventive PolitiFact note: Using inflation-adjusted dollars, the schools’ budget increase would only be 24%, so it’d be more like losing two grades while paying for an extra two. But (1) this is a quick illustration to compare numbers, (2) a healthy town’s school system should grow, so the loss in students is arguably understated, and (3) I don’t know why a school system can’t be expected to become more efficient over time, which would require another adjustment.
The interesting part of PolitiFact RI’s review of an income-inequality statement by labor heavyweight George Nee isn’t that the reporters gave him a Mostly False (or couldn’t bring themselves to give him a full-on False), but the line that it draws for the 1% in Rhode Island (emphasis added):
Nee also directed us to a Jan. 26, 2015, report and data compiled by the Economic Policy Institute, another Washington, D.C.-based liberal economic think tank. It compared each state’s highest earners — the top 1 percent — with everyone else.
The institute reports in Table 2 that in 2012, the average income of Rhode Island’s top 1 percent was $966,071 . That’s less than the $1.3 million U.S. average. …
(That report, by the way, concludes that your income needs to be at least $314,647 in Rhode Island to be in the top 1 percent.)
One wonders what sort of people make up this group of roughly 10,000 Rhode Islanders. Investment types, successful business owners, lawyers, doctors, and so on, probably. According to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity’s RIOpenGov payroll application, it also includes the University of Rhode Island’s basketball coach and university president. One surprising member of the 1%, apparently, is Neil Steinberg, the President of the Rhode Island Foundation.
Most folks think of the RI Foundation as a mainly charitable organization, but it’s also been investing in socialistic enterprises, like RhodeMap RI, and other political manipulations of the state’s economy. It’s odd to find that effort headed by somebody with (in the Economic Policy Institute’s words) “outsized” income.
It isn’t clear from the liberal think tank’s report whether it’s measuring household income or individual income. If it’s the former, of course, Rhode Island’s government and its satellites would account for many, many more members of the 1%. I mean, even some retired state workers have pensions that would suffice as half of a 1% income level.
It’s been a repeated complaint of mine that legislation sold as increasing transparency, a few years ago, was actually a restriction of it. It may have become a little easier for novices to get some standard data, but for anybody actually digging into state and local government, things became more difficult. Suddenly, going to the subject-matter experts in government was no longer possible without being routed through political officials or (worse) department lawyers practiced in routing people in circles.
With the election of Democrat Gina Raimondo as governor, the process appears to have notched to the next level, as folks who follow local journalists on Twitter may have heard. In his latest “YouGottaBeKiddingMe” blurb, Edward Fitzpatrick writes:
When PolitiFact R.I. fact-checked a statement that the House speaker made about taxes, Governor Raimondo’s office refused to make state tax expert Paul Dion available. When a second case of meningococcal meningitis arose at Providence College, the state Health Department referred questions to the governor’s office, prompting Journal reporter Paul Grimaldi to tweet: “Why does @GinaRaimondo have a ‘gag’ order on a potential contagion outbreak?” And on Thursday, Journal State House bureau chief Katherine Gregg tweeted: “One after another, knowledgeable/respected people in govt. are telling me they have been ordered to direct all Q to gov’s office #muzzled.”
When Independent Lincoln Chafee was first elected to the governor’s office — ideologue that he was — he barred his administration from appearing on WPRO. This strikes me as significantly worse.
Government already has too many advantages shaping its message for public consumption, to the point of giving voters a distorted view of what they’re voting on.
At some point, reality doesn’t need anymore evidence, and anybody who doesn’t like it has to figure out what to do about it. One such reality (proven long ago, to my satisfaction) is that the Providence Journal is a newspaper written for the progressive Democrat audience. Yes, there’s a journalistic drive to present some form of opposing arguments, but that’s the paper’s target audience.
The objects of the reporters’ suspicion are not those who have the power to take away your money, restrict your freedoms, and even lock you up at gunpoint. Rather, the villains are those who argue on behalf of your freedoms.
To expect its reporters to cover issues of ideological concern as if conservatives might be right would be to expect PolitiFactRI to choose a Pants on Fire statement to check from among far-left U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s inflammatory screeds against people who are ostensibly his constituents.
PolitiFactRI is much more tuned to digging into statements such as one made by RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity CEO Mike Stenhouse on the Dan Yorke Show. Having followed the progression of RhodeMap RI for some years, with a substantial degree of related research, Stenhouse offered Yorke his “interpretation” and “belief” about the ideological position of the federal Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Alerted that the PolitiFact kangaroo court was in session on his comment, he sent a long list of evidence that had helped to lead him to that interpretation and belief.
PolitiFact reporter Katie Mulvaney skimmed the evidence and contacted a few people who could be trusted to disagree with Stenhouse’s interpretation (professionals in the central planning industry), and PolitiFact presumed to rule his interpretation and belief false. That’s laughable by any non-partisan, non-ideological standard for public discourse. But the Providence Journal dominates the local news market, so there you go.
Or take Kate Bramson’s news story about the meeting at which the state Planning Council approved RhodeMap. She quotes Stenhouse as warning that RhodeMap eases the way for eminent domain takings of private property. Bramson’s follow-up sentence isn’t so much an addition of context as it is a debating point from somebody on the pro-government side: “The term ’eminent domain,’ in which governments may seize private property for broad economic purposes, appears nowhere in the plan.”
Well, sure. Neither does the term “freedom” or “property rights.” Bramson appears entirely ignorant of the foundation for Stenhouse’s understanding of RhodeMap, including the fact that his statement on eminent domain is absolutely true.
So how should we proceed? The problem, ultimately, is not that the Providence Journal is biased. It’s that there’s no alternative. Accepting reality, those who have been marked by the news department as the enemy should stop responding to the paper (and especially PolitiFact) as if it’s a neutral arbiter.
Progressive policies (like increasing the minimum wage and funding public college expansion with debt) hurt the very people that they are supposed to help, but the prevailing narrative makes it difficult for folks to see.
The Providence Journal’s war against Buddy Cianci feels similar to the battles that the paper regularly conducts against people on the wrong side of its institutional bias.