Pants on (three-alarm) Fire

In recent weeks, these pages have contained thousands of words on the laughable bias and general incompetence of the mainstream media’s cherished “fact checking” columns. We’ve gone back to the well so many times we risk becoming the Baby Jessica of media criticism. Alas, it’s hard to ignore these pompous gatekeepers.

In last week’s issue, Mark Hemingway noted that there is a special congressional election in -Oregon’s 1st District being held on January 31, thanks to the resignation of disgraced Democrat David Wu. It’s a surprisingly close race, and Democrat Suzanne Bonamici and Republican Rob Cornilles have been making rather pointed accusations against each other.

So PolitiFact Oregon—which works in partnership with the state’s most influential media outlet, the -Oregonian—has been trying and failing to play referee in the race by evaluating the candidates’ statements. First, PolitiFact gave Cornilles its “Pants on Fire” rating for an ad claiming that Bonamici, a state legislator, voted to raise taxes 60 times. Now depending on how broadly you define “tax,” the claim is defensible. But if you want to split hairs—and boy, does PolitiFact ever like to do that—then you would say not that Bonamici has raised taxes 60 times, but that she has raised taxes and fees 60 times.

Even if you accept that Cornilles may not have been 100 percent accurate, it’s still hard to argue he deserved a “Pants on Fire” rating—the acme of dishonesty on PolitiFact’s scale. His underlying message that Bonamici has raised taxes and generally made life more expensive for people in a state where the tax rate tops out at a whopping 11 percent strikes us as far from misleading. In any event, Cornilles modified his line of attack in a later campaign ad, claiming that Bonamici “voted for higher taxes and fees on the middle class and small business,” which would be deemed accurate by the criteria PolitiFact had laid out.