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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Pre-Debate Patterns of Deception


Ahead of the first presidential debate, FlackCheck.org explores some patterns of deception that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have used on the campaign trail.

On several occasions, Trump has used “hearsay,” which, according to FlackCheck.org, asserts that “something must have occurred because someone told you that it has.” That was the case when Trump said that he “heard” the U.S. unemployment rate was 42 percent, which is not correct.

Clinton has used the deception known as “misleading by not telling the whole story.”

For example, Clinton said an analysis by Moody’s Analytics found “that with our plans the economy would create more than 10 million new jobs.” She left out that the analysis said that most of those jobs would be created under current law over the first four years of her presidency, and only 3.2 million jobs would be added if all of her proposals were implemented, which the report noted was unlikely to happen.

For more on these and other patterns of deception, visit FlackCheck.org, our sister site for political literacy.

Correction, Sept. 26: We have changed this story to reflect that Clinton’s proposals are projected to add 3.2 million jobs over four years, not 10 years. The error was introduced during the editing process.