‘How many ways can politicians ‘lie’? How a class led to a ‘truth’ report card for the 2016 election’

In a recent article for The Conversation, Ellis Jones, assistant professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross, writes about the honesty level of politicians, specifically those running in the upcoming 2016 elections.

Jones teaches a course titled “The Sociology of Television and Media” where his focus for students is to critically explore newscasts, entertainment programming, and commercial and political advertising. The class theme is  “What happens when, as a society, we begin to mix fantasy and reality together in mass media?”

“We discuss how a range of troubling outcomes emerge for a public that has difficulty telling truth from fiction,” he writes. “I have students deconstruct political ads, and we discuss practical resources for navigating the web of truths, half-truths and outright lies that proliferate unhindered during each election cycle.”

As a resource students use Politifacts.org’s Truth-o-Meter to fact-check the political statements made by politicians and see if any truth is contained. “The first, and perhaps most important, takeaway from their work is that modern political statements cannot accurately be rated as simply ‘true’ or ‘false,’” he writes. “The second takeaway, is that there are no politicians in this country that exclusively tell the truth. Every single one, to a greater or lesser extent, spins, bends, twists or breaks the truth.”

Jones had his students add up the raw numbers for 25 major politicians (based on Politifact’s fact-checking over the past eight years) and write the results up on the board in rank order from most to least honest based on the data. “The results were intriguing. The numbers revealed that many well-known politicians were abusing the truth far more than they were embracing it.”

Which led Jones to develop the honesty report card.  Read the full article and view the report card to see where popular politicians rank.

Read the full article here.

This “Holy Cross in the news item” by Kelly Ethier.