Political ads have been an especially hot topic this week, with surrogates from both presidential campaigns alternately citing, and arguing with, vaunted fact-checking outfits like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Politifact. Although controversial rulings have eroded the magic of such efforts, it is worth noting that, by Politifact’s numbers, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is 58% more likely to lie than President Obama.





According to Politifact’s rating system, Mitt Romney’s statements have been judged Mostly False, False, or Pants on Fire 46% of the time, versus only 29% for President Obama. In the Pants on Fire category alone, Romney is more than four times as likely to suffer trouser immolation than the President. Nearly one in ten statements by Romney earned flaming slacks, versus one out of every fifty for Obama.

Even when Romney does tell the truth, according to Politifact, he’s much more likely to mix in some falsehoods. 48% of his non-false ratings were only “Half True,” compared with 35% for President Obama.

However, as Politifact critics on the left and the right have noted (including me), their rulings are often inconsistent with each other, and even contradictory to their own analyses.

For example, they gave Mitt Romney a Pants On Fire for claims he made about the strength of the US Navy because, even though the figures he quoted were “largely correct,” they didn’t back up his “overall point.”

However, in a nearly identical circumstance in which Romney correctly claimed that President Obama had never visited Israel as President, even though Politifact acknowledged that no Republican president has ever visited Israel in his first term (Ronald Reagan and Bush 41 never went), they rated Romney’s claim “True,” even though his overall point was false.

In a separate rating on the same ad, they rated “Half True” Romney’s claim that President Obama “refuses to recognize Jerusalem as (Israel’s) capital,” even though their own analysis concluded that Obama did make such a recognition as a candidate, and his current position is “not so much a refusal on his part but a continuation of the line taken before him by previous presidents.”

Fact-checkers like Politifact are tremendously valuable for the research that they aggregate and conduct themselves, but inconsistent, contradictory, and capricious rulings badly undercut that value, especially when those are what politicians and media outlets pay the most attention to. Either a more consistent ratings scale is needed, or they ought to scrap them entirely, and let each fact-check stand on its own merits.

Until then, though, these are the numbers we have to work with, so if these presidential campaigns are going to rely on Politifact when it’s convenient, then they ought to live with these results, and media organizations who constantly quote Politifact should report them.

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