WASHINGTON: It is campaign season, and facts are taking it on the chin.
Republican Donald Trump's claim that Arab Americans cheered during the September 11, 2001 attacks is just the latest in a string of falsehoods from US presidential candidates.
Trump is not alone among the candidates in distorting the truth, according to fact-checkers.
Carly Fiorina falsely claimed the United States was preparing to accept 250,000 Syrian refugees; Marco Rubio said that welders earn more than philosophers; and Ben Carson stated that no signatories of the Declaration of Independence had elected office experience.
Democrats have stretched the truth as well -- Hillary Clinton by claiming that her handling of emails through a private server was "permitted" by the State Department. Bernie Sanders overstated the evidence by asserting that "climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism."
Such claims, which have been debunked by fact checkers, are part of political life.
But the 2016 Republican campaign has been notable for incendiary claims, most notably by Trump.
"There is no rigorous way to quantify deception being better or worse over time," said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College political scientist who follows fact-checking and campaigns.
"But I do think it's fair to say Donald Trump is on the verge of melting down the fact-checking sites with what he is saying."
Trump earlier this year said the US unemployment rate was as high as 42 percent. More recently, he tweeted a graphic showing that 81 percent of white homicide victims were killed by blacks. The website PolitiFact said the correct figure from Department of Justice statistics was 15 percent.
Asked by Fox News about the mistake, Trump said, "I didn't tweet, I retweeted somebody that was supposedly an expert... am I gonna check every statistic?"
The New York Times said in an editorial Tuesday that the past week of the campaign had been "dominated by Donald Trump's racist lies."
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