To the editor:

Dolph Simons Jr., in his July 2 Saturday column, discussed the importance of the upcoming presidential election, stating that people should give serious thought to which candidate is best if we are to maintain the characteristics that made this country both great and exceptional. He emphasized the importance of electing a president who will not lie to us. Then he proceeded to describe how dishonest Hillary Clinton has been throughout her political career, that she lies and that she is not trustworthy. Not a word was said about the lack of truthfulness coming from Donald Trump. Mr. Simons should have looked at the current posting on PolitiFact, a Pulitzer Prize-winning organization that rates the truthfulness of the two candidates.

For Hillary Clinton, 72 percent of her statements were judged to range from true to half true, while 27 percent were mostly false to false. Only 1 percent were judged as outrageous lies, or “pants on fire” lies. We would certainly like to see better scores than these, but in comparison to Donald Trump, they are great. For him only 23 percent were judged to range from true to half true, with 77 percent judged to be mostly false to false. The “pants on fire” percentage was 19 percent.

Truthfulness involves not only not lying, but also telling the complete story and not leaving out pertinent information, as was done in the Saturday Column. Yes, we want our president to be an honest person, but we also want and depend on our news media being honest and trustworthy.