Combing through Klobuchar's bad data Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is facing questions about her record as the top prosecutor in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis and 1.25...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Combing through Klobuchar's bad data Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is facing questions about her record as the top prosecutor in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis and 1.25 million people. In an interview on CNN's "State of the Union," Klobuchar gave a statistic that would be the envy of any progressive running for the Democratic presidential nomination. "If you look at the data, you will see there was a 65 percent decrease in incarceration of African Americans when you go from the beginning of my term to the end," she said. Her staff later clarified that Klobuchar was talking about the jail population (not prisons) in Hennepin County. They pointed to a database maintained by the Vera Institute of Justice, which does show a 65 percent decrease in African Americans held from 1999 to 2006, compared with a 13 percent decrease in prisons. But when we pulled up the chart, the whole thing smelled funky. And our suspicions proved to be well founded. There was a sharp drop-off in the black jail population between 2000 and 2001 — but no explanation for this dramatic, one-time decline. "It seems that starting in 2001, Hennepin reported to the DOJ that about half of the people in their jail were of unknown race," Vera's senior data scientist told us after digging into the numbers. "This was not the case in 2000. This creates a false perception that both the number of white people and black people in the jail fell dramatically, while the total number of people in jail did not change very much." Klobuchar was the county's top prosecutor at the time and should have recognized that this for what it was: a huge statistical anomaly. We gave her Four Pinocchios for giving bogus data on national TV. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. The Iraq WMD myth, 16 years later Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, marked the 16-year anniversary of the start of the Iraq War with this tweet: "There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no WMDs were found, the left claimed 'Bush lied. People died.' This accusation itself is a lie. It's time to put it to rest." In a series of tweets, Fleischer argued that the U.S. intelligence community failed and Saddam Hussein for some reason lied about having weapons of mass destruction. But if you look closely, Fleischer is defending only what he and Bush said at the time (not, say, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who took things further in his own public remarks). Fleischer is also focusing on a 2005 report by the Robb-Silberman Commission, which was established to investigate these intelligence failures. But the commission was not allowed to examine whether public statements by U.S. government officials were substantiated by the intelligence. A bipartisan 2008 report by the Senate intelligence committee does look into those connections. "Statements by the president, vice president, secretary of state and the national security advisor regarding a possible Iraqi nuclear weapons program were generally substantiated by the intelligence community, but did not convey the substantial disagreements that existed in the intelligence community," the Senate panel found. The report noted that the Bush administration focused on the intelligence suggesting Iraq had WMDS, but not on the sharp dissents from the departments of State and Energy on this same question. The intelligence community's assessments on Iraq's WMD stockpiles and programs turned out to be woefully wrong. But at the same time, the Senate report shows Bush administration officials often hyped the intelligence that supported their policy goals. | |  | | Do fact-checks backfire? No, according to several major studies reviewed by our British brethren at Full Fact. The theory goes like this: Some people are so dug into their beliefs, reading a fact-check will have no effect and may cause them to double down on misconceptions. But recent studies have found scant evidence of a "backfire" effect. From the Full Fact analysis: "Two studies, from 2010 and 2012, found some evidence of backfire in certain circumstances. These both focused on short debunks (for example in news articles) rather than full factcheck articles explaining the analysis. The cases where backfire effects were found tended to be particularly contentious topics, or where the factual claim being asked about was ambiguous. "None of the five more recent studies, from 2015 to 2019, found any evidence of the backfire effect. Those studies tested claims and debunks appearing on their own, as well as claims and debunks appearing in mock news articles." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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