“Media has a Lower Approval Rate than Congress” - Just Mostly False?
Ok, let’s start off with one of my favourite examples of weird ratings yet. The case in point is this evaluation of a Trump utterance: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/16/donald-trump/news-media-less-trusted-congress/
Politifact’s ruling goes as follows:
“Trump said he thought that the media had lower favorability ratings than Congress. But Congress actually ranks below the news media, according to surveys from three different research groups spanning several years. In two polls, mistrust in the media broke 40 percent, which is hardly anything to brag about. But in those studies, mistrust in Congress was over 50 percent.
Trump had a point that the media has a trust issue, but he got the ranking wrong in terms of Congress.
We rate this claim Mostly False”
So the interesting thing is that the actual claim is false - media by no means has lower approval rate than congress, it actually has about 10 percentage points higher, so it’s not even that close - yet it’s not judged as completely false. Politifact’s criteria for “mostly false” is “The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression”. Yet there is no element of truth here. The proposition made in this particular utterance is a comparison, which doesn't hold.
So why is it just mostly false? One explanation is that politifact might have seen this as some kind of hyperbole, so that in some way, the point of the utterance would be that media has very low approval ratings. In this case the comparison wouldn’t be the central part or even the point, so then the point of the sentence would be true - 40% mistrust is not too good. This would hold even though the literal interpretation is false.
In my view, this might be too kind if an analysis. I don’t see why we shouldn’t interpret this literally - it doesn’t obviously flout any maxims, since the literal statement is a reasonable enough statement to make, and as such shouldn’t give rise to any implicatures. If this was meant to be a hyperbole it’s nowhere near outrageous enough, if you ask me. Even if the utterance is meant literally, but a “side-point” of it being that media has low favorability, that’s actually not what is proposed by this particular utterance. It might be said in other utterances in the same context, and they might be true, but this utterance is not.