-By Warner Todd Huston
A new chart has debuted showing the stark bias that purported “fact checker” PolitiFact commits against the right side of the aisle in its attempt to separate truth from fiction in politics. The chart demonstrates how Republicans and conservatives have come in for scolding by PolitiFact far more often and with much greater virulence than have Democrats and liberals.
The chart was assembled by calculating the number of “pants on fire” awards to what PolitiFact claims are lies by our national political figures.
As Chuck Rogers explains,
We assembled this chart by sorting PolitiFact’s complete list of “Pants On Fire” rulings. We filtered out any rulings of chain email or anonymous Facebook posts (although these were virtually all conservative viewpoints), as well as politicians or organizations who had only one “Pants On Fire” ruling (but again, even these were mostly conservatives).
The most impressive result is how PolitiFact treated Mitt Romney. His “pants on fire” awards are more than twice than that of any other politician except Michele Bachmann. And, according to PolitiFact, Bachmann herself is far and away a worse liar than any other pol besides Romney.
Amazingly, Romney’s “pants on fire” hits are three times more than Obama’s and Obama has had seven years of campaigning for president during which he’s committed one lie after another.
This chart is pretty revealing. For those suffering under the delusion that PolitiFact is unbiased, this chart should go a long way to disabuse them of that notion.
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.