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Reliability of sources

Re: the discussion that was closed, your comment that He found that the number of statements analyzed from Republicans and from Democrats was comparable, but Republicans had been assigned substantially harsher grades, receiving "false" or "pants on fire" more than three times as often as Democrats. The report found that "In total, 74 of the 98 statements by political figures judged 'false' or 'pants on fire' over the last 13 month were given to Republicans, or 76 percent, compared to just 22 statements for Democrats (22 percent). That doesn't say that Politifact is biased, that says that Republicans make more "false" and "pants on fire" statements than Democrats do. If you want to further examine or discuss source reliability, go to WP:RSN. – Muboshgu (talk) 18:01, 2 August 2022 (UTC)

Politifact

Scientifically speaking, the Ostermeier study you cited does not show that Politifact has a political bias. The fact-checking selection process is also not scientifically representative. Claims are chosen based on their newsworthiness, reader interest, and potential for misleading readers. Being unrepresentative, the average score given to people from a particular party does not necessarily align with the actual average untruthfulness of people from that party. There is additional variance because of the particular personalities in charge at any given moment, which party is in charge of the government, and which issues are currently being debated. You might argue the difference between parties is due to Politifact going easier on Democrats, which is possible. It is also possible that national Republicans are simply more likely to make false claims.

Having a political bias, especially if it's only in selecting what to fact-check, is also not an indication that a source is an unreliable when it comes to relaying the facts. Politifacts cites the sources and facts it uses to produce its ratings, which you can verify for yourself, and you can decide if you agree with the rating. True/false ratings tend to be highly correlated across reputable fact checkers with different political biases, though. If there were instances where Politifact made factual misrepresentations or a clearly incorrect rating, that would be of interest to Wikipedia editors, because it would make the source less trustworthy. Do you have any examples of that which would make you distrust this source? -- Beland (talk) 18:24, 2 August 2022 (UTC)