Fox, like Trump, doesn't feel the need to tell the truth. MSM (1) generally does.

(1) For Facebook, MSM means: "BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo."

Fact-checking cannot provide the kind of metric you talk about for rhetorical devices that are not drily descriptive, such as irony, hyperbole, allusion, etc. It helps that the readers have a way to look up the facts if they don't know them, but the analyses need to be read critically, same as the original statements. It's no good if you distrust one set of people and uncritically trust another. On what basis? You don't trust the politician, that's good. You don't trust some media, that's also good. But whoever in the media you choose, don't trust them blindly, they are just normal people, not superheroes.

Take, for example, this statement: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/may/... There is no clear-cut right or wrong. Same-day voter registration puts a pressure on the bureaucracy to be more forgiving and less thorough; that's a fact. But is that driven by the political elements who benefit from illegals voting, and do people on either side actually believe that it has an effect? That's not a factual question, that's a question for a political debate. Mr Trump's hyperbole captures this with a surprising pith.

The certainly do. You can see that Trump is telling the truth 2% of the time and is mostly true only 6%. Most of his claims are not true. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/

For comparison, Hillary Clinton rates true (23%) or mostly true (27%) http://www.politifact.com/personalities/hillary-clinton/

> There is no clear-cut right or wrong.

Trump's claim was analyzed. Independent experts were consulted. It's obvious why the ruling went against him.

I don't think distinguishing between hyperbole and lies is Politifact's problem. It's simply calling a lie a lie.

I appreciate that Trump tells lies for political advantage, and that most politicians do the same. However, Trump is in a different league from Clinton, just as the NYT is in a different league from Fox News.

> Trump's claim was analyzed. Independent experts were consulted. It's obvious why the ruling went against him.

> I don't think distinguishing between hyperbole and lies is Politifact's problem. It's simply calling a lie a lie.

When I was growing up in the Eastern Bloc, we looked up to the U.S. for their people's ability to think critically and to have their own informed political opinions. I am horrified at your implying that you outsource your thinking. We used to say, "experts were consulted", "it's obvious", "the ruling went against him". That's totalitarian language, describing a totalitarian concept. Why would you throw away your freedom of thought, willingly to boot?

Let me invite you to analyse that statement by Mr Trump and its analysis by Politfact and my comment above. What is your opinion? Can you give good arguments for it, and anticipate counter-arguments against it?

> we looked up to the U.S. for their people's ability to think critically and to have their own informed political opinions.

Don't confuse opinions with facts. Opinions are personal and facts are (as far as possible) universal.

However, I'm unlikely to have a good opinion of someone who says too many things that are factually untrue, which is the case with Trump and Cruz.

> When I was growing up in the Eastern Bloc

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Eastern Bloc had rulers who could say things that weren't true and not have those things exposed as lies by the MSM. That's why we fact-check both Trump and Clinton. That's what democracy is based on.

> "the ruling went against him". That's totalitarian language, describing a totalitarian concept.

No it isn't. There's absolutely nothing totalitarian about it. It's exactly the reverse.

On the evidence presented by Politifact, what Trump said wasn't true. If you want to dispute that, you have to disprove the existing information or find more information that contradicts it.

Merely having an opinion about it adds nothing: it's not worth a damn.

Same-day voter registration puts a pressure on the bureaucracy to be more forgiving and less thorough; that's a fact. But is that driven by the political elements who benefit from illegals voting, and do people on either side actually believe that it has an effect? That's not a factual question, that's a question for a political debate. Mr Trump's hyperbole captures this with a surprising pith.

Politifact [...] is [...] not a[n independent] third-party watchdog. [... Further, f]act-checking cannot provide [data about speakers' telling the truth] for [statements using] hyperbole [...].

Your overarching position seems to be that this stuff is too complicated for you to reason about on your own, and you need to rely on other (presumably qualified) people to do some of your analysis (I disagree); Politifact provides a good unbiased, trustworthy, well-sourced, and most importantly impartial set of facts (I disagree); and the candidates that have the most fraught relationship with truth just happen to be those who you oppose politically (we may agree on that one). That's, I believe, at the core of a big problem with American journalism: the intellectual trepidation to analyse facts independently, based on all available evidence, and present a conclusion that is one's own; in a word, the pretence that a journalist can escape bias by simply choosing between what others are saying, without ever directly challenging their reasoning or assumptions.

That is not really important: all I'm asking of you is to present, preferably without swearing, your own reasoning for why you think Mr Trump gave anything but an honest answer on this particular occasion?

Now you're just being stupid. And insulting.

> preferably without swearing

Since I've shown no propensity to swear so far, I take it you feel your message is patronizing enough to prompt a swearing response?

Even if you don't agree with an opinion, that doesn't make it wrong. You may be even more biased the other way.

If you are not correct, then your opinion is not worth very much. See: birthers, anti-vaxxers, chemtrails, intelligent design, faked moon landing conspiracists etc.

Something far more meaningful than people I know who simply dismiss Fox News since they are right leaning. I'm actually surprised how many stories end up on Fox News that's never reported in the MSM.

If you're going to be myopic in how you get your news, why should I be surprised your views are just as narrow as the sources you get them from??

In the good old days of the Soviet Union, we could "read between the lines", because the censorship system was not very effective, and the journalists were pissed off. But we still failed horribly at understanding what the world looked like west of the border, and imagined capitalism was some lesser form of paradise, and were quite surprised when we had to start living it.

Personally, I am weary of reading people who I know try to manipulate me. I always suspect if they try hard enough and long enough, they may succeed. What is your method, and does it work?