PolitiFact Falls Flat on Its Face Trying to Fact Check Maria Bartiromo

Julio Rosas | March 01, 2022 11:45 AM

PolitiFact tried to claim Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo had a "mostly false" statement she made on "Jesse Watters Primetime" when she said the U.S. had doubled its oil "imports from Russia in the last year."

PolitiFact goes on to write how "the U.S. did not double oil imports from Russia in the last year" and they found "the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows that the U.S. increased its oil imports from Russia by about 28% in the first 11 months of 2021."

But then the "fact check" concedes "the U.S. did double the amount of crude oil imported from Russia last year," but that does not matter because "Russia accounts for only about 3% of overall U.S. crude oil imports in 2021."

PolitiFact says their reason for giving Bartiromo a "mostly false" rating is because combined with crude and refined oil, it only represents a 28% increase:

"The U.S. imports two types of oil from Russia: crude oil and refined products such as gasoline and kerosene. Last June, the U.S. imported 848,000 barrels per day of crude oil and refined petroleum products from Russia...Bartiromo has more of a point when looking at only crude oil imported from Russia in 2021, which has more than doubled. But Russia accounted for about 3% of overall U.S. crude oil imports in 2021 — a 2 percentage point increase from 2020."

When you have 800 words to get into nuance, in writing, you can split the hair between crude oil and refined oil. But faulting someone for *not* doing that on the air, in the spoken word, is idiotic and unworthy of journalism -- especially when the statement is true on its face.
— David Martosko ???????????? (@dmartosko) March 1, 2022