NYT Found Ryan 'Misleading' on Medicare, But Its 15-Plus Fact Checkers Missed Biden's Libya Flub

The Biden-Ryan vice-presidential debate Thursday night brought out the media's "fact check" squads, including the New York Times, which had a squad of reporters evaluating the statements of Joe Biden and Paul Ryan online during the debate. Still, with perhaps 15 reporters on the job Thursday night, the paper still had to out-source a crucial Biden misstatement on Libya to the one-man fact-check machine at the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler, the next morning.

The Times boiled down a few of its findings for Friday's print edition under "Check Point" on topics including Medicare, the stimulus, and the deadly assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

James Taranto has written at Opinion Journal that this new-style media "fact checking" is "overwhelmingly biased toward the left" and "gives journalists much freer rein to express their opinions by allowing them to pretend to be rendering authoritative judgments about the facts." The Times's debate product doesn't refute Taranto's argument. Reporter Michael Cooper had the top "Check Point" item and per usual found the Republican at fault:

As Representative Paul D. Ryan debated Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Thursday night, he sometimes seemed to be defending his own past budget and Medicare proposals as much as his running mate’s plans -- sometimes in misleading ways.

When Mr. Ryan was defending his plan to reshape Medicare so future beneficiaries would receive fixed amounts of money to purchase private insurance or buy into the existing government program -- a model for Mitt Romney’s proposal -- he described his plan as “bipartisan,” and called it “a plan I put together with a prominent Democrat senator from Oregon.” But he failed to note that he later lost that Democrat’s support.

There is plenty of debate over how effective Mr. Obama’s economic policies have been, especially given the painfully slow recovery. But even critics who believe that the president’s stimulus law was a missed opportunity -- from liberals who say it was too small to conservatives who say it was wasteful and poorly targeted -- tend to acknowledge what the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has found: that it did save or create jobs, lower the unemployment rate and help the economy grow in the short term.

By contrast, the paper ignored a key point about Libya. Reporter Eric Schmitt's contribution to the fact-check criticized the administration but didn't weigh in on Biden's false claim "We weren’t told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security," although the paper's own Mark Landler wrote in a separate story Friday that "Biden appeared to contradict other American officials when he declared that the administration did not know about requests for more security in Libya." Indeed, the White House had to clarify Friday morning that Biden was speaking for himself, not the administration.

It was up to the paper's left-wing editorial blog to clarify. Juliet Lapidos wrote early Friday afternoon:

Mr. Biden fumbled somewhat when discussing Libya, and may have added to the impression that the administration has been less than transparent about what happened.

Mr. Biden said of the consulate in Benghazi, “We weren’t told they wanted more security. We did not know they wanted more security there.”

Oddly, Lapidos cited as refutation a fact-check from...Glenn Kessler of the rival Washington Post.

Mr. Ryan made a claim that journalists and independent fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked: that President Obama and Congressional Democrats raided Medicare benefits of $716 billion. But for Mr. Ryan, the claim has drawn countercharges of hypocrisy on his part....What was even more remarkable was that Mr. Ryan began echoing the charge against Democrats within days of joining the Romney ticket....Now, as in 2010, the Republican charge has several problems.

Also during the debate, Richard Oppel Jr. defended the president against Ryan's claim that he has apologized for America values overseas.

The claim of Mr. Obama apologizing for American values has been repeatedly found to be inaccurate: While Mr. Obama has acknowledged American failings at times -- and, like his predecessor, George W. Bush, has on at least one occasion apologized for a specific act of American wrongdoing abroad -- he has never explicitly apologized for American values or diplomacy.

Incidentally, Kessler's Washington Post fact check, cited by Lapidos, was more succint and direct than the Times' s mass effort, with Biden coming out rather worse than Ryan.

Here are the top ten worst lies told by Biden during the debate:

Update - Honorable Mention: “There’s not one Democrat who endorsed his...plan.” Biden lied—as Ryan pointed out, amidst the Vice President’s interruptions—about the fact that Ryan had worked with both Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin in developing his entitlement reforms. While it’s true that neither have endorsed the Romney-Ryan ticket’s separate plan—which is different—Ryan’s own plans, to which Biden referred, were endorsed by Democrats, and Biden knows it.

10. “With all due respect, that’s a bunch of malarkey....not a single thing he said is accurate.” At the outset of the debate, Biden tried to paint Ryan as a liar—when Biden, in fact, was the one lying. Ryan had pointed out: 1) that the White House had distanced itself from the Cairo embassy’s apologies on 9/11; 2) that Obama had failed to speak up for Iranian protestors in 2009; 3) that the Obama administration called Syria’s dictator a “reformer”; 4) and that the Obama administration is imposing defense cuts and projecting weakness. All of that is true.

9. “The president has met with Bibi [Netanyahu] a dozen times....This is a bunch of stuff.” While they have met several times—not a dozen—that includes a meeting at which Obama made the Israeli prime minister enter the White House through a back entrance, refused to take a picture with him, and left him on his own for dinner. Specifically, Ryan had criticized Obama’s refusal to meet Netanyahu in New York last month, and to tape talk show interviews instead—a clear snub that sent the wrong signal, again, to Israel’s enemies.

8. “Just let the taxes expire like they’re supposed to on those millionaires.” Biden’s “millionaires” are actually households earning more than $250,000 a year, which includes many middle-class families with two earners, and small business owners in particular who report business earnings as personal income. Biden and Obama have repeatedly labeled those earning over $250,000 as “millionaires and billionaires,” distorting the actual impact of their tax plan on the non-millionaires it would hit hardest, who create a vast proportion of small business jobs.

7. “You know, I heard that death panel argument from Sarah Palin. It seems that every vice presidential debate, I hear this kind of stuff about panels.” Biden’s cheap shot against Palin was an attempt to diminish both her and the man sitting across from him. But Palin never talked about “death panels” in her debate with Biden, for the simple reason that Obamacare had not yet been proposed. Nor did Ryan mention “death panels”—he had addressed the undeniable fact that Obamacare proposes a board to impose cost controls.

6. “The congressman here cut embassy security in his budget by $300 million below what we asked for.” Biden’s lie about Ryan’s budget was an attempt to dodge responsibility for lax embassy security—and to cover up that the Obama administration called for new cuts to embassy security just days after the 9/11 attacks. Ryan’s proposal, which called for a 19% overall decrease in non-defense discretionary spending, does not even mention embassy security—the Obama campaign merely made up that number by applying 19% across the board.

5. “No, they are not four years closer to a nuclear weapon.” Biden’s attempt to lie about the glaring reality of the Iranian nuclear program fell flat. Iran is indeed four years closer to a nuclear weapon, and the Obama administration—believing it knew better than its predecessors—tried to reinvent the wheel on talks with Iran, causing frustration to our allies in Europe and the Middle East. Meeting after meeting this year has failed to produce results, and the loophole-filled sanctions, while hurting Iran somewhat, are not stopping its nuclear program.

4. “No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise...has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy they provide. That is a fact.” No, it is not a fact—it is the opposite of a fact, and saying “that is a fact” does not make it any less a blatant lie. The Obama administration is forcing religious institutions to provide contraceptive and abortion drugs through their insurance policies. That is the reason several dozen religious institutions are suing the administration to defend their First Amendment freedom of religion.

3. “It came from this man voting to put two wars on a credit card...I was there. I voted against him.” Biden voted for both the Iraq war and the Afghanistan war. He did not vote for George W. Bush’s plan to extend coverage of Medicare to prescription drugs (though he voted for an earlier, similar proposal), nor did he vote for the Bush tax cuts. But he voted for both of the wars he derided last night. To quote Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention: “It takes some brass to attack a guy for doing what you did.”

2. “What we did is we saved $716 billion and put it back — applied it to Medicare.” Biden repeated the lie the Obama administration has been telling since before Obamacare passed in 2010: that cuts to Medicare today were savings that extend the life of the program. They would be—if the same $716 billion wasn’t also being used to pay for Obamacare. As Ryan pointed out in 2010, and again last night, you can’t double-count the same cuts. Taking $716 billion out of Medicare means exactly that—and hurts, not helps, the program’s solvency.

1. “Well, we weren’t told they wanted more security again.” Biden lied through his teeth about the fact that the administration—specifically, the State Department—had been told again and again that security on the ground in Libya, and in Benghazi in particular, was inadequate. The day before, in Congressional hearings on the Libya attacks, former regional security director Eric Nordstrom described his frustration with having those requests turned down by the government bureaucracy: “For me the Taliban is on the inside of the building.”

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