Tag Archives: Obamacare

TV News highlights: NATO, Russian influence, coal miners, and more

By Katie Dahl

This week’s highlight reel of TV News moments fact-checked by our partners at PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s Fact Checker feature the presidential tweet during the congressional hearing about Russian influence on the election, what Germany does and doesn’t owe to NATO and the U.S., what a coal miner and single mom do and don’t pay in taxes, whether GOP amendments were included in Obamacare, and a breakdown of the statistics we’ve been hearing about the 9th Circuit.

Claim: Germany owes money to NATO and the U.S. for defense (false)

After a face-to-face meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House, President Donald Trump tweeted: “Germany owes vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!” The tweet was featured on “BBC World News Today.”

PolitiFact’s Allison Graves’ analysis was that “Trump is misunderstanding how NATO’s joint defense is paid for, and that Germany doesn’t owe anything.” She explained that “[a]s of 2014, NATO’s collective agreement directed members to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense spending by 2024… Trump likely was alluding to the fact Germany has not yet met the NATO target commitment for overall defense funding… Germany only pays 1.2 percent of their GDP on defense spending.” The misunderstanding was that “Germany doesn’t pay that money to NATO or the United States… [t]he United States decides what level of military spending it wants to have, as do all other NATO  members.”

Laicie Heeley, a military budget expert at the Stimson Center, a defense policy think tank, told Graves, “‘Trump seems to represent the NATO alliance as a licensing deal — one in which countries like Germany pay the United States for its power and influence…This is not the case.’”

Claim: NSA, FBI said ‘Russia did not influence electoral process’ (false)

During a House Intelligence Committee hearing on March 20, FBI Director James Comey and National Security Agency (NSA) Director Michael S. Rogers were asked questions about Russian influence in the U.S. presidential election. While the hearing was still going on, President Trump tweeted, “NSA and FBI tell Congress that Russia did not influence electoral process.”

According to Eugene Kiely and Robert Farley of FactCheck.org, “that’s not what Comey or Rogers told the committee.” Lauren Carroll wrote for PolitiFact: “Comey and Rogers said they believe Russia meddled in the race leading up to Election Day, chiefly by cyber-infiltrating the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations. Contrary to Trump’s tweet, they also said the intelligence community did not assess whether Russia’s actions actually had a measurable impact on the election outcome or public opinion.”

The president’s tweet itself became part of the hearing: “When later asked about the presidential tweet, Comey said it did not reflect what he and Rogers had said: ‘It certainly wasn’t our intention to say that today,’” reported Glenn Kessler from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.

Claim: Coal miners and single moms pay for public broadcasting (it’s $.20 and $0)

While talking about the president’s proposed budget cuts, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney asked, “can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs? The answer was no. We can ask them to pay for defense, and we will, but we can’t ask them to continue to pay for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

By asking the question, he seemed to insinuate that coal miners and single moms pay for public broadcasting now. Kessler looked at the numbers using the H&R Block tax calculator and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found that “single mothers in Detroit, most of whom are living in poverty, likely pay no taxes at all and instead would be receiving funds from the U.S. government via the Earned Income Tax Credit.” And in three examples of coal mining jobs, Kessler reported that a coal miner “owed no income taxes,” a loading machine operator “paid about 20 cents of his taxes to the CPB,” and supervisors of production workers “paid 60 cents.”

Claim: Hundreds of Republican amendments were adopted in Obamacare (half true)

During a conversation about political maneuvering and obstructionism related to the proposed American Health Care Act, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D., Ill., defended the actions of Democrats offering amendments and said “hundreds of Republican amendments were adopted in the ACA.”

Reporting for PolitiFact, Gabrielle Healy found “788 amendments were submitted during the ACA’s markup in the Senate Committee for Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee (HELP). Three quarters of them were filed by the committee’s Republican members… Of those, 161 were adopted in whole or revised form.” She also noted that many of the Republican amendments were “technical in nature.” An expert, “Timothy Jost, emeritus professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law,” told her that ‘the basic statement that hundreds were adopted is wrong.’”

Claim: less than 1/10 of 1 percent of 9th Circuit decisions are overturned by the Supreme Court (not very helpful)

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has been in the news recently because of its decision to halt the president’s travel ban executive order. President Trump said in a news conference last month that “80 percent” of the court’s decisions are overturned. Then more recently, Rep. John Conyers Jr., D., Mich., used a very different figure, saying “less than one-tenth of one percent of 9th Circuit decisions are overturned.”

Michelle Ye Hee Lee reported “it’s more complicated than that… Most cases reviewed by the Supreme Court get reversed, so the number or rate of reversals is not necessarily reflective of the court’s performance.” The Washington Post’s Fact Checker also reported that in: “the 2014-2015 term, the 9th Circuit’s reversal rate was about 60 percent, below the average rate of 72 percent. In the 2015-2016 term, the latest year of data available, the 9th Circuit court’s reversal rate was 80 percent, and the average rate was 67 percent. This is the figure that Trump cites. …But the 80 percent figure represents a small fraction of the cases that the 9th Circuit hears in a given term — roughly one-tenth of 1 percent. This is the figure that Conyers cites.” In the end, Lee wrote, the statistics both Trump and Conyers used “[do] not add much to the debate,” because they “lack context.”

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See Trump Archive fact checks in one place

Robin Chin, Katie Dahl, Tracey Jaquith, Roger Macdonald, Nancy Watzman, and Dan Schultz are contributing research and engineering for the Trump Archive. 

Now it’s easier to find fact checks of specific statements by President-elect Donald Trump in our new Trump Archive, an experimental collection of TV news clips featuring Trump–including fact checks of his press conference on January 11, his first since July 2016.

We’ve got 500+ fact checks by FactCheck.org, the Pulitzer-prize winning PolitiFact, and The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker embedded within the Trump Archive; these are now viewable on this dedicated page, with the option of downloading a csv containing links to fact checks, links to TV news clips, date of airing, and topics covered.

The Internet Archive’s Trump Archive launched on January 5 with 700+ televised speeches, interviews, debates, and other news broadcasts related to President-elect Donald Trump, and it continues to grow.

We created the Trump Archive in response to journalists and scholars who had trouble finding clips of Trump speaking through the caption search function in our TV News Archive library. We are hand-curating this collection as an experimental prototype for learning how to engineer solutions so similar archives can be created–whether by the Internet Archive or members of the public–about other elected officials and topics of interest. We are looking for collaborative partners to explore artificial intelligence approaches to creating such collections, with an ease and scale far beyond what can be accomplished now by hand.

The list of fact checks in the Trump Archive includes claims made by Trump during his press conference on January 11 covering issues from health care to ISIS to Trump’s connections to Russia. Here’s a sampling.

Health care

Trump said: “Obamacare is a complete and total disaster. It’s imploding as we said. Some states have over 100 percent increase.”

FactCheck.org: “Only Arizona has an average increase that high, and 84 percent with marketplace coverage in 2016 received tax credits to purchase insurance.”

PolitiFact: “While the average premium increase in Arizona rose by 145 percent in 2017, it is the only state with a triple-digit increase. Alabama saw the second highest increase, 71 percent. On the other end, a few states saw decreases. The average premium increase across all states was 25 percent.”

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker: “Trump exaggerates here, and appears to misunderstand a fundamental part of the Affordable Care Act. State-by-state weighted average increases range from just 1.3 percent in Rhode Island to as high as 71 percent in Oklahoma. But the most common plans in the marketplace in 2017 experienced an average increase of 22 percent. These plans have been used as the benchmark to calculate government subsidies.”

ISIS

Trump: “I mean if you look, this administration created ISIS by leaving at the wrong time. The void was created, ISIS was formed.”

FactCheck.org: “Trump continues to oversimplify the situation by placing the entirety of the blame for the creation of ISIS on Obama’s decision to withdraw troops from Iraq.”

PolitiFact: “This is a more tempered version of Trump’s previous Pants on Fire claim that Obama and Clinton “founded ISIS.” Experts told PolitiFact that you can reasonably criticize the Obama administration’s withdrawal from Iraq, lack of support to anti-Assad rebels in Syria, and intervention in Libya for contributing to the power of ISIS. But the timeline was set in motion by the Bush administration.”

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker: “Trump greatly simplifies a complex situation.”

Russia

Trump: “I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away. And I have no loans with Russia.”  

PolitiFact:  “It’s true that Trump has yet to build a hotel or tower in Russia, but he has eyed the Moscow skyline for decades.

We don’t know for sure about the extent of Trump’s business dealings in Russia, because he hasn’t released his tax returns. But his son, Donald Trump Jr., said in a 2008 real estate conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.”

We do know that Trump agreed to host the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013, a $20 million deal facilitated by a Russian real estate mogul and billionaire Aras Agalarov. (Trump also cameoed in Agalarov’s son’s dance-pop music video). He also made millions selling a 17-bedroom Florida mansion to a Russian billionaire.

The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker: “Trump is being misleading when he says he has stayed away from Russia. Trump repeatedly sought deals in Russia. In 1987, he went to Moscow to find a site for luxury hotel; no deal emerged. In 1996, he sought to build a condominium complex in Russia; that also did not succeed. In 2005, Trump signed a one-year deal with a New York development company to explore a Trump Tower in Moscow, but the effort fizzled.

In a 2008 speech, Donald Trump Jr. made it clear that the Trumps want to do business in Russia, but were finding it difficult. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son said at a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”