CNN Fact Checked an Entire Bernie Sanders Speech, Found Eleven Percent of His Claims False

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

CNN’s Daniel Dale has been tracking President Donald Trump’s lies and falsehoods for years, but he recently combed through an entire speech by Independent Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and found six times as many true claims as false ones.

On Friday, Dale and Holmes Lybrand published a detailed fact-check of a Sanders speech from February 23, writing that the impetus for the scrutiny was Sanders’ victory in the Nevada caucuses. The results were quite a contrast from Dale’s usual subject:

The result: three claims were false, six claims we couldn’t render a verdict on because an exact figure is not publicly known and 18 claims were true or mostly true.

Of the three false claims, one was a data error made by a think tank and not disclosed to the Sanders campaign until after he gave this speech. Another was an exaggeration about health care Sanders has repeated for more than a decade even as fact checkers have repeatedly debunked it.

The third, about Trump’s 2017 tax law, was an inaccurate description of a legitimate figure in a study.

Sanders does make false claims that fact-checkers miss, but when compared to the current occupant of the White House, it’s not even close to a close call. Trump, in contrast to Sanders, has made more than 14 false statement per day, on average, since taking office. At his current rate of false statements, Sanders would have to be president for several decades in order to catch up to Trump.