Lying Liars Who Lie: 2016 Edition

Rob Taber
The Mormon Press

It was the picture that shattered all of our records.

The idea behind it is simple enough. Take the politicians who have been active enough on the national stage to get fact-checked by PolitiFact at least 50 times since the start of 2007. Look at all of their ratings and tally them. Place the tally in the chart. Not scientific by any means, but interesting. (Update 7/21/2016: Trump's "truthiness" rating, to use Nolan's criterion in his comment of "true" + "mostly true," currently sits at 11%, which is a small gain from the ~7% when the chart was made, but still well behind Michele Bachmann. Hillary's "truthiness" is at 51%, which is largely unchanged. Again, this chart is not scientific and the post is more about the response to the chart than the chart itself.) 

Real Time with Bill Maher: New Rule – Lies Are the New Truth

Who Is the Biggest Liar in the 2016 Election?

By Tessa Stuart

Rolling Stone

 December 15, 2015

George Orwell once said politicians' words are "designed to make lies sound truthful and murder sound respectable." PolitiFact, founded by the Tampa Bay Times in 2007, was designed to examine those truthful sounding lies – and some outrageous sounding truths – and to determine the actual facts underlying both.

The website doesn't check every politician's or candidate's statements, just the ones likely to provoke the most debate. But even by that scattershot standard, the website has had its work cut out for it this election cycle, as PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan discussed in a recent piece for the New York Times.