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.