Angie Drobnic Holan, of the respected, nonpartisan factchecking orgPolitifact has an editorial in the New York Times about the record levels of falsehood in the GOP race, an outlier in a general increase in the literal factualness of political campaigns, thanks to fact-checking orgs like hers.
But the showstopper in the piece is a chart that ranks the current political frontrunners from the GOP and Democratic Party by the number of lies they’ve been caught telling. Ben Carson edges out Trump at the top of the chart, while Bill Clinton is right at the bottom.
The chart has a sampling bias problem. An organization that’s only been checking facts since 2007 will have had fewer data-points on Bill Clinton than one that started in, say, 1992. It’s also not clear what triggers a check of a claim by a political figure, apart from general controversiality – so what we’re really seeing is the “eye-catching lies” as opposed to a thorough census of all the falsehoods uttered by a given politico.
