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.
The Truth-O-Meter journeyed to Texas last week to check the grad rate in Austin that was being touted by the woman tapped to be the next superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.
PolitiFact and PolitiFact Georgia also looked into claims about the potency of today’s marijuana and the numbers on the uninsured since President Barack Obama took office.
And we put a statement by former President Jimmy Carter to the test that dealt with the wage disparity between men and women.
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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Austin, Texas, School Superintendent Meria Carstarphen: The Austin Independent School District’s graduation rate reached an all-time high of 82.5 percent in 2012.
What Carstarphen said matters because the Atlanta school board has chosen her as the sole finalist to take over as superintendent in the district still rebounding from a national cheating scandal.
Austin’s grad rate for its Class of 2012 is great rate by most standards and well above Georgia’s 69.73 percent grad rate and Atlanta Public Schools’ rate of 50.87 percent.
Austin’s grad rate has climbed steadily in Carstarphen’s tenure, which started in 2009. It was 75.6 percent in 2009, 78.6 percent in 2010 and 80 percent in 2011, according to the Texas Education Agency.
The upward trajectory of Austin’s overall graduation rate mirrors that of the state. Texas has one of the nation’s best grad rates.
It’s difficult to say how much of the increases can be attributed to policies Carstarphen has pushed. But her numbers are accurate, according to district and state data
We rated the statement by Carstarphen as True.
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Heidi Heilman, president of the Massachusetts Prevention Alliance: “Today’s marijuana is 300 percent to 800 percent more potent than the pot of yesteryear.”
“Such dangerous levels of THC heighten mental illness and addiction risks for those who smoke marijuana — especially for kids with developing brains,” Heilman, who is also the director of New England field development for Smart Approaches to Marijuana, said in an op-ed piece in The Providence (R.I.) Journal.
THC, or tetrahydracannabinol, is the key active ingredient in marijuana.
It’s well established that the potency of marijuana has increased over time. On Jan. 24, PolitiFact ruled on former Rhode Island Congressman Patrick Kennedy comment that marijuana today is “genetically modified,” with THC levels that “far surpass the marijuana” of the 1970s. We rated his statement was Mostly True.
Heilman’s comment was more specific. Because something 100 percent more potent is actually twice as potent, she was saying that the potency of today’s marijuana is now four to nine times greater than “yesteryear,” a rather vague starting point. In 2012, the most recent year in which testing has been completed, the average THC concentration was 12.3 percent.
We rated Heilman’s statement as True.
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U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Savannah: “There are still more people uninsured today than when (Barack) Obama was elected president.”
Kingston, who is running for the U.S. Senate, based the claim he made on Fox News on a Gallup poll detailing the percentage of uninsured between the beginning of 2009 and now. The poll shows 15.4 percent of Americans were uninsured during the first quarter of 2009. Currently, 15.9 percent of Americans are uninsured. The poll has a margin of error of 1 percentage point.
Kingston’s office says the Census Bureau data we found showing more people uninsured in 2012 than in 2008 supports his argument.
The percentage of Americans uninsured we reviewed in other polls and surveys mostly shows there has been a slight increase since 2008, although the numbers are close or within the margin of error.
We rated Kingston’s claim Half True.
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Former President Jimmy Carter: Women in the U.S. get 23 percent less pay than men for the same exact work.
The former president was doing a television interview to promote his new book, “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power,” and said: “In the United States, for the same exact work for a full-time employee, women get 23 percent less pay than men.”
Carter made a similar claim last year at a women’s conference in Atlanta. He told the conference that women in the United States are paid about 70 percent of what men earn for the same work. PolitiFact Georgia rated that statement Mostly False.
Carter’s assistant, Steven Hochman, emailed this about Carter’s television interview: “In a conversation or an interview, sometimes we don’t say all we want to say. In the United States for the same exact work, most women earn less than men. For full-time employees, the median annual earnings are about 23 percent less for women than for men.”
The number Carter used in his March 24 TV interview comes from a U.S. Census Bureau study that looked at the total wages earned by male and female workers. The study found men’s total wages were about 23 percent higher that the total amount of women’s wages. But that large discrepancy was due in part to the fact that men generally work more hours. The study did not attempt to look at equal pay for the same work or the same number of hours worked.
There is a gender pay gap. But Carter vastly overstated it during his television interview.
We rated Carter’s statement Mostly False.
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