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.
Election-year claims kept PolitiFact Georgia’s fact-checkers busy last week.
This time, the AJC Truth-O-Meter focused on the Democratic runoff for state school superintendent and the governor’s race. We also took a look back at President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to help the veterans. And we fact-checked a U.S. senator’s view on life after the bank bailouts.
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U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.: “Today, the five largest financial institutions are 38 percent bigger than they were back in 2008, when they were too big to fail.”
Warren was making the rounds to promote her new book, “A Fighting Chance,” and dispelling speculation about a 2016 presidential bid while continuing to make a case for greater government intervention in the financial sector.
On May 19 on “PBS Newshour,” Warren said there’s a need to “break up these banks,” which have only gotten bigger since the financial collapse.
“Today, the five largest financial institutions are 38 percent bigger than they were back in 2008, when they were too big to fail,” she said.
Warren’s office said the analysis came from SNL Financial, a private bank researching firm that pointed us to a CNN article describing the report. It found assets from the top six banks were up 37 percent. That’s six banks, not five, as Warren said, and the article was from September 2013, so it’s a little outdated.
Our experts took some issue with her loose characterization of “too big to fail” and some of the context she left out. But her underlying point is largely accurate.
We rated Warren’s statement as Mostly True.
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Valarie Wilson, Democratic candidate for state school superintendent: Says her primary runoff opponent, state legislator Alisha Thomas Morgan, voted to “slash” funding for the preschool programs for disabled and special needs students.
Wilson made her charge against her campaign rival in a recent campaign flier.
In January 2010, then-Gov. Sonny Perdue was asking lawmakers — Morgan included — to cut $1.2 billion out of a budget that had already been in place for six months.
The program to help disabled 3- and 4-year-olds be better prepared for school didn’t escape the cutting. Neither did the special needs scholarship program.
The $29 million budget for the preschool disabled program was cut about $2 million. Funding for the private school scholarships was cut $4 million, and officials in the House Budget Office say that was based strictly on the state’s education funding formula.
We felt a lot of context was needed to understand Wilson’s claim.
We rated her statement as Half True.
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Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign (revisited May 2014): Pledged to reduce the benefits claim backlog for veterans.
The last time we looked at this promise, in November 2012, we rated it Promise Broken.
We found a series of government oversight reports on the issue of wait times, which cited not only long lag times but also avoidable errors in rating claims. Officially, the backlog refers to benefit requests that go unaddressed by a government office within 125 days.
We found that the backlog nearly doubled from roughly 36 percent in summer 2010 to 65 percent in June 2012. So not only did Obama not reduce the backlog as president, it grew after he took office.
In 2014, journalists have uncovered stories about Department of Veterans Affairs staff falsifying documentation about how long veterans are waiting to receive health care in VA facilities. The story seems to be the same: a system overwhelmed by demand for services. Obama said May 21 that he’s waiting for findings from official investigations so he can take action.
Because of the allegations of falsifying information, we have questions about whether official numbers are trustworthy. In April, the Obama administration released numbers suggesting the backlog was shrinking, but veterans groups said they had serious concerns that the numbers weren’t accurate.
We’ll be looking at this promise again in the coming months.
For now, it remains Promise Broken.
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Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association: “Nathan Deal cut the HOPE scholarship program so that literally 100,000 Georgians will not be able to go to college or get technical training that they so badly needed to raise — you know, give them a chance at a good job.”
Immediately following the primary election, Shumlin attacked the Georgia governor about changes to the popular HOPE scholarship in his tenure during a May 21 appearance on MSNBC.
Deal, with bipartisan support, pushed through several changes to the HOPE scholarship program in his first year in office that he said were needed to ensure its long-term viability.
Within two years, the number of students on HOPE scholarships and grants dropped by 62,504. That’s not 100,000, and state officials say other factors were at play, including the economy. Shumlin’s staff based its claim on incomplete data in a January 2014 magazine article.
We rated Shumlin’s statement as Half True.
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