Wednesday, November 4, 2015

The "not a lot of reader confusion" update

PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan insists there's "not a lot of reader confusion" about the meaning of its report cards. People supposedly understand that PolitiFact's sample of statements is non-representative and therefore cannot support conclusions drawn about the candidates based on candidate "report cards."

We say Holan is either fooling herself or lying.

The blog Patheos provides yet another recent example:
Politifact maintains a database on the truthfulness of politicians. Politifact evaluates statements made by politicians for truthfulness. And while not every statement a politician makes is evaluated, any statement that is called into to question is examined from a nonpartisan position and that statement is given a rating from “True” to “Pants on Fire.”

This may not come as a surprise to some, but even the most honest Republican candidate has just barely told the truth more than 50% of the time in statements evaluated by Politifact. The two front-runners in the GOP race have unbelievably high untruthfulness ratings.
Not a lot of confusion.

Right. Sure.

What would surprise us? If PolitiFact suddenly decided to do an occasional article disputing the use of its data for these types of conclusions.


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