In my "Part 2" of Bill Adair’s breakin’ out the Truth-o-meter on the June 28th edition of MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, he mentions to host Chuck Todd that he is thinking of changing the “Barely True” category to “Mostly False.” At first I got all excited and thought maybe he read something I posted about six weeks ago which was headlined with precisely this suggestion. My ego eventually deflated, however, as I realized there could be other factors: I believe I saw some commentary at the Facebook page to that effect, but, more significantly, there was a ruling on a statement made around June 1 by the National Republican Congressional Committee where they essentially interpreted Barely True as True, which shows what can happen when you say something that’s mostly false is “Barely True.”
This is what NRCC spokesperson Tory Mazzola told PolitiFact (PF) in response to their inquiry as to why Mazzola claimed a PolitiFact-confirmed “True” for “Barely True”:
We [PF] sent him [Mazzola] an e-mail this morning (June 1) noting our puzzlement, and he replied. "By ruling it ‘true,’ albeit barely, you determined that the Democrats' responses were not believable, not credible, or false at least a degree more than ours were true," he said.
So, it all depends on interpretation…and a “Mostly False” ruling would likely have resolved this. As I said in my previous post, I do not like the words “Barely True” because the word True is somewhat misleading as it conveys the “True” or truth of the ruling more strongly than the False, even though it's more "False" than "True". And that’s exactly what was "conveyed" to Troy Mazzola and the Republican National Campaign Committee.
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