After the Republican Debate Wednesday night, numerous media outlets published "fact-check" stories regarding claims made during the debates. So far I have not found a single "mainstream media" fact-check story that has questioned Carly Fiorina's whopper, "Two-thirds of the people in our prisons are there for non-violent offenses, mostly drug related."
As this pie chart illustrates (click on the graph for a larger view), that is not remotely close to the truth. Why the silence?
As this pie chart illustrates (click on the graph for a larger view), that is not remotely close to the truth. Why the silence?
This graph is created from data from the last BJS report on prisoners available before the debate. (A new one came out the day after.) It combines the populations of state and federal prisons to produce a total figure. The BJS breaks the numbers down by the "most serious offense" among the crimes for which each prisoner has been sentenced and groups them into broad categories.
The two-thirds non-violent claim is patently false. About half are sentenced for crimes that are violent on their face. There are other reasons beyond that why many in the other half are also violent, but this figure alone is enough to make the statement clearly false.
The claim that most of those sentenced for "non-violent" crimes are in for drug offenses is also patently false. The drug offenders are only 20% of the total, which is only 40% of the supposedly "non-violent" half, not "most" by any stretch.
In terms of prioritizing the claims to go into a fact-check article, this one would seem to deserve to be near the top of the list. It involves a substantive issue of great importance. The claim is clearly, objectively false. What else are they checking that is more important so that this one needs to go on the cutting room floor?
At the WaPo, Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee have this article. They discuss (1) Donald Trump's organizational as opposed to personal bankruptcies, (2) whether the Planned Parenthood videos actually show a fetus with its heart beating before organ harvesting as distinguished from a technician describing that scene, (3) whether Trump's claim on the costs of illegal immigration is inaccurate for failure to discuss the benefits as well, (4) how much HP actually grew while Fiorina was CEO, (5) whether Chris Christie was nominated as US Attorney on Sept. 10, 2001 or Dec. 7, 2001, and a number of other claims.
USA Today prints an analysis by Factcheck.org's Lori Robertson. She discusses the bankruptcy, HP, Planned Parenthood, and immigration cost claims, plus (1) vaccines and autism, (2) whether Trump wanted to bring casinos to Florida when he donated to Bush, (3) whether Mexico has a birthright citizenship policy, (4) the effectiveness of unilateral US anti-climate-change measures, and (5) Hillary Clinton's emails. On the latter, interestingly, she assails Mike Huckabee for saying Mrs. Clinton "destroyed government records" by stating the "fact" that she was entitled to delete personal emails. But the premise of that "fact" is that all the deleted emails were actually personal. And Ms. Robertson's basis for that presumed "fact"? None except Mrs. Clinton's own word.
Over at CBS, the Christie nomination date seems to be the most newsworthy fact to check. Reena Flores has this story.
Associated Press has this story: Vaccines, casinos, Planned Parenthood, Wisconsin budget, Mexico fence. Where is Fox News? They carry the AP story.
Some of these issues are important. Some are trivial. Nomination date? Give me a break. None, though, has the combination of policy importance with a clear, objective, egregious departure from the truth that the Fiorina whopper has. So other things being more important and more newsworthy can't be the reason. What is the reason?
For many conservatives, leftward media bias is the explanation of first resort. A Republican candidate supporting a position generally favored by the political left is music to the ears of our liberal friends, so that don't want to nail her, even when her supporting "facts" are patent falsehoods. Possibly, but I am inclined to think not, at least not in that intentional sense.
I am inclined to think that the problem is one of confirmation bias. If a person makes a factual assertion and that claim is consistent with what the listener generally thinks the state of affairs to be, the listener is more likely to accept the claim and less likely to challenge it.
Do the people writing the fact-check articles know off-hand that half the people in prison are there for violent offenses and that the two-thirds claim is bogus? Probably not. Further, because of the efforts of well-funded anti-punishment advocacy organizations combined with the nearly monotonically pro-defendant products of academia, people who have gotten their information on this subject from news stories, reports, and articles but have not gone to actual data generally have the impression that what Fiorina was saying is true. (Indeed, I expect that Fiorina herself does not know that what she has been saying on this issue is false but instead has come under the spell of a Rasputin on her staff who is feeding her all this nonsense.)
So, listening to the debate or reading the transcript looking for facts to check, our fact-checkers just breeze right over this one. They have a limited time to research assertions for possible falsity, and this one doesn't look promising to them.
Our media fact checkers dropped the ball. They all did. People who write fact-checking articles should be aware of their own biases and consciously correct for them. That didn't happen this time, and the failure was not just in a single outlet but across the board.
The two-thirds non-violent claim is patently false. About half are sentenced for crimes that are violent on their face. There are other reasons beyond that why many in the other half are also violent, but this figure alone is enough to make the statement clearly false.
The claim that most of those sentenced for "non-violent" crimes are in for drug offenses is also patently false. The drug offenders are only 20% of the total, which is only 40% of the supposedly "non-violent" half, not "most" by any stretch.
In terms of prioritizing the claims to go into a fact-check article, this one would seem to deserve to be near the top of the list. It involves a substantive issue of great importance. The claim is clearly, objectively false. What else are they checking that is more important so that this one needs to go on the cutting room floor?
At the WaPo, Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee have this article. They discuss (1) Donald Trump's organizational as opposed to personal bankruptcies, (2) whether the Planned Parenthood videos actually show a fetus with its heart beating before organ harvesting as distinguished from a technician describing that scene, (3) whether Trump's claim on the costs of illegal immigration is inaccurate for failure to discuss the benefits as well, (4) how much HP actually grew while Fiorina was CEO, (5) whether Chris Christie was nominated as US Attorney on Sept. 10, 2001 or Dec. 7, 2001, and a number of other claims.
USA Today prints an analysis by Factcheck.org's Lori Robertson. She discusses the bankruptcy, HP, Planned Parenthood, and immigration cost claims, plus (1) vaccines and autism, (2) whether Trump wanted to bring casinos to Florida when he donated to Bush, (3) whether Mexico has a birthright citizenship policy, (4) the effectiveness of unilateral US anti-climate-change measures, and (5) Hillary Clinton's emails. On the latter, interestingly, she assails Mike Huckabee for saying Mrs. Clinton "destroyed government records" by stating the "fact" that she was entitled to delete personal emails. But the premise of that "fact" is that all the deleted emails were actually personal. And Ms. Robertson's basis for that presumed "fact"? None except Mrs. Clinton's own word.
Over at CBS, the Christie nomination date seems to be the most newsworthy fact to check. Reena Flores has this story.
Associated Press has this story: Vaccines, casinos, Planned Parenthood, Wisconsin budget, Mexico fence. Where is Fox News? They carry the AP story.
Some of these issues are important. Some are trivial. Nomination date? Give me a break. None, though, has the combination of policy importance with a clear, objective, egregious departure from the truth that the Fiorina whopper has. So other things being more important and more newsworthy can't be the reason. What is the reason?
For many conservatives, leftward media bias is the explanation of first resort. A Republican candidate supporting a position generally favored by the political left is music to the ears of our liberal friends, so that don't want to nail her, even when her supporting "facts" are patent falsehoods. Possibly, but I am inclined to think not, at least not in that intentional sense.
I am inclined to think that the problem is one of confirmation bias. If a person makes a factual assertion and that claim is consistent with what the listener generally thinks the state of affairs to be, the listener is more likely to accept the claim and less likely to challenge it.
Do the people writing the fact-check articles know off-hand that half the people in prison are there for violent offenses and that the two-thirds claim is bogus? Probably not. Further, because of the efforts of well-funded anti-punishment advocacy organizations combined with the nearly monotonically pro-defendant products of academia, people who have gotten their information on this subject from news stories, reports, and articles but have not gone to actual data generally have the impression that what Fiorina was saying is true. (Indeed, I expect that Fiorina herself does not know that what she has been saying on this issue is false but instead has come under the spell of a Rasputin on her staff who is feeding her all this nonsense.)
So, listening to the debate or reading the transcript looking for facts to check, our fact-checkers just breeze right over this one. They have a limited time to research assertions for possible falsity, and this one doesn't look promising to them.
Our media fact checkers dropped the ball. They all did. People who write fact-checking articles should be aware of their own biases and consciously correct for them. That didn't happen this time, and the failure was not just in a single outlet but across the board.
For years, the movement decrying America as "incarceration nation" has traded on the supposed "non-violent, low-level" pot smoker as its poster boy. This was never true, but seldom challenged. It's Holy Writ in academia and much of Liberaldom. Libertarians trade on it as well.
My explanation for the press's disinterest in Ms. Fiorina's blunder is somewhat different from Kent's. Accomplishing the mainstream media's present goal of mass sentencing reduction (which it calls sentencing "reform") depends on selling the public on the idea that the prison population is exactly what Ms. Fiorina said it is. To correct her and tell the truth about who is actually in prison would be grievously to undermine this goal; therefore no correction is going to show up.
P.S. I might add that this fiction is of a piece with other defense-sponsored fictions, to wit, that sex offender registries are chock full of people who did nothing more than public urination, or that the firearms disabilities attaching to felony convictions affect people no more likely to become violent than Martha Stewart.
Do you have any idea how the 20% slice that are public-order crimes breaks down? Would it consist of many people convicted on child porn charges and/or statutory rape?
See the report linked in the third paragraph.
For the state prisoners, no, BJS does not break the category down. For the federal prisoners they are mostly weapons and immigration.
I am ever grateful that the folks blogging here are ever eager to focus on data and are quick to correction badly innaccurate statements by Prez candidates. But the concept that there is mass lefty bias in the media and the academy to blind the "real" people of "real" facts does not, generally speaking, advance serious discourse much. Let me explain a bit why:
1. The marijuana discussion during the GOP debate, even more than the comment by Fiorino, was chock full of factual distortions and misinformation. I doubt Kent and Bill think there is cabal of the media and academia to keep marijuana illegal, though I have seen very little fact-check attention paid to what was said on this topic. (Indeed, as I suspect you realize, I think there is an on-going tendency among so-called "serious" people to ignore the legal significance and social import of state marijuana reform efforts.)
2. In the "public advocacy" academy and especially in politics and the media, "shiny objects" matter a whole lot more than serious consideration of serious issues with serious consequences. The recent obsession with the arrest of the teenager for his clock is the latest example, and arguably both the Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter movements are longer-term varieties of the same symptoms. Even in the crime/punishment arena, concerns about the death penalty fall prey to this shiny objects problem. And lately, even though modern mass incarceration in the US has been a reality for 15+ years, imprisonment rates are the shiny objects that everyone wants to talk (often stupidly) about.
3. My key point, which in some sense aligns with Kent's, is that what real defines what the left-leaning bias of the media (and, in my view, too much of the academy) is a failure seriously to study and to contextualize, either in space or time, serious public policy issues. Bill does a great job highlighting how massively lower crime rates get lost in a discussion of modern incarceration rates, but then he plays the same basic gae when talking up a national crime wave. We hear now much of the modern herion epidemic, but I continue to struggle to figure out hw the modern problems connect to the last set of concerns with pill mills and then before than the meth problem and prior cocaine/crack problems.
4. In sum, while I am happy/eager to join in bashing the media and the academy (and others) for various left/right biases (and I would geneally agree there are lefty biases in these areas, as their are righty biases in other institutions). But I much rather have folks on both sides of the aisle bash the media and others for just failing to encourage serious discourse about serious issues. Our republic benefits from having more serious people talk about serious issues in serious ways.