Our Fact Checks Get A Fact Check
Civil Beat’s Fact Checks are all about accuracy. Who’s telling the truth and who’s twisting it for their own political benefit.
So last week we decided to turn our truth squad on ourselves, a discussion about the words and the labels we created two years ago to describe what we’d concluded after checking the facts.
The Fact Check scorecard was meant to allow for nuances in public and political speech. Not everything is black or white, true or false. There are shades in between.
“True” was clearly true; there’s no question that the facts support the claim. We recently gave Ed Case a “True” for his statement that U.S. Senate opponent Mazie Hirono gets much of her campaign money from mainland donors. You only have to look at the federal campaign finance reports to figure that one out.
“Mostly True” was given to those statements that aren’t exactly true, but also aren’t so far off point that you would think the truth is being purposely skewed. A recent example: mayoral hopeful Kirk Caldwell, who backs a proposal to merge Honolulu fire and medic departments, said in a debate that there are 25 emergency medical stations. There are only 20 so we gave him a “Mostly True.”
“Half True” was our way of saying “hmmmm, really?” The statement had some elements of truth to it, but also had a dose of falsehood that seems to us the speaker likely should have known. A recent case in point: mayoral hopeful Ben Cayetano said during a debate that you can’t build homes or add additions in Pearl City because of a city moratorium on additional sewer hookups. So it turns out the city had announced a moratorium but still reviewed permit applications on a case-by-case basis and had approved more than a dozen. Since Cayetano was trying to make a political point — that he’d do a better job than the current administration — we gave it a “Half True.”
“False” speaks for itself. The facts don’t support the claim. Recent example: Anti-Big Wind group I Aloha Molokai put out a press release saying a major Arizona electric utility had rejected wind power as an electricity generation option. Nope. The utility never said that and has several wind farms in its mix.
“Screaming Lie” is an outrageous abuse of truth. We’ve never given anyone that rating.
“Unverifiable” means there’s just no way to tell.
And “In Progress” is our way of letting you know we are on the case but need more time to check the facts.
So that brings us to the source of our recent internal hand-wringing — the “Barely True” rating. Those two words were aimed at describing statements that were just one step above false. Some part of the claim could be supported, but significant parts were so misleading, overstated or otherwise not credible that the claim was mostly false.
And that’s what we’ve changed it to — “Mostly False.”
Our discussion was prompted by the recent Fact Check of a TV spot by Pacific Resource Partnership in which a teacher purports that when Cayetano was governor he forced teachers to struggle financially while at the same time giving a tax break to rich people. The two contentions were clearly unrelated — tax cuts came three years before Hawaii teachers went on strike. And Cayetano’s tax cut proposal was aimed at the middle class, not the rich, although once it got through the Legislature the state’s high-income residents also saw their taxes cut. So because the tax package did include tax reductions for the highest earners, we gave it a “Barely True.”
That caused quite a stir in the Civil Beat community. Most of you who posted comments on the story thought our rating was off base, that it should have been “False.” We heard you and started kicking it around the newsroom.
What we realized was that “Barely True” still sounds to the casual reader like the claim is mainly true, and not largely false with a kernel of truth thrown in. Our lengthy definition — displayed off to the right of the article — is pretty precise, but those two summary words weren’t as accurate as they could be.
So, starting today, we implement a new rating known as “Mostly False.” We hope that has more of the ring of truth.
