In case people are not reading the comments on our results, Andrew Tyndall made some criticism of our recent Mike Murphy fact-check which is worth reading:

This first fact check fails. If Murphy had said: “Violent crime in Arizona has increased during the Obama administration” then the FBI statistics from early 2009 would be relevant.

The force of the “…as a result of unauthorized immigration…” however means that even in a general climate of declining crime, that small subset of violent crime that happens to “result” (whatever that means) from unauthorized immigration may have increased, against the trend. The FBI statistics do not address that question.

In this instance, crowd-sourcer Kelly can be excused, since Meet The Facts’ own paraphrase contains that same error. Murphy did not say that “AZ violent crime is up due to unauthorized immigration” as this post’s headline claims.

Or perhaps it is the transcript that is confusing.

If Murphy meant: “Violent crime in Arizona, as a result of unauthorized immigration, has increased during the Obama administration” then the declining crime rate would make him FALSE.

The lack of commas makes Meet the Facts FALSE instead.

This seems like valid criticism. When I (at least) watched the show and then reread the transcript and wrote the summary post of checkable statements, I understood the context to be as we had outlined. That Mr. Murphy was stating that violent crime had increased in Arizona as a result of a failure by the Obama administration to control unauthorized immigration. Then that the Obama administration had done nothing to counter unauthorized immigration in Arizona. These are some standard talking points that some conservative politicians and pundits are employing around the immigration debate. (examples here, here, here, and here) That being said, this was not an easy “quote” to use in the sense it was broken up like it was, and not grounded in specifics.

Let’s look at the whole thing. (In the original summary post I had condensed Mr. Murphy’s statements.)

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