Nonpartisan Spin Referee PolitiFact Gives Liz Cheney a Pass Even After Proving She Lied

With the Republicans’ propaganda mills working at full speed, churning out lies, half-truths and disinformation morning, noon and night, there are only a handful of sources that can be relied upon to sort their truths from the lies.

There are at least two excellent liberal sites with the mission of debunking right-wing lies, Media Matters, which was founded by David Brock, a one-time right-wing propagandist who saw the light, and News Hounds, which has the great tagline, “We watch Fox so you don’t have to” — thanks again, guys, for that not-so-small mercy.

Until now, however, there were primarily just two nonpartisan arbiters of spin: Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning unit of the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.

But now, PolitiFact has embarrassed itself by mishandling an incident in June on ABC’s Sunday morning political chat show in which Arianna Huffington challenged a patently false statement by Liz Cheney:

Huffington noted that Halliburton, which has had a role in the BP oil spill, “defrauded the American taxpayer of hundreds of millions of dollars.” Liz Cheney, whose father was Halliburton’s chief executive before becoming George Bush’s vice president, was also part of the round-table discussion that day. She declared that Huffington was living on another planet and that her assertion had “no relationship to the facts.” Huffington responded, “I’m so glad PolitiFact is going to be checking this.”

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. PolitiFact issued a report that, while acknowledging allegations about Halliburton’s malfeasance, focused on parsing Huffington’s use of the term “fraud” — while completely ignoring — failing even to mention — the fact that it was Cheney, not Huffington, who had lied.

Halliburton and its various units have been accused of bilking the government out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The company — no doubt with the help of its former CEO — managed to stave off serious investigation into most of these matters during the Bush administration, which that today its guilt or innocence is conveniently unadjudicated. As we noted on June 6, however, Halliburton did plead guilty in federal court in February 2009 to violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The company admitted paying $180 million in bribes to Nigerian officials, for which it agreed to pay a $402 million fine.

In a separate matter, the company agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission $177 million in forfeited profits to settle a U.S. bribery charge in lieu of admitting wrongdoing.

In its report, PolitiFact ignored these crimes but found plenty of allegations of wrongdoing in Halliburton’s record:

The PolitiFact report noted that Halliburton’s former subsidiary, KBR, which held one of the largest contracts assigned during the Iraq war (bagging about $31 billion), has repeatedly been questioned about its fulfillment of contracts. PolitiFact referred to a congressional investigation that found Halliburton had overcharged the government $167 million for its purchases of gasoline, and noted that a government audit had charged KBR with overcharging $4.5 million for meals it provided

According to PoltiFact:

In our ruling on Huffington’s claim, we said we “find much in the public record to support her statement, most notably the Justice Department lawsuit. Certainly there have been hundreds of millions of dollars that Halliburton’s KBR attempted to charge the government that have been denied.” We also noted a civil lawsuit that charged KBR defrauded the government by hiring private security in violation of their contract; that lawsuit has not yet gone to trial. We noted that Halliburton sold the KBR subsidary in 2007 and no longer is involved in wartime contracting.

So, hundreds of millions of dollars have been identified as wasteful and potentially fraudulent, but the lines are not clear.

And when the military had a chance this year to stop using KBR’s services, it declined. Military officials said the company was a critical supplier to the military in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was no other company that could step in and take its place without major disruptions. So we rated Huffington’s statement Half True. She had some good points, but her statement left out important details.

But what about Liz Cheney’s claim that Huffington was simply lying about the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars bilked by her father’s company? PolitiFact didn’t even bother to fact-check her:

[What] is beyond dispute is that Liz Cheney was dead wrong. On “This Week,” she said that Huffington’s charge had “no relationship to the facts.” Given that even the stingy vetters of PolitiFact concluded there is “much in the public record to support [Huffington’s] statement,” Cheney’s denial deserves the Truth-O-Meter’s “Pants on Fire” rating.

Yet PolitiFact didn’t evaluate Cheney’s remark. So here’s the real problem: Huffington made a charge that was rooted in reality. Cheney responded with a statement that had no basis in reality. Yet PolitiFact zeroed in only on the former and let the real lie escape. True, Huffington had dared PolitiFact to review her remark. But [Poltifact was] free to expand the mission. The greater public service would have been to compare Huffington’s and Cheney’s comments and determine who was closer to the truth. This is where PolitiFact truly fell short.

This is a perfect illustration of our broken and corrupt media environment. Even supposedly nonpartisan media outlets like PolitiFact have been so indoctrinated by right-wing claims that they have a liberal bias that they have adopted two different standards of truth-telling: a higher incredibly nuanced standard for liberals like Arianna Huffington and a slack, all but nonexistent threshold for right-wingers like Liz Cheney — in spite of the fact that Huffington’s record as a truth-teller is spotless, while Liz Cheney is a notorious, practiced liar, just like her father.

Update: The quote from Liz Cheney that PolitiFact did not fact check is this:

CHENEY: What you’re saying, has no relationship to the truth. Your assertion that Halliburton defrauded the U.S. government… Arianna, it’s absolutely not true.