Pants, shirt and vest on fire!

After seeing the daily hoo-hah and repetitious charges of “Fake News” I decided to do the one thing which I was comfortably sure would be an indicator of who tells the truth and how often. (and, of course, the inverse - who lies and how often.)

My methodology was to use a source that I know evaluates statements of controversy by data, not opinion. I chose Politifact for this, because although far rightists are sometimes critical of any media organ which dares to call it like it is, Politifact’s parent newspaper’s parent company is a generally and historically right of center corporation, so any slant if any (this assumes the parent interferes, as the Tribune company famously does) should be more “Right favorable.”

Politifact’s fact check rating scale ranges from True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and (for real bullshit whoppers), Pants on Fire. Obviously checking all statements would take a Cray, and I don’t have one of them nor do I have all that much time, so I called up all “Pants On Fire” rated statements, of which there are 81 pages. I limited my survey to the first 8 pages, a total of 148 fact checks rated Pants on Fire. Note: these are blatant contradictory lies where there is no question as to the veracity of the statement. Several are from fake news bloggers, and some of those are probably satirical.

I then determined (it wasn’t hard!) from the statement and the person making it, which political persuasion they represented. I then divided them into Republican/Conservative, Democrat/Progressive and due to the nature of some of the whoppers, just “Other.” 

An example of “Other” is, as an actual entry:

“Lottery winner arrested for dumping $200,000 of manure on ex-boss' lawn.”

I consider this apolitical, therefore, “Other” although Karl Marx might demur.

The results were Other – 22 of 148 evaluated statements.

Democrats/progressive – 11 of 148 evaluated statements.

Republicans/Conservatives – 105 of 148 statements were rated as “Pants On Fire” lies.

As a reader, almost daily, of Politifact, I expected a skew to the Right, but this even surprised me. It should be noted that while a fair number of these lies were statements made by President Trump, (“six new steel mills”, “$451 billion in Saudi contracts”, “First military pay raise in ten years” as examples, many others were Republican candidates attacking opponents in the recent congressional race and afterward. Many of these are truly vile.

“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but no one is entitled to their own facts!” - Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan