In what may be a first for the alleged fact checkers at PolitFact, a claim by Maria Bartiromo has been found to be both true, and also false at the same time!
Yesterday, misinformation merchant Yacob Reyes attempted to fact check Bartiromo’s statement that “We have doubled our oil imports from Russia in the last year,” rating it mostly false, stating “The U.S. did not double oil imports from Russia in the last year.” Then when you scroll down two paragraphs in his article, we learn that “The U.S. did double the amount of crude oil imported from Russia last year. But Russia accounts for only about 3% of overall U.S. crude oil imports in 2021.”
So it’s “mostly false”… but also literally true.
.@PolitiFact & @yacob_reyes should be banned for spreading misinformation on @Twitter.
Their game usually goes as follows: Deceiving headline & meter, and the truth found buried in the article, knowing that most people only read headlines.
Malicious deception.
Prime example 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/vmkKNp5m9Y
— Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) March 1, 2022
Since what Bartiromo literally said is literally true, Reyes decided to also editorialize on the “implications” of her comment, which he uses to justify the “mostly false” rating.
Reyes writes:
The U.S. more than doubled its crude oil imports from Russia, to about 208,000 barrels a day in the first 11 months of 2021, from 76,000 barrels a day in 2020. But Bartiromo’s broader point was about the extent of U.S. reliance on Russian oil, which remains fairly modest. Russia accounted for only about 3% of overall U.S. crude oil imports in 2021 — a 2 percentage point increase from 2020.
What Bartiromo implied from her factual statement as it pertains to a greater narrative is irrelevant, as that’s not the claim being fact checked. Reyes is free to evaluate that separately, but his “mostly false” rating is specifically applied to the claim that “We have doubled our oil imports from Russia in the last year.”
The rest of the piece continues in the theme of fact checking a version of Bartiromo’s claim that Reyes simply made up in his head. While Bartiromo was clearly speaking about crude oil, and a spokesperson for Bartiromo confirmed to Politifact their claim was about crude oil imports, Reyes then decides to ignore that and point out that the increase in imports hasn’t been as large if you include refined products such as gasoline and kerosene (in which the case increase would’ve been 28%).
And that wasn’t all.
In another widely-mocked fact check yesterday, PolitiFact went after Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s claim that “Virginia is one of only a handful of states that actually taxes our veterans’ retirement” all of which ultimately came down to how one defines the term “handful.”
All told, 15 states tax military pensions. That’s a minority, but certainly more than the "handful" Youngkin describes.https://t.co/E9sYZKuAuZ
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) March 1, 2022
Virginia is one of three states to fully tax military pensions, while twelve more tax them at reduced rates, for fifteen states in total taxing pensions. “That’s a minority,” Politifact’s Warren Fiske writes, “but certainly more than the ‘handful’ Youngkin describes,” before awarding his claim a “half-true” rating.
As for how one exactly defines what a “handful” of states is, PolitiFact can’t even be consistent on. In one prior PolitiFact “fact check” from 2012, the writer describes a group of 34 members of the Democratic Executive Committee as a “handful of party officials.” While 34 used to be a “handful” at PolitiFact, the definition apparently shrinks to something less than 15 when a Republican uses the word.
Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros
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