{"id":23351,"date":"2010-05-18T10:40:47","date_gmt":"2010-05-18T15:40:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=23351"},"modified":"2013-12-15T03:00:26","modified_gmt":"2013-12-15T08:00:26","slug":"rumors-and-partisan-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2010\/05\/18\/rumors-and-partisan-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Rumors and Partisan Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends<\/a> counted the number of rumors about President G.W. Bush and President Obama that were identified and determined by rumor-validation site, snopes.com, to be true, false, a mixture of true and false, or uncertain.\u00a0 It turns out, there are a lot more rumors and a lot more false rumors about Obama than there were about Bush:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Jay Livingston<\/a> summarizes:<\/p>\n

In less than two years, Obama rumor-mongers have had nearly twice the output that their Bush counterparts managed in eight years \u2013 87 to 47. And while the Bush rumors split almost evenly true-false, false Obama rumors dwarfed the true ones. The false rumors about Obama outnumbered the total number of rumors about Bush. And while the lies about Obama are almost all negative, some of the false rumors about Bush are quite flattering, along the lines of the George Washington cheery tree rumor \u2013 like the rumor that had Bush paying for the funeral of a boy who had drowned near the Crawford ranch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Looking closer at the mixed rumors, Bell reports that:<\/p>\n

I delved down to the stories that the site designates as a mixture of truth and falsehood. For Obama, in most cases the truth is innocuous while the lie reflects poorly on the President, particularly photographs that are misrepresented<\/a> or show behavior that produced no complaints when his predecessors did the same<\/a>. In contrast, in this mixture of truth and falsehood about George W. Bush praying with an injured soldier<\/a>, the lie reflected well<\/em> on that President…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Looking at the last two Presidential candidate losers reveals the same pattern: more false rumors about Kerry than McCain.<\/p>\n

Bell interprets this evidence to mean that Republicans fight dirtier than Democrats.\u00a0 What do you think?<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

J.L. Bell at Oz and Ends counted the number of rumors about President G.W. Bush and President Obama that were identified and determined by rumor-validation site, snopes.com, to be true, false, a mixture of true and false, or uncertain.\u00a0 It turns out, there are a lot more rumors and a lot more false rumors about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[85],"class_list":["post-23351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-politics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23351"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23351\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60213,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23351\/revisions\/60213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}