Politi-Score: First Half Preview--PolitiFact Writers Revisited

The first half of 2011 is almost over, so I have started compiling PolitiFact rulings from where I left off at the end of March. As I start with PolitiFact National and there’s just a few days left in June, I thought it would be worth it to take another look at the PolitiFact National writers again in terms of the Politi-Score. At that time, it appeared that PolitiFact writer Angie Drobnic Holan favored the Democrats more than the two other writers Lou Jacobson and Robert Farley; however, now that more rulings have been accumulated, that theory may have been a bit premature.

Holan’s Politi-Score dropped from 63 to 53 for Democrats and went up a bit for Republicans; both Farley and Jacobson dropped in “truthiness” on both sides. Here is the chart for the first quarter, and below that (outlined in red) is the chart for the first half (first and second quarters combined):

First quarter 2011 (click to enlarge).

First Half 2011 (click to enlarge).

Conclusions? Well, if we are to believe that PolitiFact is liberally biased, it would seem they selected more Republican statements in the second quarter that were false. They did select more Republican statements, aside from whether they “knew” the statements would be ruled False or Pants on Fire. For the record, there were 116 rulings total published by PolitiFact National for the second quarter of 2011 (as of Monday, June 27). Of these, 45 were Democratic/Liberal statements and 67 were Republican/Conservative (the rest were non-partisan). The Democrats had only two Pants on Fire rulings, and 10 False; the Republicans had 11 Pants on Fire rulings, and 19 False. That’s a ratio of 5:1 on Pants on Fire and 2:1 on False comparing Republicans to Democrats.

Yesterday, a Facebook commenter named Vic Pilkington addressed me on something similar:

… what is your tally when comparing right and left "pants-on-fire" and "false" starements? I contend the right have a 4:1 edge over the left on those statements considered as having no basis in reality.

Well, I guess it’s even worse than Vic thought. For the second quarter of 2011, at PolitiFact National, there IS some basis for that reality. On the other hand, we have about a quarter of all the rulings represented here, and the rest (the PolitiFact partners) need to be reviewed.