Truth Index: 5,000 Rulings Continued

The various permutations I show on the 5,000 PolitiFact (PF) rulings are very similar to my series on the 4,707 rulings analyzed through the end of 2011, so I will not repeat them here. The 293 rulings which took it up to 5,000 represent about six percent of all the rulings, so the stats should be very close to what they were then. I do want to show, however, that there are some trends which seem to continue that I didn’t emphasize in my end of 2011 analysis.

Affiliation.  The majority of rulings  (53%) were on Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians; 39% were Democrats/Liberals, and the rest were non-partisan or unknown (see graphic above).  PolitiFact's own numbers, if they have them, would differ from mine slightly because of more delineation of the affiliation on my part:  for example, their chain e-mails are not broken down by party (although many of them can't be) and there are a few people for whom I determined affiliations for which PolitiFact had assigned a "none."

PF's table adds to 99%

The National percentages. I confirmed my agreement with the National Truth-o-Meter rulings which were displayed in the 5,000 ruling celebration article—that is, that it was very close to what I showed for 5,000 rulings including the states. However, it’s important to match to the National “only” rulings to see how I compared apples to apples, and there I have a slight discrepancy. For National, all percentages match except I am one point higher on the Pants on Fire, at 9 percent instead of 8 percent. Now, I may have more rulings in the National number because of the way I added up the rulings through 2010, which may have caused the over-calculation, but it is also important to note that the numbers as given by PolitiFact add to .99, not to 1.00. Carrying it out to decimals, I have 8.69% for Pants on Fire for PolitiFact National. For greater analysis on PolitiFact regions (by party) through the end of 2011, click here.

Individuals versus Groups and “Entities.” Some of these are fairly intuitive when you think about it. Individuals (85% of the 5,000 rulings) score more truthful on the PolitiFact Truth Index than groups or “entities”(advocacy, party boosters, bloggers, chain e-mails, etc.) They average a -9.06 while groups and entities are -37.55, a pretty substantial difference. For a further breakdown of these groups and how they compared affiliation-wise, click here.

Individuals comprise about 85% of PolitiFact's 5,000 rulings and are more "truthful" as measured by its Truth Index.

Office-holders (current and former) are 74% of the 5,000 with a Truth Index of -8.47 while non-office holders (which would include those groups and entities mentioned above) score a -27.77 on the Truth Index.

And as noted in a previous post, one out of seven (674) of the 5,000 rulings were on females who had a lower aggregate Truth Index (-13.2) than the males (-8.28) although it is a fairly small variation.

All suggestions for further refinements are welcome!