There’s been a variety of ways that other PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index quantifiers have broken down their results: about two years ago, someone named “cinematical” at Daily Kos was probably one of the first to talley up PolitiFact rulings and assign a score for each Truth-o-Meter ranking. He broke it down by office holders and non-office holders, groups and individuals, politicians and non-politicians.
My Truth Index counterpart, Steve of Quibbling Potatoes, has done one of the most comprehensive and analytical reviews of the PolitiFact Truth-o-Meter scores ever. His “Truth Index” moniker was copied by PolitiFact (although I don’t know if they were aware that Steve had preceded them). One of his breakdowns is by “occupation”—Activist, Advocacy Group, Journalist, Party Booster and Politician.
So I’ve decided to do it by what I’ll call “Source and Occupation":
So I’ve decided to do it by what I’ll call “Source and Occupation":
Office-holders. This includes current, former and “potential”, for example, Herman Cain, since he is running for president but never held office.
Non-office holders. That’s everyone else, including journalists, blogs, and chain e-mails and as Steve might call them, just plain “rabble-rousers.”
Groups. I lumped advocacy groups and “party boosters” (like the RNC or DNCC) all together. Blogs and chain e-mails were not included here.
Media. That would include all journalists, pundits, and TV/radio talk show personalities. Someone who is a consultant to media, like Sarah Palin, would still be categorized as an office-holder since she was governor of Alaska.
Below is the breakdown (for the first nine months of 2011) of these categories by overall Truth Index score (multi-color), the by Democrat (blue), Republican (red) and all other political affiliations (light purple).
Going up from the horizontal zero line is “more truthful” and going down from it is “less truthful.” To keep the graph less busy I have not included a Truth Index number label for “all other.”
“Safety in numbers” appears to hold true when it comes to not telling the complete truth, as Groups appear to lie the most, which include “party boosters.” Steve had this to say about “party boosters” in his review of his compilation of the same database:
…party boosters (basically any organization with "Democrat" or "Republican" in its name, or such an organization's spokesman), whose sole function is to get folks to elect Democrats or Republicans, seem to lie at a shockingly high rate independent of party affiliation.
The Truth Index for Individuals appears to mimic office holders closely, since the majority of individuals are office holders. The score of non-office holders includes the media and the groups, as well as bloggers and chain e-mails, which made its score much lower than office holders across the board. Media personalities, however, constituted the biggest divergence in the Truth Index, with a variance between Republicans/Conservatives and Democrat/Liberals of almost 60 points. About 40% of all the statements coming from Republican/Conservative pundits or journalists were either False or Pants on Fire on the Truth-o-Meter; it was half that for the Democrat/Liberals.
Bloggers and chain e-mails by far are the worst offenders on the Truth-o-Meter. Their combined score (regardless of affiliation) was an almost Pants on Fire -133.33. There were six overly similar rulings of Pants on Fire done by various PF states all at the same time which concerned the ideology of certain Democrats, however, that I have a very strong inclination to do a separate post on. Nevertheless, nearly three fourths of the rulings on these two were Pants on Fire.
For 2012, I am thinking of separating office-holders to “local” and Washington-based as Steve did in order to contrast the two. He also did something interesting which was to look at senators as opposed to congressmen. At first I thought this should not be that relevant, but when you think about it, does the six year term as opposed to two year have any effect on “truthiness”? In a way, it might make you less inclined to be more truthful since you have the benefit of a longer term…or it could make you less? Hopefully I can continue where Steve may have left off and try to remain up to his excellent standard.
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