Beginning the day after Christmas, I began compiling all of PolitiFact’s rulings from its website "Personalities" page, and completed the task New Year’s Eve: a comprehensive list of 2,788 rulings (actually, 2,787: one was counted as two because it ruled on statements of two people as one). Yes, from Snooki to Spike the Romney Attack Dog, I recorded every last one by name, affiliaton, whether they were "media" or a pundit, the ruling, and which PolitiFact partner wrote it if one did. This was a good point to compile the list because PolitiFact was taking a self-congratulatory end of year break as well, so the rulings were in a delayed point of time status and were not changing as I recorded them.
Minor sore spots, however: 89 “chain” e-mail ratings were all counted as one "personality" by PolitiFact, as well as 13 “blogger” rulings. The field I am most interested in recording is that of political affiliation: however, for example, all 89 chain e-mails could neither be just Democratic nor just Republican—or even affiliated with either party. So that meant I had to go through each chain e-mail ruling and determine if there was an affiliation. Which led to a quandary on Obama: during the primaries, the Republicans were not his only adversary: there were Democratic Hillary fans who might be disseminating anti-Obama e-mails as well, which would make the affiliation Democratic. So I decided not to include those rulings unless there was clear and convincing information in the ruling which could associate it with the parties, such as a verified source of the e-mail within the ruling critique.
The majority of the chain e-mails were anti-Obama (43 of the 89 emails): birtherism, Muslim/Ayres/ socialist/ anti-Christ connections ran the gamut, followed by dubious claims about healthcare reform (9). There was a short run of anti-Palin rulings from Democrat affiliated chain e-mails, but the number of those (5) were one tenth of those making allegations about Obama. There were also three anti-Hillary rulings which seemed to me should not have been attributed to “chain e-mails” but to Dick Morris, the Fox News Contributing Clinton-hater (I left them in the chain e-mails with a Republican affiliation).
The rest were of a more local political variety such as property taxes and school issues for which there was no certain “ideology” associated with them. It appears that recently PolitiFact National has “demoted” many of the chain e-mail ruling critiques to its partnerships. Most of these rulings for which a political affiliation could not be determined were of this type.
Now to get to the results…..here is the breakdown by affiliation by the numbers (in my new and improved easier-to-understand line graph!):
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Because the rulings not associated with Democrats or Republicans look out of place at the bottom because they were far fewer, here is percentage-of-total to make them more relative:
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| Affiliation | Score |
| Democrats | 50.51 |
| Republicans | 38.90 |
| Other | 38.79 |
Stay tuned for more commentary and analysis on these scores, and what they might mean!
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