I looked into this when it made the rounds and I don't agree that it is evidence of intentional bias on the part of Politifact.
I do believe it is a good case study that exposes the weak points of their approach toward condensing a quote down to a true/false rating. I think they would do much better to decompose a quote into separate claims and fact check those separately.
The Sanders quote that was fact checked can be read as making three separate claims, and Politifact discusses each before lumping them together for the true/false stamp:
1. The "real unemployment rate for young people" is not the same as the typically accepted rate
2. unemployment for blacks >> unemployment for Hispanics > unemployment for whites
3. The "real unemployment rate for young people" is 51%, 36%, and 33% for those groups, respectively
Sanders doesn't explicitly spell out (1), but he at least uses the qualifier "real" instead of simply saying "the unemployment rate", and his campaign later clarified what he meant. (2) is supported by the study his campaign supplied. The numbers in (3) match the study his campaign supplied.
In contrast, the Trump quote is:
"If you look at what’s going on in this country, African-American youth is an example: 59 percent unemployment rate; 59 percent"
and Politifact is only fact checking the "59 percent unemployment rate for black youths". Trump's campaign did not respond, but the Politifact research found that "it appears likely it comes from a computation of all 16- to 24-year-old blacks who aren’t working and may not even want a job, including high school and college students." Since the fact-check is focused on the statistic itself, this tips it into the false category.
Of course, a potential criticism is that Politifact should be fact-checking the higher-level claim that Trump is making. But from this quote, it's very difficult to tell exactly what this claim is. Trump tends to use words to paint emotional pictures that are intended to resonate with a broad audience, rather than making a chain of argument to support specific claims. How do you fact-check a claim about "what's going on in this country"? Any interpretation of such vague phrasing is going to rely as much on the personal experience of the audience as it will on the actual quote.
So I do agree that this exposes a weakness of Politifact. But in this case the Sanders and Trump claims are not equivalent, and Politifact has a clear chain of reasoning behind their ratings.
Another, higher-level potential criticism is that Politifact, as an organization with limited resources, has to make editorial decisions and clearly can't fact-check every public statement made by a candidate. I don't know how they decide which quotes to fact-check, so I don't rely on them to provide a complete account of what is happening in the world. But I'm happy they're able to dig in deeply in some cases where clarification is needed.
The lesson to take away is to read articles from fact-checking organizations for what they're good at. Read and understand their cited evidence and reasoning, not just the true/false stamp.
I do believe it is a good case study that exposes the weak points of their approach toward condensing a quote down to a true/false rating. I think they would do much better to decompose a quote into separate claims and fact check those separately.
The Sanders quote that was fact checked can be read as making three separate claims, and Politifact discusses each before lumping them together for the true/false stamp:
Sanders doesn't explicitly spell out (1), but he at least uses the qualifier "real" instead of simply saying "the unemployment rate", and his campaign later clarified what he meant. (2) is supported by the study his campaign supplied. The numbers in (3) match the study his campaign supplied.In contrast, the Trump quote is: "If you look at what’s going on in this country, African-American youth is an example: 59 percent unemployment rate; 59 percent"
and Politifact is only fact checking the "59 percent unemployment rate for black youths". Trump's campaign did not respond, but the Politifact research found that "it appears likely it comes from a computation of all 16- to 24-year-old blacks who aren’t working and may not even want a job, including high school and college students." Since the fact-check is focused on the statistic itself, this tips it into the false category.
Of course, a potential criticism is that Politifact should be fact-checking the higher-level claim that Trump is making. But from this quote, it's very difficult to tell exactly what this claim is. Trump tends to use words to paint emotional pictures that are intended to resonate with a broad audience, rather than making a chain of argument to support specific claims. How do you fact-check a claim about "what's going on in this country"? Any interpretation of such vague phrasing is going to rely as much on the personal experience of the audience as it will on the actual quote.
So I do agree that this exposes a weakness of Politifact. But in this case the Sanders and Trump claims are not equivalent, and Politifact has a clear chain of reasoning behind their ratings.
Another, higher-level potential criticism is that Politifact, as an organization with limited resources, has to make editorial decisions and clearly can't fact-check every public statement made by a candidate. I don't know how they decide which quotes to fact-check, so I don't rely on them to provide a complete account of what is happening in the world. But I'm happy they're able to dig in deeply in some cases where clarification is needed.
The lesson to take away is to read articles from fact-checking organizations for what they're good at. Read and understand their cited evidence and reasoning, not just the true/false stamp.