Does anyone in the policy world still give credence to the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” column? We’ve sounded this note before but are driven to reiterate: This ostensibly impartial referee is in fact a liberal column that operates under the guise of being above mere partisanship.
The duplicity that provoked us this time was its award of “Three Pinocchios” to a comment Rick Santorum made to the Iowa Freedom Summit: namely, that despite “six million net new jobs created in America” since 2000, “there are fewer Americans working today who were born in this country than there were 15 years ago.”
While the Fact Checker acknowledges that the numbers appear to check out, it goes on for several paragraphs of fault-finding. It takes issue with the fact that Santorum’s data derive from a study that looked only at the traditional working ages of 16-65, even though there are 2.6 million more people over age 65 working today than in 2000—and not all of them are immigrants. (Actually, we can only infer this, because the Fact Checker bungled this sentence, stating that there are only 2.6 million more native-born Americans 16 and older today than in 2000. But the Fact Checker knows that you know what it was trying to say, right?)
The Fact Checker also points out that you would get different numbers if you picked different start dates and end dates. But so what? The year 2000 was the peak of a business cycle and is eminently defensible for a starting point. If that’s going to be the basis for a Fact Checker investigation, it’s going to need a newspaper all its own—a very boring and self-righteous one, even by newspaper standards.
The real problem the Fact Checker finds with Santorum’s statement has nothing to do with the facts but with his implications, namely that immigrants are taking the jobs of native-born Americans. It’s an interpretation that doesn’t comport with the view of the folks at the Post, so they trot out Georgetown economist Harry Holzer who declares that . . . well, he doesn’t actually say it’s incorrect, but he avers that it’s an oversimplification.
We don’t necessarily agree with all the implications of Santorum’s statement, but if we wanted to take issue with them, we’d state why we disagree, not pose as an impartial arbiter of the facts and, worse, one who must torture the evidence to declare his factually correct statement “wrong.”