PolitFact Defends Their Choice Of Democrats' "Lie Of The Year 2011"

By Susan Duclos

PolitiFact addresses the massive liberal criticism after PolitiFact named the "lie of the Year 2011" to be the Democrats' statement that "Republicans voted to end Medicare."

PolitFact, in the same piece, provides links to two other fact check organizations that found that very same statement to be untrue. One being The Washington Post's The Fact Checker which named that statement and others from both Republicans and Democrats in their "The biggest Pinocchios of 2011," piece and the other was FactCheck.org who named it a "Democratic Whopper."

Via PolitiFact:

PolitiFact had its latest brush with the Echo Chamber Nation this week. We gave our Lie of the Year to the Democrats' claim that the Republicans "voted to end Medicare." That set off a firestorm in the liberal blogosphere, with many saying that claim was not actually wrong. We've received about 1,500 e-mails about our choice and only a few agreed with us.

Some of the response has been substantive and thoughtful. The critics said we ignored the long-term effects of Rep. Paul Ryan's plan and that we were wrong to consider his privatized approach to be Medicare. In their view, that is an end to Medicare.

We've read the critiques and see nothing that changes our findings. We stand by our story and our conclusion that the claim was the most significant falsehood of 2011. We made no judgments on the merits of the Ryan plan; we just said that the characterization by the Democrats was false.

Our competitors FactCheck.org and the Washington Post's FactChecker had also said the Medicare claim was false — and this week both picked it for their biggest-falsehoods-of-the-year lists.

Some of our critics wrongly attributed our choice to our readers' poll and said we were swayed by a lobbying campaign by Ryan. But our editors made the choice and the poll was not a factor.

Predictably, their piece addressing their critics, is being criticized by the very same people that howled over their choice to begin with.

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PolitiFact Chooses Democrats' Lie as '2011 Lie of the Year'

By Susan Duclos

PolitiFact has issued their 2011 "Lie of the Year", naming the Democrats' claim that "Republicans voted to end Medicare."


Background:

Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit. Introduced by U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the plan kept Medicare intact for people 55 or older, but dramatically changed the program for everyone else by privatizing it and providing government subsidies.

Democrats pounced. Just four days after the party-line vote, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a Web ad that said seniors will have to pay $12,500 more for health care "because Republicans voted to end Medicare."

Rep. Steve Israel of New York, head of the DCCC, appeared on cable news shows and declared that Republicans voted to "terminate Medicare." A Web video from the Agenda Project, a liberal group, said the plan would leave the country "without Medicare" and showed a Ryan look-alike pushing an old woman in a wheelchair off a cliff. And just last month, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi sent a fundraising appeal that said: "House Republicans’ vote to end Medicare is a shameful act of betrayal."

After two years of being pounded by Republicans with often false charges about the 2010 health care law, the Democrats were turning the tables.

PolitiFact reports that they debunked the claim in nine different fact-checks, rating those Democrats' claims "False" or "Pants on Fire" in each instance.

Findings:

• They ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare -- or even the people 55 to 65 who would join the program in the next 10 years.

• They used harsh terms such as "end" and "kill" when the program would still exist, although in a privatized system.

• They used pictures and video of elderly people who clearly were too old to be affected by the Ryan plan. The DCCC video that aired four days after the vote featured an elderly man who had to take a job as a stripper to pay his medical bills.

Despite the typical liberal justification for the outright lies from people like New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and The New Republic, and their complaints claiming PolitiFact was wrong but they, the liberals, were right, PolitiFact shows that other fact-check organizations confirmed their own findings.

But PolitiFact was not alone. Other independent fact-checkers also said the claim was false.

"Medicare would remain an entitlement program, but it would also be more costly to future beneficiaries. It would not end," noted FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker concluded that while there’s "a worthwhile debate" about whether Ryan’s proposal should be adopted, "it is not true to claim Republicans are trying to ‘kill’ Medicare."

Predictably, some of those same liars are whining about PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year 2011."

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