PolitiFact's Lie of the Year Was Half True in 2012

The main thing one learns from
PolitiFact’s 2013 Lie of the Year Award is that PolitiFact is not
very good at determining what does or does not constitute a lie, or
a fact, at the time it’s actually utttered. 

Yesterday, the fact-checking organization
named President Obama’s oft-repeated promise that individuals
who like their health plans can keep them under Obamacare its 2013
Lie of the Year. 

Given that Obama first uttered his promise years ago, this might
seem a bit late. Especially since, as PolitiFact editor Angie Holan
notes in a column on the award, the organization rated that same
promise “half true” in both 2009 and 2012, which Holan says means
the statement was “partially correct and partially
wrong.” 

So it was partially true then, but it’s the Lie of the Year now?
That’s quite an evolution—and one that doesn’t exactly offer a
strong reason to trust the organization’s real-time fact-checking
prowess. 

Indeed, PolitiFact’s judgment on this particular Obama claim has
actually shifted even more over the years. As The Washington
Examiner‘s Sean Higgins
points out, PolitiFact
rated Obama’s statement that “if you’ve got a health care plan
that you like, you can keep it” as “true” back in 2008, when Obama
was campaigning for president. The reasoning behind that call:
“Obama is accurately describing his health care plan here. He
advocates a program that seeks to build on the current system,
rather than dismantling it and starting over.” As millions of
people have already discovered, however, even building on the
existing system turns out to require tearing some parts of it
down.