Truth Index+: By Occupation

Early in 2012, using PolitiFact's own Truth Index calculation method, I published a Truth Index by occupation for the year 2011.  That was for 1,919 PolitiFact rulings. This time it will be for ALL rulings through the 2012 election, that is, 6,535 rulings.  The result is somewhat similar to that for the 2011 analysis.  Here is how they break down by category:  

Click to enlarge:  Each proportional slice of the pie gives the number of rulings

 This time I am using the Truth Index+ method to calculate the results as applied to the 6,535 rulings, which equally measures (starting at zero for Pants on Fire to 100 for True) all Truth-o-Meter categories.  Office holders, of course, compose the largest group of PolitiFact "rulees" comprising over half.  This time, however, I've decided to separate out the "candidates" who were not in office at the time they made their fact-checked statements.  This greatly reduces the "Other" category which is where they would have gone.  The majority of candidates in this category were Republican: for example, Mitt Romney, Herman Cain, and from 2008, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.   In fact, there were only 22 statements in this category attributed to Democrats, which means any comparison between Democrats and Republicans in terms of the Truth Index means very little.

 

The Truth Index+ for those categories shows the disparity between Republicans and Democrats attributed by some to "bias."  Every category except one (PACs and Super PACs) had an index favoring the Democrats.  In the case of media (pundits, chain e-mails, blogs, etc.), the variance was quite large, at almost 40 percent, compared to the overall average variance of 16 percent, or 15 percent for those holding office.

 

Click to enlarge:  Media (chain e-mails, pundits, celebrities) was by far the least truthful.

Finally, here's the raw "Pants on Fire" factor graphed for the same occupation categories.  This factor is a measure of how much more often a party is assigned a Pants on Fire when a statement is determined False by PolitiFact.  The red (Republican) and blue (Democrat) bars are all the same--they all equal a one, with the "fire" bar a measure of how much more that party is assigned the Pants on Fire when they get a False.    Even with the Democrat dominance of a favorable Truth Index, this factor does not correlate that well with it, except in the case of the media.  The "presidential candidate" factor is not a good one, either, because as noted above there were so few Democrat rulings (of the 467 rulings, 22 were on Democrats.)  And it gets even more out of kilter when the "in office" number is broken down further by position, up next.

Click to enlarge:  While media had worst Truth Index, advocacy groups (Republican) told most "whoppers."