New Mexico Central

Truly Theirs?

by John Weckerle

Hardly a day seems to go by on which one simply can’t turn on the radio or television news – or browse the internet – without one of the Republican presidential primary candidates accusing one of the others of making false statements.  Frankly, with available time for radio listening at a premium, we’re getting a little tired of hearing the same thing over again.  However, we have had our interest piqued by a particular question: just how often are these accusations of falsehood justified?  How much can we trust these people?

To get a feel for the veracity of the primary candidates, we visited the Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact.com, a project of the Tampa Bay Times.  The site sorts through statements by various personalities and rates them as True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire.  We looked into the files for each candidate and compiled it into a single table.  What we noted immediately was that the raw data were less useful than we’d like, because the number of evaluated statements by each candidate varied substantially.  To rectify that, we calculated the percentage of the total number of statements represented by the ranking in question for each candidate.

We must stress here that Politifact, and not New Mexico Central, did the evaluations of the statements, and we did not review each one individually.  We’re leaning on the Pulitzer Prize-winning status to give us at least some hope that the data are correct.  Some of the totals are fairly small, so small-sample bias is a real possibility, here.

Mr. Cain, Mr. Perry, and Ms. Bachman have dropped out, but they have either dropped out recently or endorsed other candidates, so we kept them in the mix for now.  The overall “leaders” (we’re not sure that word applies to, say, the person with the highest “False” or “Pants on Fire” score) in each category are underlined in red.  The “winner” (really, who wants to be #1 in “Pants on Fire?”) among those currently running is indicated by an asterisk (*).     Now, this is all very fine and good, but those are quite a few categories – and while the data arranged as such are certainly telling, we thought it would be worth boiling it down into two categories: Fairly Truthful (True and Mostly True) and Not Truthful (Half True and Worse).  We think it’s a logical distinction, as the phrase “lies and half-truths” is often used to describe a lack of, well, accuracy.

We’re going to make a few observations here.  There are a number of reasons for making inaccurate statements.  For example, on the most innoccuous end of things, one may simply misspeak. One may be passing along inaccurate information that he or she thought was accurate. Some people may consider themselves too busy or too infallible to bother with fact checking. Some may not want to fact check because they do not want to find out that certain statements are not accurate.  One may also be easily fooled, and uncritically passing on unverified information. One may also place more importance on his or her emotional reaction to a statement than on its accuracy – in other words, to some people it is more important that statements feel “right” than be true.  Then again, there are those who have no aversion to knowingly making false statements, or repeating them, because they appear to advance and/or lend support to a cherished position or ideology.  The list goes on, and for the purposes of this article we will not attempt to divine the actual motivations behind the data.

At any rate, among all the candidates and the current runners, Mr. Paul ranks significantly higher in our Fairly Truthful category and lower in the Not Truthful than any other candidate. Mr. Cain holds the opposite distinction among all the candidates, and Mr. Santorum claims this “honor” among those still in the race.  At 83%, his score is tied with that of Ms. Bachman. Mr. Gingrich is not far behind at a 20%/80% split, and with a 35%/65% spread, Mr. Romney doesn’t seem to have much to crow about, either.

For those who cry foul with “You didn’t include Barak Obama!” – You’re right; we didn’t.  Mr. Obama is not running in the Republican Party presidential primary.  We did run the calculations, however.  Mr. Obama (with 342 statements analyzed, nearly three times the next greatest number) led the pack slightly in the Fairly Honest category (46%).  He also trailed the pack slightly in Politifact’s Mostly False and False categories, and scored only a 1% in the Pants on Fire category.  The “slightly” in the last two sentences is largely a function of Mr. Paul’s scores – take him out of the equation, and Mr. Obama’s lead increases to double digits.  However, Mr. Obama perhaps holds an unfair advantage here, since he is not running in a primary and therefore not necessarily forcefully engaged in the political fisticuffs that may erupt once the general election has officially begun.  Once that happens, we’ll take another look at the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates.

For our part, we’re hoping to see a greater degree of accuracy in all parties’ statements in the coming months.  What we’re hoping for is not what we expect, though, and we anticipate a lot of channel/station switching between now and November.

Saturday, February 4th, 2012, by John Weckerle and is filed under "National Affairs ". You can leave a response here. Pinging is currently not allowed.