Lately the U.S. presidential election campaign seems like standing under a rain of lies. Fortunately there are fact-checking web sites to help us sort out what is what. An article by Brian Charles Clark in the Spring 2018 issue of Washington State Magazine titled Fact or Fiction? Using the web to quickly fact-check social media links to eleven of them. (I previously blogged about Mr. Clark on May 4, 2020 in a post titled Sifting through misinformation). Daniel Dale and the crew at CNN Politics do a good job, like after the second debate on October 23, 2020 in an article titled Fact check: toned-down Trump continues his onslaught of falsehoods.
PolitiFact is a very useful site that classifies claims into six different categories: True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False, and Pants on Fire. I looked up both Donald Trump and Joe Biden at Politifact as was astounded by how different their profiles are. For an overview I added up the sums for both the three true and three false categories.
As shown above via a bar chart, Donald Trump tells the truth less than 27% of the time and lies more than 73% of the time – almost 3/ 4 ths. What he says is True only 4% of the time, Mostly True 9.5% of the time, and Half True 13.4% of the time. But what he says is Mostly False 20.6% of the time, False 36.4% of the time, and Pants on Fire the last 16.2% of the time. Before he speaks at rallies they really should play the Knickerbockers 1965 song Lies.
As shown above via another bar chart, Joe Biden tells the truth roughly 60% of the time and lies the other 40%. What he says is True 12.9% of the time, Mostly True another 23.5% of the time, and just Half True another 23.5% of the time. But what he says is Mostly False 18.8% of the time, False 17.6% of the time, and Pants on Fire just 3.5% of the time.
The man with an umbrella was adapted from this image by George Lansbury at Wikimedia Commons.
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