| PaulS |
12-22-2015 02:31 PM |
Saw a good article - what is Trump's approval rating up to now? Did it hit 40%?
Donald Trump Wins Politifact's 'Lie Of The Year'
The bigger the lie, they say, the more people will believe it. Or, in Republican presidential contender Donald Trump's case, the sheer volume of lies will do the trick.
That was the thought behind Politifact's decision to award Trump its not-so-coveted "Lie of the Year" award. The Pulitzer-prize winning fact-checking service, overseen by the editors of the Tampa Bay Times, didn't even bother selecting one of the Donald's untrue statements.
"In considering our annual Lie of the Year, we found our only real contenders were Trump's - his various statements also led our Readers' Poll," the publication wrote. "But it was hard to single one out from the others. So we have rolled them into one big trophy."
Among Trump's misstatements, as Politifact noted: His insistence that "thousands" cheered the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11; that Mexico sends its "bad" citizens over the U.S. border; and that "Whites killed by blacks - 81 percent" when, in fact, most people are killed by someone of the same race.
"PolitiFact has been documenting Trump's statements on our Truth-O-Meter, where we've rated 76 percent of them Mostly False, False or Pants on Fire, out of 77 statements checked," the publication wrote. "No other politician has as many statements rated so far down on the dial."
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is perhaps the most recent rival to call Trump a "pathological liar," but the real-estate's tycoon willingness to fib has stymied those ready to write off his run for the White House long ago.
"Republicans who support Trump either don't see his comments as lies or are so angry at the mainstream media they don't trust its fact checking or simply don't care," comedian Dean Obeidallah wrote at CNN in November. "In fact, a recent poll found that 60 percent of Republicans find Trump to be honest and trustworthy."
Others have said that it's in the media's interest not to directly challenge Trump's lies. After all: People love reading about this guy, right? Why derail a colorful candidate who grabs readers' interest?
"The incentive for candidates [to lie] is that most media outlets don't have the resources to check for accuracy immediately, but since the U.S. news media is based on the commercial model - and more eyeballs on the page or the screen is good for business-the networks love it when someone like Donald Trump says outrageous stuff," Michelle Amazeen, an assistant communications professor at Rider University, told the Daily Beast last month. "Fact-checking rains on the parade of that revenue model."
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