Media sources are cracking down on fact checking Donald Trump and the results aren’t good for the Republican presidential candidate.
This week Politico released their results of their fact-checking process on Trump, a chronicle of 4.6 hours of speeches and press conferences. The results? More than “five dozen statements deemed mischaracterizations, exaggerations, or simply false…It equates to roughly one misstatement every five minutes on average.”
Some of Trump’s statements, such as “The Untied States has a $500 billion a year trade deficit with China” and that he never settles lawsuits, are flat-out wrong.
Other statements, like claiming Marco Rubio is “totally in favor of amnesty”, are stretching the truth. Then there is the multitude of small misstatements and falsehoods.
You can see Politico’s complete run-down, which includes 60 untruthful statements so bad that they would have been forced to retract them had they been printed in their magazine, here.
Another political fact-checking website, Politifact, put together a chart of politicians and their rate of lies vs. truth. Trump leads them all with the highest rate of lies and lowest rate of truth statements. Nearly 75 percent of his statements are rated the worse level of lies, “pants on fire.”
Mainstream media has begun to crackdown on Trump as well. CNN and MSNBC are beginning fact check his statements in real time, using part of the screen to show the results.
Now @MSNBC‘s lower-thirds casually fact-check @realDonaldTrump. pic.twitter.com/8yAarBOfQC
— Geoffrey Sorensen (@GSorensen) August 4, 2016
I’m noticing more & more on-screen fact-checking pic.twitter.com/vQ6BSg61ri
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) August 4, 2016
Of course, CNN’s reasons for fact-checking Trump may be their bias towards Hillary Clinton. CNN is owned by Time Warner, a major donor to Clinton’s campaign.
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