@4: Actually, that was Bureaucrat Number 1.0. :-)

The problem with their claim to technical correctness is the same problem with their entire organization and approach: they think they can present objective truth. They can't. Everything they do inherits a framing bias by virtue of the fact that it's the result of human labor, and not acknowledging that bias makes it IMPOSSIBLE to account for it in the analysis and presentation of the empirical data. Politifact's original sin is that it believes in objective truth, that human ideas can exist in a culture-free, context-free vacuum, which leaves it no room to account for the context of production of those ideas or the implications of their discursive functioning or the impacts of specific policy initiatives (e.g. privatizing Medicare, a public health insurance system, intrinsically makes it no longer a public health insurance system, which makes it no longer the thing we currently call Medicare, even if you slap the same label on the new thing).

Politifact's claim is analogous to saying that if a revolutionary force manages to topple the US government, enacts a new constitution, and completely changes the way the law operates (for example, establishing a totalitarian monarchy), they haven't gotten rid of the USA if they call their new state the USA nor democracy if they call their system democracy; it's a sort of linguistic non-essentialism that completely negates any utility to language at all.

This isn't a new problem that has recently made them irrelevant (as Krugman suggests), either: it's ALWAYS been an issue. Fact-checking is absolutely important, but those facts NEED to be contextualized, both in terms of context of production and context of transmission/effect.

@21: I went back and read it, too. See above. Also, for a detailed analysis of the bias:

"Republicans muscled a budget through the House of Representatives in April that they said would take an important step toward reducing the federal deficit." In the very first sentence, we have a framing bias for the issue at hand: Politifact is asserting that reducing the Federal deficit is important (or at least that a step toward reducing the deficit is intrinsically important), and by stating it as an uncontextualized universal, the only context we have is at the time the words are being published, meaning that they're asserting that reducing the federal deficit at this point in time is important, an assertion with dubious empirical backing, and a failure to say for whom it is important (I'll go ahead and tell you: reducing the deficit primarily does two things - preserves the USA lines of credit internationally and to the Fed and slows currency devaluation, both of which are important primarily to the super-rich with large investments that exist in the form of US dollars; in fact, both of these are actually objectively bad for people who carry large amounts of debt and benefit creditors, as they maintain the relative value of the debt vs. average earnings).

"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." In the second sentence we get to the crux of the issue: Politifact considers changing a publicly-funded, publicly-run, universally-freely-available (after a certain age) program to a program wherein public funds are used to purchase private insurance plans for not-full-coverage-for-everyone to not be eliminating the original program as long as one calls it the same name. However, everything that makes Medicare what it is (universal no-cost access, public insurance fund) is eliminated. The Ryan plan DOESN'T "change" Medicare, it completely eliminates it in a phased fashion, replacing it with an entirely new system also called "Medicare".

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

And again: "It’s the third year in a row that a health care claim has won the dubious honor." This is actually a larger framing problem the Politifact is reinforcing instead of challenging/debunking as it should: "health care" is being equated to "health insurance", but they are very much not the same thing. I can, for example, have health insurance without receiving any health care (and actually do, as I have not been to see a doctor since starting my current plan, and only go for the mandatory yearly physicals required to keep my plan at all); alternately, I can go to an ER and be treated for life-threatening injuries without any health insurance. This conflation of two distinct concepts contributed to a whole hell of a lot of the disingenuous claims around the 'Obamacare' health insurance reform bill (and then law). Politifact completely dropped the ball with that one because it does not (usually) account for context or framing; unfortunately, this disregard for context in favor of a view that treats "facts" as decontextualized claims with stable truth values does (and always has) rendered their final verdicts useless (to their credit, the actual data-mining operations in which they engage are extremely valuable, they're just really bad at the analysis part).

Another false care/insurance conflation: "A complicated and wonky subject with life-or-death consequences, health care is fertile ground for falsehoods."

"The Democratic attack about 'ending Medicare' was a pervasive line in 2011 that preyed on seniors' worries about whether they could afford health care." This one actually avoids the previous pitfalls, but consists entirely of projection, as it provides no evidence for how the line played with seniors (it might be accurate projection, but for an organization claiming to base analysis of truth on empirical data, asserting e.g. the discursive functioning of a claim without e.g. linking polling data that support that claim is seriously questionable).

Fuck, I'm already sick of this. The rest is more of the same.

Ironically, they actually quote one blogger who points out what's wrong with Politifact's analysis, going on to point out that other people say the same thing they do, without responding to the criticism of the analysis, as though "but he did it too!" somehow makes a behavior okay (I'm sure there's a technical name for that sort of logical fallacy, "appeal ad populum" or somesuch): "'According to (PolitiFact's) logic, if the FBI were replaced with a voucher program wherein citizens would receive subsidies for hiring private investigators to look into criminal activity, but the agency running the voucher program were still called the FBI, it would be unfair to say that the FBI had been ended,' wrote Jed Lewison for Daily Kos. 'I guess it's their right to make that argument, but it's transparently absurd.'"

There's a perfectly accurate analysis of what the Ryan plan actually proposes, presented with similarly problematic framing. Finishing that section, there's this: "'Ryan basically proposed the Affordable Care Act for future seniors,' said Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who advised both President Obama and Republican Mitt Romney on health care. 'I don't understand how you can like it for future seniors but not like it for today's needy uninsured. That doesn't make any sense.'" I very much dislike the Affordable Care Act for the exact same reason I dislike ending Medicare (by which I mean the public insurance program the we currently have called "Medicare"); however, there is one difference in that there isn't currently a single-payer insurance system for people under 65. It's not entirely inconsistent to say that a voucher system for private insurance is better than nothing and also say that a voucher system is worse than single-payer, allowing one to support a shift from nothing to a voucher system and also oppose a shift from a single-payer system (Medicare) to a voucher system. Alternately, it's not inconsistent to oppose ANY public insurance system and there fore oppose the ACA and also support shifting from a single payer system called Medicare to a voucher system also called Medicare. Again, Politifact fails to account for the nuance, instead framing the statement as equating the change presented by the ACA and the Ryan plan, when in fact they move in the opposite directions.

The segment ends with a bunch of assertions about the discursive functions of the different claims without any evidence whatsoever; there are appeals to authority that masquerade as evidence, but as we (hopefully) all learned in high school, appeals to authority are not the same thing as legitimate arguments for a point.

So, yeah, this is pretty much always the case with Politifact unless they're analyzing something with a stable truth value across frames and contexts (e.g. "Using the definitions of 'water,' 'hydrogen,' and 'oxygen' that have achieved consensus in the human scientific community and the definitions of the rest of these words that have achieved consensus in Standard Received English, water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen by molar count"). Their finding of quotes and compiling of data is very useful, while their analysis is awful and has a considerable Conservative bias (Conservatives overwhelmingly support essentialist, Modernist framings established in a culture of White, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, propertied, etc. privilege that discount the importance of context in the operations of policies and even 'facts' across disparate and especially marginalized populations).