Rush Limbaugh’s pants are on fire

In every case, I check into the request and give the reader a call back. In every case, at least so far, my response has been the same: “We didn’t publish that story because it never happened — it wasn’t true, so the wire services never even wrote a story about it.”

Now the St. Petersburg Times, one of our country’s most respected newspapers, is not only answering readers’ questions about political pundits’ “news stories,” but they’re independently evaluating those statements and rating them on a “Truth-O-Meter.”

They do so on a Pulitzer Prize-winning website called PolitiFact, which tracks and evaluates the statements of political commentators, politicians, lobbyists and government officials. Each claim is researched for its accuracy by a professional journalist and then rated on a scale from “true” to “false” to “pants on fire.”

And now Jeff Bercovici, a writer for aol.com’s Daily Finance blog has taken all the separate evaluations and rated the nine individual commentators who appear most often on PolitiFact for their overall truthfulness.

Of those, conservative columnist George Will received the highest accuracy rating, at 72.7 percent.

The lowest score went to Rush Limbaugh, who was accurate 31.7 percent of the time, followed by Glenn Beck at 38.8 percent. Six of the 12 claims by Limbaugh analyzed by PolitiFact were rated as either “false” or “pants on fire” – the lowest rating given by PolitiFact, a rating reserved for absolute fiction.

You can see Bercovici’s full report, including a spreadsheet of his findings, here.

My point? There is a difference between commentary and fact – and one of the great dangers in our society today is the blurring of the line between those two. Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are not journalists. They are commentators. Sometimes, they intentionally say things that are not true – or that are greatly exaggerated – to make a point. That’s all part of their spiel as commentators, and that’s fine as long as their readers/viewers/listeners understand that what they are hearing is opinion and not fact.

Already, we are seeing these untruths – repeated again and again on TV, radio and in blogs – being uttered as truths by a significant segment of our population. As in: “President Obama is a Muslim.” “President Obama is not an American citizen.” “President Obama was born in Kenya.”

Not one of those statements is true. But according to one recent study, 18 percent of Americans now believe President Obama is a Muslim. He is not. He is a Christian. It’s a simple, straightforward fact. How did so many people come to believe something which simply is not true? They listened to – and believed – commentators who were intentionally not telling the truth. They didn’t notice – or chose not to notice – when Rush Limbaugh’s pants caught on fire.