Politifact language audit

We report on attempts to use currently available automated text analysis tools to identify possible biased treatment by Politifact of Democratic vs. Republican speakers, through language. We begin by noting that there is no established method for detecting such differences, and indeed that “bias” is complicated and difficult to operationalize into a measurable quantity. This report includes several analyses that are representative of the tools available from natural language processing at this writing. In each case, we offer (i) what we would expect to see in the results if the method picked up on differential treatment between Democrats vs. Republicans,(ii) what we actually observe, and (iii) potential problems with the analysis; in some cases we also suggest (iv) future analyses that might be more revelatory.