This document establishes how White House press secretaries and senior agency spokespeople normally communicate — how much they spin, how often they are fact-checked false, and how they respond to correction. It draws on the public records of press secretaries across administrations of both parties, from the George W. Bush administration through the present, using ratings from institutional fact-checkers (PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, the Washington Post Fact Checker, AP, Reuters).

The purpose is to give readers a factual yardstick. Every administration’s communications staff advocates zealously for its President’s agenda and enforces message discipline reflecting the party line — that is the normal, expected function of the role. When a spokesperson’s fact-checked-false record deviates from the cross-administration norm, the deviation warrants scrutiny — but deviation alone is not proof of intent.

This baseline is the reference class for the Spokesperson Misinformation Assessment (SMA) skill. It supplies the comparative (deviation) layer only; the SMA scores individual statements for knowing misinformation separately.

Why a Bipartisan Baseline Matters

Any spokesperson can be quoted saying something one-sided; every administration’s press shop puts the best face on the President’s agenda. Without knowing what “normal” looks like across both parties, it is impossible to say whether a given spokesperson’s false-statement record is ordinary message discipline or an outlier.

Building the reference class from Republican and Democratic press secretaries is deliberate: it is both the analytical control and the fairness safeguard. A subject is measured against Fleischer and Perino and Gibbs, Carney, Psaki, and Jean-Pierre — not against an idealized standard no working press secretary meets.

What “Normal” Spokesperson Conduct Looks Like

The following are the normal, expected behaviors of the role. None of them is misinformation, however one-sided:

The departures from normal conduct that the SMA scores are: repeating a claim after a formal correction; pushing the same false framing across many channels at once; contradicting the speaker’s own agency’s data; attacking the courts, elections, press, or official data to delegitimize them; and attacking the fact-checking process itself instead of the substance.

The Reference Class

Press secretaries and senior communications officials across administrations, with hardcoded tenure windows. All fact-check evidence must be filtered to the tenure window — institutional scorecards are lifetime and include pre- and post-government media careers, which are out of scope (see the Tenure-Window Guard in the SMA skill).

White House Press Secretary Tier

Fact-check counts below are tenure-windowed (dated PolitiFact rulings falling inside the role, not lifetime scorecards). Three honesty constraints govern this tier: (1) PolitiFact launched in 2007 and WaPo per-person tracking ~2011, so pre-2007 secretaries have no obtainable institutional scorecard — their band rests on qualitative anchors, stated as such; (2) PolitiFact rates only the statements its editors choose to check (small Ns), so these are ordinal signals, not lie rates; (3) a secretary’s lifetime scorecard often includes a later TV-pundit career that the Tenure-Window Guard excludes — most starkly Dana Perino, whose entire PolitiFact record is post-tenure Fox content.

Load-bearing comparison — in-window PolitiFact False + Pants-on-Fire (the recent, cleanly-windowed tier):

For Spicer, Sanders, and McEnany the “outlier” band rests on documented emblematic events (crowd-size falsehood; the Mueller-documented admission; “I will never lie to you” followed by same-briefing falsehoods and an election-fraud role) more than on the small selection-biased scorecards.

Agency / Department Spokesperson Tier

Agency-tier spokespeople (State, DHS, DOJ, HHS, DOT, VA, DOL, USDA, Pentagon, etc.) are materially under-covered by institutional fact-checkers — PolitiFact and FactCheck.org rarely maintain per-person scorecards below the White House press-secretary level. For this tier:

• Baseline rows rest on primary-source briefing/press-release research and dated exemplars rather than ready-made scorecards.
• Expect a higher rate of Format B (“No SMA / insufficient in-window fact-check record”) outcomes.
• The tier norm is established qualitatively from the handful of agency spokespeople who have been fact-checked, not from a populated distribution.

Rollout finding (2026-07-03): across all 44 agency/department spokesperson profiles assessed in the first SMA rollout, none carried an in-window statement with a rating from an approved institutional fact-checker sufficient to score — every one resolved to a Format B “No SMA designation.” This confirms the tier is under-covered by institutional fact-checkers; agency-tier reference rows remain qualitative and are built per-spokesperson from primary-source briefing research as material warrants.

The Deviation Detection Framework

Compare a subject’s in-window fact-check record against the tier reference class. Because institutional fact-checkers check the controversial claims — not a random sample — this is an ordinal reference band, not a rate. Cite raw counts; never compute or publish a “lie rate.”

How to Read This Framework

• within-norm: fact-check volume and false-rating share comparable to the same-tier reference class. Document; do not flag.
• elevated: visibly above the reference class on false-rating share or repetition-after-correction. Warrants the SMA comparative note.
• outlier: far above any reference-class member on the tier, typically with multiple deviation indicators present. Warrants the SMA comparative note and supports (but does not by itself establish) a cumulative designation.

This framework applies regardless of political party. The benchmarks are structural, not partisan. A spokesperson landing “within-norm” is the expected result for most of the reference class — including several Trump-administration figures whose in-window records are ordinary.

Relationship to the SMA Score

The baseline band is the comparative layer only. It answers “how does this person’s false-statement rate compare to normal?” It does not determine whether any individual statement was knowing misinformation — that is the job of the SMA Gate and Misinformation Severity Score, which rest on statement-level fact-checks and knowledge evidence. A spokesperson can be “elevated” on volume yet carry no MSS 3+ statement, or “within-norm” on volume yet have a single knowing MSS 4 statement. The two layers are reported side by side and neither overrides the other.

Factual correction requests: If you believe information in this document is incorrect, please contact factcheck@patriot.university with your name (optional), the specific claim, and any supporting documentation. We review all submissions and correct verified errors promptly.

Sources

1. PolitiFact per-person “report card” scorecards (filtered to tenure windows).
2. FactCheck.org person pages.
3. Washington Post Fact Checker (Glenn Kessler), including the Pinocchio scale and the “Bottomless Pinocchio” designation.
4. AP Fact Check and Reuters Fact Check archives.
5. Report of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III (2019) — documented Sanders admission re: the “countless FBI agents” claim.
6. White House and agency press briefing transcripts (whitehouse.gov and agency press offices).

This document establishes norms and benchmarks from publicly available fact-check records across administrations of both parties. Deviation from a norm is not proof of intent — it is a signal for further scrutiny. All White House press-secretary counts are tenure-windowed PolitiFact rulings (dated entries falling inside the role), not lifetime scorecards or “lie rates”; pre-2007 secretaries predate institutional per-person fact-checking and carry qualitative anchors only. Numbers are ordinal signals subject to PolitiFact’s own selection of which statements to check.