Ten Years Of Fact Checking

It’s an old stereotype that politicians are likely to “massage the truth” a little bit. That’s probably as generous as that can be said.

With that in mind, I was intrigued recently when PolitiFact celebrated their tenth anniversary. PolitiFact is a non-partisan, independent organization that fact checks statements by politicians (and others). With each statement, they rate it “True,” “Mostly True,” “Half True,” “Mostly False,” “False,” and “Pants on Fire!” After ten years, they rated 13,524 statements by those measures. That’s a lot of work.

One thing that I thought was interesting: the most common rating was “Half True.” A little bit of truth, but not enough.

It is easy to mock politicians for their elastic relationship with the truth, but to a substantial degree they are simply echoes of the human condition. So often we believe what we want to believe and ignore what we find inconvenient. As Christians we must hold onto the essential “fact check” that we want as much truth in our lives as possible because God is truth. We want to push aside convenient lies and avoid misleading statements because that separates us from God’s truth.