(Credit: Jeff Malet, maletphoto.com)
Salon
Many politicians stretch the truth or obfuscate to some degree or another — but does one party do it more than the other? According to a new study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University the answer is an unequivocal yes. Parsing 100 statements evaluated by the fact-checking website PolitiFact between Obama’s second inauguration and this month, the researchers found that claims from Republican officials were labeled as “false” or “pants on fire” by a 3-to-1 margin, compared to claims from Democratic officials. Conversely, half as many Republican claims were labeled “entirely true.”
“While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party,” said CMPA president Robert Lichter in a press release. An earlier study from the CMPA found the website rated the Romney campaign worse than the Obama campaign during the 2012 election. Not surprisingly, Michele Bachmann is one of the most poorly rated politicians on PolitiFact.
