This being an election year, Media Research Center executive Tim Graham spent more time and space than usual lashing out at fact-checker for the offense of fact-checking Donald Trump and other conservatives. Graham spent a July 12 column trying to frame anyone who’s not a anti-abortion extremist like himself as and “extremist” on abortion rights:
Republicans and many independents do not believe in the term “independent fact-checkers” when it comes to federal elections. Fact-checkers predictably defend Democrats from GOP “misinformation” in election season. Democrat extremism on abortion is one topic where the fact “checkers” are the fact manglers.
Take Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in Montana. On July 10, PolitiFact broke out the “False” flag for something Sheehy said in a June 9 debate: “Elective abortions up to and including the moment of birth. Healthy, 9-month-year-old baby killed at the moment of birth. That’s what Jon Tester and the Democrats have voted for.”
You can tell PolitiFact is politically motivated for Democrats in the tone of their headline: “GOP’s Tim Sheehy revives discredited abortion claims in pivotal Senate race.” Discredited?
Donald Trump was slammed in his last debate for saying what he often says — the Democrats favor abortion up until birth. The first proof of that is plain language in the 2020 Democrat party platform, which explicitly stated: “Democrats oppose and will fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights. We will repeal the Hyde Amendment, and protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom.”
Fact: They are unequivocally opposed to any “barriers to reproductive rights” and will “codify the right to reproductive freedom.” Nothing in that language expresses any time limit on an abortion. The “right to choose” is absolute. That includes — if you repeal the Hyde Amendment — the “right” to force anti-abortion taxpayers to pay for abortions.
The first big clue that Graham doesn’t care about facts is his use of “Democrat party” instead of the correct name of the Democratic Party. He then dishonestly framed a call for fewer restrictions on abortion as a call to remove all restrictions, despite nothing he quoted making that exact claim. And just because Trump was “saying what he often says” doesn’t make the repetition any more accurate. He concluded by whining:
This is not about facts at all. It’s about maintaining the fiction that the Democrats don’t favor the most permissive, baby-killing extreme, the exact opposite of people who want to ban killing unborn babies. They would prefer the public be swindled into believing the myth that Republicans are extremists on abortion while the Democrats are somehow sensible centrists.
Meanwhile, Graham is trying to swindle people by insisting that the anti-abortion absolutism he clearly supports — which, at its logical endpoint,will result and the arrest and imprisonment (and likely execution) of every woman who has ever had an abortion — is somehow hot “extreme.”
Gratham spent an Aug. 27 post whining that PolitiFact found the Democratic National Convention was more factual than the Republican National Convention:
PBS and their “independent fact-checker” partners at PolitiFact can agree: the Democratic convention was much more factual than the Republican convention. So Democrats didn’t just corner the market on “joy” and “electricity,” but apparently on facticity.
PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders appeared on Thursday’s News Hour before Kamala Harris had even spoken. She did not appear during the prime-time convention coverage to “referee” the proceedings, as she did during the GOP convention.
Graham rehashed his usual whining that PolitiFact “gave Republicans three times as many False ratings while giving Democrats three times as many True ratings” — while not proving that these numbers are in any way inaccurate.
As he likes to do, Graham spent a Sept. 3 post portraying a single false claim that wasn’t immediately fact-checked as an indictment of all fact-checkers:
NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker doesn’t have a page at PolitiFact. She’s apparently never mangled a fact that required checking. It’s because she’s in the liberal fold. By contrast, Tucker Carlson has18 fact checks during the Biden era, with seven “Pants On Fire” rulings, ten “False” and one “Mostly False.”
On Sunday, Welker unloaded a whopper as she rushed in to contradict Sen. Tom Cotton as he responded to the fake Arlington Cemetery scandal. He pointed out the perversity that the Democrat media is hounding Trump when Kamala Harris failed to come to Arlington to honor the 13 service members killed by a suicide bomber during the botched Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Welker falsely claimed Harris was present at Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived for a “dignified transfer.” That, too, was an occasion for fact-mangling, when the “fact checkers” tried to deny an undignified President Biden repeatedly looked at his watch as the bodies were transferred. They had to issue corrections.
Actually, there was nothing fake about the Arlington “scandal,” in which Trump violated cemetery protocol to film in an area of the cemetery where such filming is prohibited for partisan politcal purposes.
Graham was dishonest about the abortion issue again in his Sept. 13 column:
“Fact checking” is often an exercise in spin-spoiling. The most obvious example from the ABC debate was the Democrat position on abortion. It is, as plainly stated in the 2020 DNC platform, for the woman’s “right to choose” without exception. That is what congressional Democrats have pushed in legislation, to repeal every limitation states have imposed.
Donald Trump routinely turns to the 2019 comments of then-Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia on the radio as he discussed a bill by state legislator Kathy Tran to make third-trimester abortions easier. She admitted it was so extreme it would allow a baby to be killed as they were about to be born.
So Northam explained how a baby that was born could be “kept comfortable” while the parents decided if they wanted abortion. After this clip went viral, Northam’s team said he didn’t mean abortion. That’s not credible, but the spin spoilers will quote it like it’s rock-solid.
Given that Northam and his office quickly pointed out that he misspoke and that Trump and others were taking his words out of context, it’s quite credible. But Graham wants to pretend that the correction was never made. Still, he went on to play the :extreme” card again:
At the very least, the knee-jerk reflex to “fact check” should be suppressed. “Fact checkers” all over the media descended on Trump over his latest citation of Northam, as they have for years now. They spew in outraged protest that late-term abortions are “rare,” like that somehow makes the extreme Democrat stance untrue.
ABC had carefully prepared to pounce on this. After the debate, Linsey Davis admitted to Stephen Battaglio at the Los Angeles Times that the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the CNN debate between Trump and Joe Biden, “whose poor performance led to his exit from the race.“
They claimed to have researched the speeches of both candidates, and Davis said she fully anticipated that Trump’s “erroneous” abortion claim would come up when she questioned him. “That was an obvious thing to get on the record,” Davis said.
But there was no attempt, after all this apparent research on both candidates, to question anything Harris said to “get on the record.” Not one thing.
Graham didn’t concede that Trump makes it easy for fact-checkers to prepare for him by constantly repeating his lies — and he identified absolutely nothing from Harris that demanded fact-checking.
Graham’s Sept. 18 column was devoted yet again to complaining that a liar like Trump keeps getting fact-checked:
Kamala Harris consented to a puffball panel discussion with the National Association of Black Journalists on September 17, and it was announced that PolitiFact would engage in live “fact checking.” Their Twitter feed then displayed 14 checks on Kamala’s answers. The first one was labeled “False,” and all of the rest of them were “True,” “Accurate,” or basically okey-dokey.
On September 11, PolitiFact hit a new milestone in leftist aggression. Donald Trump was thumped with a “Pants on Fire” tag for the 200th time with “they’re eating the pets” in Springfield, Ohio. He’s been tagged with flaming pants 12 times since June 1.
Kamala Harris, by contrast, has zero. She was first elected statewide in California in 2010. Your two candidates this year, not exactly “neck and neck” at 200 to nothing.
Now compare this to national politicians since PolitiFact came on the scene in 2007. Joe Biden has seven “Pants On Fire” ratings, and only one as president. Barack Obama has nine, Hillary Clinton has nine, Bill Clinton has three, and Bernie Sanders has a perfect zero like Kamala.
Again, Graham refused to offer evidence that Trump deserved none of those ratings while the Democrats deserved more. He concluded with one more whine:
Trump has 1,051 fact checks, and 805 of them are “Mostly False” or worse – 76.6 percent wrong. Bernie Sanders has 176 fact checks, and 44 were on the false side – 25 percent. Bernie can call Trump a “fascist” and he’s all good.
Yet again, Graham failed to prove those evaluations were not deserved. As usual, he’s trying to distract from the fact that Trump is a habitual liar who cannot be trusted.
Graham huffed in an Oct. 5 post:
Near the end of the CBS vice-presidential debate, the moderators brought up Trump’s election denial and the January 6 riot, which the media then turned into the most noteworthy moment, because to them, January 6 is always the top issue. J.D. Vance wouldn’t denounce his running mate’s election denial, turning instead to how Democrats aren’t great on Democracy.
“You guys attack us for not believing in democracy,” said Vance. “The most sacred right under United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself has said there’s no first amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris — wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That’s a threat to democracy there will long outlive this present moment.”
Vance shouldn’t have had to bring up Big Tech censorship on his own. CBS moderators should have.
Graham is certainly not going to call out Vance for changing the subject in order to avoid having to talk about Trump’s constant lying — that’s not the MRC is paying him to do.