This diary will not be news to anyone in this community. But it does offer a factually based perspective on something that we all pretty much have known for some time.
The data in this diary is based on truth evaluations of comments from elected officials, partisan organizations, and prominent members of both major political parties as judged by Politifact.org. Politifact is an independent fact-checking organization operated by the St Petersburg times, and is widely regarded as an objective fact-checking resource. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year for its fact-checking of the 2008 Presidential campaign.
The results are posted immediately below the fold, followed by a brief series of comments and caveats about the data provided.
In total, politifact has made 451 truth-value judgments on statements made by Democrats, and 495 from Republicans. The truth of these statements is evaluated in detail and then assigned one of six designations:
True
Mostly True
Half-True
Barely True
False
Pants On Fire!
The breakdown of these truth evaluations is as follows:
A few interesting points emerge from this. First, the ratio of Democratic "True" statements to "False" statements is 2:1, where the True/False ratio for Republicans is 1:1. It is also noteworthy that the percentage of Republican "Pants on Fire" statements is more than twice the percentage of Democrats'.
The results are even more striking if we consolidate these categories into groups according to whether they are generally true or generally false. These categories are my own conception, and it uses the "half true" value as the dividing line, so that:
True Group = True and Mostly True
Half-True = Half True (of course)
False Group = Barely True, False, and Pants on Fire
These numbers, I think, speak for themselves. Not only do Republicans lie more than Democrats, but Republicans utter more generally false statements than generally true statements. Democrats, on the other hand, are generally more truthful in their claims than they are false.
Method, Caveats, and other Remarks:
First of all, yes I do have a life. This didn't take much longer than an hour to compile, so get off my back.
Second, all the evaluated comments were gathered from this page. In addition to the leadership listed at the top of the page, I only included people and organizations that were explicitly identified as Democratic or Republican. Glenn Beck and Bill Bennett, for example, were not identified as either so I did not include them. Similarly, Joe Lieberman is labeled as an independent, so I did not include him either even though he caucuses with the Democrats in the Senate.
Third, one could rightly raise the objection that this is not reflective of Democratic and Republican comments on the whole, but only reflects the claims and comments the St Petersburg Times chose to evaluate. This is a valid point, and it makes me wonder how politfact decides which comments to evaluate. But, on the whole, I get the impression that these are statements of some importance to the national discourse insofar as they have been reported in the media. Still, it would be nice if they let us know how they decide which comments to fact-check.
