Truth Revolt
December 15, 2017
The New York Times, which promised to do a better job at unbiased reporting after the election, actually reported with a straight face that President Obama only lied 18 times in his entire presidency. Take a second to recover from laughter (or outrage).
David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Stuart A. Thompson considered it a challenge when they heard from Trump supporters who after reading the NYT’s list of lies of President Trump said: “Yes, but if you made a similar list for previous presidents, it would be just as bad.”
“We’ve set out to make that list,” the authors stated. “Here, you will find our attempt at a comprehensive catalog of the falsehoods that Barack Obama told while he was president.”
The NYT writers promised they “applied the same conservative standard to Obama and Trump, counting only demonstrably and substantially false statements.”
Their result: Obama, 18 lies in 8 years, while Trump told 103 in just 10 months! Don’t believe them? Just check out that handy colorful chart above. You’ll see.
In his first 10 months in office, he has told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly. Obama told 18 over his entire eight-year tenure. That’s an average of about two a year for Obama and about 124 a year for Trump.
The writers inform us that Trump’s lies were only counted once, and not the ones he repeated:
If we had used a less strict standard, Trump would look even worse by comparison. He makes misleading statements and mild exaggerations – about economic statistics, his political opponents and many other subjects – far more often than Obama. We left out any statement that could be plausibly defended even if many people would disagree with the president’s interpretation. We also left out modest quantitative errors, such as Trump’s frequent imprecision with numbers.
The article even went back to…