Politifact's Pants on Fire
This site is getting mentioned a lot for its supposedly impartial analysis of claims by politicians. But check out
today's "fact-checking" for an eye-opener:
On April 6, 2012, Romney’s press secretary Andrea Saul tweeted, "FACT: Women account for 92.3% of the jobs lost under @BarackObama, a claim also made on Romney's website.
They call that statement "mostly untrue", although if you read the analysis, it becomes apparent that what they really mean is "completely true, but hurts Obama, so we're going to say it's untrue".
When we asked for backup for the claim, the campaign cited national employment figures spanning four years. We found that though the numbers are accurate, their reading of them isn’t.
They run through the math, and guess what? It turns out that 92.3% of the jobs lost since Obama took office belonged to women. But they ding it as untrue because, well, counting right from the beginning of 2009 is unfair because he just took office that month and anyway, if you count from the beginning of the recession in 2007, a lot more men lost jobs.
But that does not make Romney's statement untrue. It arguably makes it a little unfair, perhaps a little misleading. But to say it's mostly untrue is ridiculous.
