Politi-Score: On the New PolitiFact App (Part 1)

Recently PolitiFact posted on Facebook about a new Android application available for only $1.99, which crunches its rulings and gives a “report card” by individual as well as what it calls a “Truth Index” which according to PolitiFact is “… like the Dow Jones Industrial Average of truth.”

As I don’t have a device which operates on Android and don’t intend to go out and purchase one to try to figure out the machinations of the PolitiFact app, I will try to figure it out solely from the graphics PolitiFact provided. The first one, the color-coded report cards by individual, was fairly easy. I reproduce it here using bar chart creation in Excel, compared to PolitiFact’s graphic.



Here's PolitiFact's Report Card in its new "App"



Here's how I did it along with the Politi-Score in parentheses next to the person's name.



Just to underscore the ambiguity of the color-coding, in looking at it, for example, it would be hard to tell, of Rick Perry and Scott Walker, who was actually the bigger “liar” by PolitiFact rulings. The Politi-Score calculates Scott Walker to be the bigger liar, even though Rick Perry has had the biggest share of “Pants on Fire” rulings of anyone on the list. It does appear that Obama is the most “truthful.” We can also see that John Kasich, so far, has not caught his Pants on Fire. But per Politi-Score, his overall truthfulness is less than Rick Scott and Barack Obama.

So the color-coding conveys a “spread” of information about the person’s rulings, but we can't really tell how each person compares to others overall. Given what I have found so far, maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe not.

Now it's onto take a look at PolitiFact's "Truth Index" to try to figure out exactly what it's about.  Stay tuned.