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Study: PolitiFact says Republicans lie more

The fact-checking organization PolitiFact has found Republicans to be less trustworthy than Democrats, according to a new study.

Fifty-two percent of Republican claims reviewed by the Tampa Bay Times fact-checking operation were rated "mostly false," “false” or “pants on fire,” versus just 24 percent of Democratic statements, according to George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs. By the same token, 54 percent of Democratic statements were rated as "mostly true" or "true," compared to just 18 percent of Republican statements.

(WATCH: Ted Cruz: ‘I don’t trust the Republicans’)

The CMPA looked at 100 statements -- 46 by Democrats, 54 by Republicans -- that were fact-checked by PolitiFact between January 20 and May 22. The study's findings are similar to a previous CMPA study, which found that PolitiFact gave more negative ratings to the Romney campaign than the Obama campaign in 2012.

See their complete findings here.

UPDATE (9:45 a.m.): Bill Adair, the Tampa Bay Times' Washington bureau chief and editor of PolitiFact, emails:

PolitiFact rates the factual accuracy of specific claims; we do not seek to measure which party tells more falsehoods. The authors of this press release seem to have counted up a small number of our Truth-O-Meter ratings over a few months, and then drew their own conclusions. We've rated more than 7,000 statements since we started in 2007. We are journalists, not social scientists. We select statements to fact-check based on our news judgment -- whether a statement is timely, provocative, whether it's been repeated and whether readers would wonder if it is true.