How does PolitiFact Georgia’s Truth-O-Meter work?
Our goal is to help you find the truth in American politics. Reporters from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution fact-check statements by local, state and national political leaders, including lobbyists and interest groups. We then rate them on the AJC Truth-O-Meter.
To fact-check a claim, reporters first contact the speaker to verify the statement. Next, the research begins. Reporters consult a variety of sources, including industry and academic experts. This research can take hours or a few days or even longer, depending on the claim. Reporters then compile the research into story form and include a recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling.
The fact check then moves on to a panel of veteran editors who debate the statement and the reporter’s recommended Truth-O-Meter ruling. The panel votes on a final ruling; majority prevails.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is nothing if not controversial. How else do you explain all the buzz about comments she made about her grandparents or about suggestions from the Republican National Committee chairman that she’d taken money from kings?
Our fact-checkers dug deep last week to see what was behind the sensation.
We also checked claims that Georgia has the nation’s busiest court of appeals and that Cuba continues to display conduct that raises questions about President Barack Obama’s decision to remove it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Lastly, we checked out an all-too-common mischaracterization of the wage gap.
Abbreviated versions of our fact checks are below.
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Full versions can be found at www.politifact.com/georgia/.
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Charlie Bethel on Thursday, April 2, 2015, in the state Senate chamber: Georgia has had the nation’s busiest court of appeals for a decade or more.
Without any formal vetting process, the General Assembly agreed to a proposal to increase the size of the the Georgia Court of Appeals by three judges — or 25 percent — at a cost to taxpayers of $1.5 million (including support staff).
One argument for expanding the court that was brought before the state Senate in the closing hours of the recent 40-day legislative session:
“Is it not true that Georgia’s Court of Appeals is the busiest intermediate court of appeals in the country and has been for a decade or more?” Sen. Charlie Bethel, R-Dalton, asked in traditional legislative parlance.
PolitiFact Georgia decided to fact-check the often-repeated claim.
Arguably the best case for it being the nation’s busiest court of appeals is an apparently unique provision in the Georgia Constitution. It mandates that the state’s two appellate courts — the Georgia Supreme Court and the Georgia Court of Appeals — rule on any appeal within two court terms, or in about eight months. Failure to meet that deadline means the prior court ruling in the case stands.
The court website says that during the 1990s, the Georgia Court of Appeals was, “on the basis of the number of cases decided by each judge, one of the busiest appellate courts in the country.”
An analysis, conducted by the state’s Administrative Office of the Courts in 1995, found that the court was the nation’s busiest in 1993 — based on signed opinions per judge. The Georgia court, which had nine members then, averaged 278 signed opinions per judge that year, and California was second with 137 signed opinions per judge.
But experts say an apples-to-apples comparison to determine the busiest court of appeals in the country would be difficult, if not impossible. That’s a lot of missing context. For that reason, we rated the statement Half True.
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Viral BuzzFeed on Monday, April 20, 2015, in video: Women make only 78 percent of what men make for the same job.
The two-minute video is hilarious. And unsettling.
A young woman and a male co-worker, who appear to be about the same age, are examining their paychecks when the woman discovers she makes only 78 percent as much on payday as her cubicle mate.
“That’s so weird because we have the same job,” the woman says. “That’s not fair.”
In protest, the woman then proceeds to do only 78 percent of her job, much to the dismay of her male co-workers and bewildered bosses. The comedic attack on the gender wage gap struck a nerve. As of this week, it had 9.7 million views, thanks to social media.
PolitiFact couldn’t resist checking the wage gap claim.
The 78 percent figure is real, but for culmulative wages. It does not factor in occupations held, hours worked or length of tenure. And, unlike the video, the U.S. census data never attempted to compare equal pay for equal work. Using this statistic to illustrate the gender pay gap is misleading.
We rated it Mostly False.
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Hillary Clinton on Wednesday, April 15, 2015, during a roundtable chat in iowa: “All my grandparents” immigrated to America.
Hillary Clinton last week became the latest example of a politician flubbing her family’s ancestry while making the case for her presidency.
She was speaking at a business roundtable inside an Iowa produce store when she related her personal family heritage to the struggles of immigrants living here illegally and trying to work in the United States.
“All my grandparents, you know, came over here, and you know my grandfather went to work in a lace mill in Scranton, Pa., and worked there until he retired at 65,” she said, according to a video tape of the event. “He started there when he was a teenager and just kept going. So I sit here and I think, well, you’re talking about the second, third generation. That’s me, that’s you.”
BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski quickly pointed out that Clinton was wrong, primarily using census and military records from Ancestry.com.
A Clinton spokesman admitted the error to BuzzFeed. And it’s very clear from the evidence that not all of her grandparents were immigrants. In fact, only one was.
We rated Clinton’s claim False.
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David Perdue on Wednesday, April 15, 2015:
The Castro regime ‘violated international norms’ by secretly shipping weapons to North Korea in violation of a U.N. embargo.
Some Republicans, including freshman U.S. Sen. David Perdue of Georgia, object to taking Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
“Cuba must prove it is willing to change its destructive and oppressive behavior before the United States removes it as a state sponsor of terrorism,” Perdue, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement issued the day after the White House announced the move that some believe eliminates a major obstacle to the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba.
Perdue listed what he considers several examples of that “destructive and oppressive behavior,” including “a secret shipment of 240 metric tons of weapons to North Korea by Cuba in 2013 that violated a United Nations embargo.”
PolitiFact Georgia decided to fact-check Perdue’s statement about the weapons shipment.
News reports and statements from the administration back up Perdue’s claim about the incident.
The administration said its decision was narrowly focused on Cuba’s record in the past six months and its commitment not to support terrorism in the future. That is context the reader needs.
We rated Perdue’s statement Mostly True.
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Reince Priebus on Sunday, April 12, 2015, in an interview: Says Hillary Clinton took “money from kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Oman and Yemen.”
On April 12, the day Clinton’s run became official, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus disparaged her on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
He appeared on the program after U.S. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who declared his candidacy for president several days before Clinton did. Paul told host Bob Schieffer that Clinton will have a problem with female voters because “she has taken money from countries that abuse the rights of women,” and he referred to Saudi Arabia.
Priebus replied with a claim about kings and cash:
“Super PACs, parties, individual candidates — they can’t take money from kings of Saudi Arabia and Morocco and Oman and Yemen, and that’s what Hillary Clinton did. And so she’s going to have to account for this money.”
The monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Oman have contributed to the Clinton Foundation, but Yemen, which does not have a king, has not.
And although Priebus’ claim was made during a discussion of the foundation as well as contributions to political candidates, his phrasing could have left the impression that Clinton herself, rather than the foundation, received the money.
The statement is partially accurate. We gave it a Half True.
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