Early last year I did a pretty detailed analysis on Eric Ostermeier’s study of about a years’ worth of PolitiFact (PF) National rulings. I compared my larger numbers to his at that time; to be specific, Ostermeier evaluated 511 PolitiFact statements while my sample was 1,784. My number actually included everything that was in his 511.
This time I am again looking at the entire population of PolitiFact rulings to compare to Eric Ostermeier’s. The most notable and most cited by various conservative pundits in terms of its possible bias is the 76/22 one: that is, 76% of all False and Pants on Fire rulings are attributable to Republicans while only 22% are attributable to Democrats. Mark Hemingway of the conservative Weekly Standard cited it in a recent NPR radio piece with Washington Post Fact-Checker author Glenn Kessler. Here's Eric's finding:
Republican statements were graded in the dreaded "false" and "pants on fire" categories 39 percent of the time, compared to just 12 percent for statements made by Democrats.
That means a supermajority of falsehoods documented by PolitiFact over the last year - 76 percent - were attributed to Republicans, with just 22 percent of such statements coming from Democrats.
So, how does it look now? I could never get close to Ostermeier’s numbers, although Republican False and Pants on Fire always outnumbered the Democrats. I did it in several ways to compare to Ostermeier: one with everything, which would include the PF states, one with everything including the non-office holders, and one just on National. I actually achieved the 22% for the Democrats by using the top 60 in terms of those with 10 or more rulings as posted previously on individual Truth Index average; but that is not a representative sample. The Republicans in this case were just over 70%, not 76%. But in all the other more inclusive measures, as shown in the graph below, the Republicans varied from around 60% (all False and Pants on Fire rulings) to 69% (PF National only). The Democrats were anywhere from 26% to almost 30% for all False and Pants on Fire rulings. Here’s a graphic of all my “permutations,” including one which included everyone and everything: for the 4,707 rulings PF did from the day it was “born” through the end of 2011, the False and Pants on Fire categories were roughly 60% attributable to Republicans, 30% to Democrats, with the remaining 10% for Independents, non-partisans and unknowns. While it’s still a 2 to 1 ratio in favor of the Democrats, it’s clearly better than the 3.5 to 1 as found by Ostermeier.
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| Click to enlarge: Smart Politics' percentages for Republican "Falsehoods" exceeded all five ways I did it with the entire PF database. (NH is New Hampshire, which appears to only do national rulings related to the 2012 Elections.) |
The other Truth-o-Meter categories were reviewed by Ostermeier as well, and so I obliged with my own, calculating not only just the percent of total rulings compared, but the rulings as a percent of all those in the Truth-o-meter rating. Again, this was for elected officials and those holding office. According to Ostermeier, "....… Democrats have therefore been presented as much more truthful - with over 75 percent of statements receiving the top three grades of True (16 percent), Mostly True (27 percent), or Half True (33 percent)."
The numbers indicate that Ostermeier’s sample appeared to be skewed more in favor of Democrats, no matter how I tried to shake the numbers. I had 10 fewer points for the Democrats and 5 more for the Republicans, and there was even one stat in favor of the Republicans: that was the percent True, Mostly True and Half True as a percent of the total True, Mostly True, and Half True: Of the 2,033 rulings in those Truth-o-Meter categories, 50% were attributable to Republicans, while 47% were attributable to Democrats. Part of the reason may be, of course, that there were more Republican rulings. While at the time Ostermeier found that PF National had roughly the same number of rulings for each party in his sample, they began to become more heavily Republican with the 2010 Elections putting more Republicans in office, and the 2011 Republican presidential campaigns and debates requiring frequent fact-checks. As a result, Republican rulings increased about 10 percent while Democrat rulings dropped almost 14 percent from Ostermeier’s more even percentages.
Next, and last but not least, a few fact-ettes and fact-oids shared from my database of PolitiFact rulings.
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