I Brake for Pants on Fire (in 2013)

Since its debut in 2007 through the end of 2012, the PolitiFact team (including its states) decided that 1,915 statements it fact-checked out of the 6,658 total it had done deserved a false.  And of these statements found false, 29.6 percent, or 566, were deserving of its now famous Pants on Fire designation.  While I'm not going to discuss the somewhat subjective exercise of how it's assigned, it may be worth unpacking it and seeing what's inside.

 

If those 566 Pants on Fire rulings, 137 or 24% went to Democrats, 369 or 65% went to Republicans; the rest (60) were non-partisan or unknown as to a party affiliation.  This is what "alarms" to some degree the PolitiFact detractors who are mostly Republican: on a "raw" ruling basis, Republicans (in general) were 2.71 times more likely to be assigned the Pants on Fire than the Democrats.    The Republican theories as to the reason for this have been sampling or selection bias, although there are other compelling ones which I've posted about before:  the loss of the Whitehouse in 2008, and the enacting of "Obamacare."

 

One particular categorizing that was first done by the University of Minnesota's Eric Ostermeier in a study of 511 PolitiFact rulings in 2010 was "official versus non-official"; it took into account those who were in office.  Only 190, or about one third, of the Pants on Fire rulings were awarded to people who were in office; of the other 376 who were not in office, half were organizations and the on-line media.  If we look at party affiliation of those in office who were assigned the Pants on Fire, we have 60 Democrats (32 percent) and 128 Republicans (67 percent).  This means Republicans in office were 2.1 times more likely to be awarded the Pants on Fire than were Democrats in office, still more than double but about 25 percent less than the 2.71 overall.

 

The media--which includes celebrities, pundits, blogs, websites and chain e-mails--received the largest percentage (24%) of Pants on Fire claims, followed by governors and state government officials (19%).

 

Sixty-eight rulings receiving the Pants on Fire related to Obamacare, the vast majority from Republicans.  Claims on the subject of healthcare generated the most Pants on Fire rulings, with over 80 percent of them about Obamacare, or 14 percent of the Pants on Fire claims.   Obamacare overlapped to the subjects of Medicare, housing and abortion as well.  As a general topic, however, fiscal subjects (deficit, economy, federal/state budgets, stimulus and taxes) took up about 20 percent of the Pants on Fire claims.

 

As the number of fact-checks has grown year to year, however, the percentage of Pants on Fire claims in terms of the total has been gradually dropping year to year since "peaking" in 2009 as shown here.

Click to enlarge:  Number of rulings shown in parentheses after year

Finally, below are the same numbers which show the Republican/Democrat breakdown each year. What this appears to show is that while the percentage of Pants on Fire overall has gone down, the percentage of those Pants on Fire assigned to Republicans has gone up.  Non-official candidates--which include Mitt Romney and the other Republican presidential candidates like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum--comprise the third highest category in terms of candidate occupation for Pants on Fire rulings, which may have contributed to this high percentage in 2011 and 2012.  So, we may see a drop in this high Republican percentage in 2013.  Stay tuned.

Click to enlarge: Years (2010-12) of most Pants on Fire were dominated by Republicans