In Charles Sykes new book, How the Right Lost Its Mind he claims that Politifact is biased against Republicans and often inaccurate:
A WORD ABOUT POLITIFACT
Matt Shapiro, a data analyst for the Paradox Project, ran the numbers on PolitiFact; assigning a point value to the ratings 0 for True and 5 for “Pants on Fire,” Shapiro found that Democrats had an average rating of 1.8—somewhere between “Mostly True” and “Half True.” Republicans, on the other hand, had an average rating of 2.6, somewhere between “Half True” and “Mostly False.” Some of the numbers were skewed by Trump’s egregious track record of fabulism, but the pattern seemed to hold even when he was removed from the mix. The most frequent rating for a Republican who was not Donald Trump was still “mostly false,” and often employed its customary convoluted logics to reach many of the verdicts.8 “PolitiFact often rates statements that are largely true but come from GOP sources as ‘mostly false,’” Shapiro noted, “by focusing on sentence alterations, simple misstatements, fact-checking the wrong fact, and even taking a statement, rewording it, and fact-checking the re-worded statement instead of the original quoted statement.” Again, this cannot be attributed to the Trump effect alone. Shapiro noted that during the 2012 campaign PolitiFact awarded nineteen “Pants on Fire” ratings to Mitt Romney. He put this in some context: from 2007 to 2016 a grand total of twenty-five Democrats combined were assigned the “Pants on Fire” rating. “This seems to indicate Romney wasn’t just a liar, but an insane, raving liar, spewing malicious deceit at every possible opportunity,” wrote Shapiro. “In the mere two years he was in the spotlight as a Republican presidential nominee, Romney somehow managed to rival the falsehoods told by the entire party of Democrats over the course of a decade. Or it is possible that PolitiFact has a slant in their coverage.” In contrast, he noted that based on PolitiFact’s ratings, Hillary Clinton was “the single most honest politician to run for president in the last 10 years.”9
Is he correct? Is Politifact biased against Republicans? Or is it possible Republicans lie more?
