Just the Facts, Please

A few months ago we’d hardly heard of them, and now just about everybody with a microphone or keyboard seems to have become a “fact checker.”  I like the idea of checking on the tales politicians tell, but there are pitfalls. 

Fact checkers obviously need a little time to do their work well. Quick shots from the hip can be dead wrong.  One such caused me to open my glazed eyes wide just after last night’s Obama-Romney debate ended. An ABC-TV fact checker said Romney was right and Obama was wrong in a heated exchange about oil and gas production from public lands.

I know a thing or two about that after 30 years of living in the Intermountain West. Most of that time, I worked for the U.S. Forest Service, which manages 31 million acres of public land in the region. Questions about oil and gas permits, operations, and production abounded, and I often had do some research to answer them.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages far more acres of public land than does the Forest Service, and it also keeps records of permits and oil and gas production on all federal lands plus off-shore drilling areas. Careful fact checkers went to BLM records to make their judgments the day after the debates. They reached a different conclusion than the ABC guy who gave his “expert” analysis minutes after the debate ended.

Romney said oil production was down 14 percent each year (of Obama’s years in office) and gas production was down 9 percent. He repeated that assertion twice.  He said that was because “the president cut in half the number of licenses and permits for drilling on federal land and in federal water.”

Obama said production on federal public lands is up, and what Romney said “is just not true.”

The ABC fact checker said Romney was correct because leases issued dropped from 3,499 in fiscal year 2008 to 2,188 in fiscal year 2011, nearly the 50 percent decline he claimed. However, had the checker looked carefully at BLM records and been knowledgeable about federal operations, he would have known that government fiscal years start on Oct. 1. So the decline in permit approvals started during the Bush administration.

An alert newsman also should have noticed a large drop in 2010. That’s because Obama ordered a moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico so all involved could get their acts together following the worst oil spill in the history of drilling in federal areas. Since then, permit approvals have been increasing gradually, a fact Obama mentioned during the discussion.

Gas production is down on federal lands as Romney said, but it is not because of a lack of permits. New technology, particularly in controversial “fracking” operations, has increased gas production immensely across much of the U.S.

Extraction companies will go where the low-hanging fruit is.  That usually is on private or state lands where, in most cases, environmental regulations are less stringent than on the federal lands. Also, drilling new gas wells generally is easier and thus less costly on eastern lands than in rugged western terrain. Existing access roads also invite drillers to lands other than the often sparsely roaded western public land areas.

What about the charge that oil production on public lands has declined 14 percent in each of the last 4 years? BLM records show the truth is it has increased 16.6 percent during Obama’s time in office. It is interesting to note that during the last 4 years of George Bush’s tenure as President, oil production decreased by 16.8 percent on federal lands.

Romney deserves a very long nose on this one. The ABC fact checker deserves a zero performance rating.

Which Party Will Win the Deceit Contest?

There’s nothing new about politicians making deceptive or downright false statements. And neither Democrats nor Republicans have a corner on deceit.  But when those who traditionally go all out in support of one party or the other publish criticism of their own standard bearers, we’ve come a long way downward.

That happened in the wake of the Republican National Convention.  Not once, but twice.

The Chicago Tribune, our family newspaper while I was growing up, rarely has a good word to say about a Democrat and has staunchly supported Republicans in every election within memory.  Yet, Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune editorial board, took Republican campaign managers to task in a post-convention story titled “Team Romney’s War against Facts.”

The author said, “There’s no excuse for the fantasies repeated by myth-building politicians, like the evening’s star speaker, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, even after nonpartisan media fact checkers have found the statements to be untrue.

“For example, Romney grandly promised, ‘I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began with an apology tour.’ Ah there goes the ‘apology tour’ again. The line lives in Republican stump speeches, despite its winning ‘four Pinocchios’ months ago from the Washington Post’s fact checker Glenn Kessler, among others.

“In fact, the president has never apologized for anything on his foreign trips, although previous presidents have.”

Both parties are being watched. Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler recently gave the Obama campaign four Pinocchios for a 30-second ad attacking Mitt Romney as a "corporate raider" and for outsourcing jobs. Kessler said, "On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair, and untrue."

Page also singled out a Republican ad concerning welfare as a particularly blatant lie:

“When the welfare ad,  for example, says the Obama administration has ended the work requirement in the landmark 1996 welfare reform law, that’s simply false. The administration is offering states a chance to apply for more flexibility in determining their own work requirements, if they agree to actually raise the number of people they move from welfare to work.”

Fox News, perhaps the ultimate conservative medium, posted a column by Sally Kohn, a contributor and writer, which came down hard on Rep. Paul Ryan for statements in his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination.

Kohn said, “To anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.

“The good news is that the Romney-Ryan campaign has likely created dozens of new jobs among the legions of additional fact checkers that media outlets are rushing to hire to sift through the mountain of cow dung that flowed from Ryan’s mouth. Said fact checkers have already condemned certain arguments that Ryan still irresponsibly repeated.”

The Fox writer then listed as examples four specific lies Ryan told to the cheering convention audience and millions of television viewers:

1. While Ryan tried to pin the downgrade of the United State’ credit rating on spending under President Obama, the credit rating actually was downgraded because Republicans threatened not to raise the debt ceiling.

2.  While Ryan blamed President Obama for the shut down of a GM plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, the plant actually closed while George W. Bush was in office.

3. Though Ryan insisted that President Obama wants to give all the credit for private sector success to government that is not what the president said on the subject.

4.  Though Ryan accused President Obama of taking $716 billion out of Medicare, the fact is that amount was savings in Medicare reimbursement rates, which should also save Medicare recipients some out-of-pocket costs.

Kohn concluded with a statement that any caring American would endorse:

“Elections should be about competing based on your record in the past and your vision for the future, not competing to see who can get away with the most lies and distortions without voters noticing or bothering to care. Both parties should hold themselves to that standard.”

This week the Democratic National Convention holds the spotlight.  Will the speakers stick to facts, thus raising the bar for discourse during the balance of the campaign?  Or will they try to better the GOP’s convention performances with a barrage of lies and distortions?

We’ll know when the fact checkers issue their analyses after the speechmaking is over.