PolitiFact asks its readers: Should ‘Barely True’ rating be changed to ‘Mostly False’?

PolitiFact
Over the years, PolitiFact readers haven’t expressed much love for the Barely True rating, which is reserved for “statements that have a small amount of truth but otherwise exaggerate or distort,” writes Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact. In a recent case, a Republican Party committee misrepresented a Barely True rating as True. “After hearing so many complaints about Barely True over the years, that episode was a key moment in our thinking about Barely True,” Adair writes. “So we are considering changing the rating from Barely True to Mostly False. We’re increasingly convinced that our existing approach does in fact put too much emphasis on ‘true.'” PolitiFact (a project of Poynter’s St. Petersburg Times) has asked its readers to weigh in on its Facebook page. As of Monday afternoon, most people — make that “many people” so that PolitiFact doesn’t fact-check this — had asked for the ruling to be changed.