The Media Research Center’s war on facts continued during the 2024 presidential election, and one of its favorite targets was PolitiFact, whose analysis the MRC constantly nitpicked for deviating from approved right-wing narratives. Tim Graham, the MRC’s chief fact-checker-hater, huffed in an April 2 post:
For International Fact-Checking Day on April 2, Eric Litke, the leader of the USA Today fact-checking squad, asked who should be fact-checking the fact checkers? His answer:“Everyone.” He argued: “Proper fact-checking requires critical thinking, deep reporting, precise writing and an obsession with fairness. But most importantly, it requires transparency.”
As a website, PolitiFact is fairly transparent, but studying its work does not lead everyone to find an “obsession with fairness.” Instead, we have repeatedly found in its articles the implication of the old Stephen Colbert joke that “reality has a liberal bias,” and therefore the liberals are routinely more honest and factual than the conservatives.
A NewsBusters analysis of the first three months of this year’s PolitiFact articles that evaluated a named politician or public official with a “Truth-O-Meter” ruling reveals that the site fact-checks Republicans more often than Democrats and is much harsher in its opinions of the GOP side.
Graham then whined: “This is why we have an ongoing tag for ‘Fact-Checking the Fact Checkers.‘ This doesn’t mean we’re hostile to Facts. It means the ‘fact checkers’ are not ‘independent.’ They have all the same biases and messaging tendencies as liberal reporters.”
Graham is lying — he very much hostile to Facts, particularly when it’s pointed out that conservatives keep getting busted not imparting them. He offers no evidence whatsoever to support his contention that Republicans and Democrats spread falsehoods at the same rate so Democrats must be called out as much as Republicans are. At no point does he prove his suggestion that fact-checks against Republicans are inherently false.
Alex Christy complained in an April 17 post:
It is a time-honored tradition that during campaign season, politicians will defend themselves by claiming that “since I took office” such-and-such has happened or attack their opponents by arguing that “since so-and-so took office” this has happened, but when Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tried that tactic against President Biden and his inflation record, PolitiFact slapped him with a “half-true” rating despite admitting his numbers were completely true.
The specific claim Rubio made was that “It’s very misleading when (President Biden) says (inflation) used to be at 9%. This is compounding. It’s not like it went down from 9% to 3%. This is building month after month. The better way to think about it is that it’s 18%, 19% over the last three years.”
In the “if your time is short” summary at the top of his article, Louis Jacobson wrote, “Inflation compounds and it has risen by about 19% over the last three years.”
If that sounds like the shortest and easiest fact-check ever, Jacobson was there to say not so fast, “compared with February 2020, the month before the pandemic began, and also compared with one year ago, wages have increased faster than prices.”
Jacobson then spends several paragraphs expanding on these points. Sandwiched between two graphs on wages and inflation, Jacobson claims, “One is to compare today with February 2020, the last full month before the coronavirus pandemic hit. The pandemic represented such an economic upheaval that February 2020 is a plausible benchmark for a ‘normal’ economy.”
Christy is mad about Rubio’s numbers being put in their proper context — something it normally demands.
After PolitiFact called out House Speaker Mike Johnson for falsely claiming Columbia University officials told Jewish students to stay away from campus during unrest earlier this year, Christy justified his falsehood in an April 30 post, insisting that Johnson was just paraphrasing things:
It is common for people to paraphrase others when they believe that they are trying to get away with saying something odorous in a polite way. Columbia explicitly advising Jewish students to stay home would be a P.R. disaster, meaning Johnson’s paraphrase was his way of citing what he thought the administration was really saying by their refusal to end the encampments against Israel and Zionists, which is just anyone who thinks Israel should exist.
Jacobson conceded that there was a Columbia-affiliated rabbi who urged Jewish students to stay home, making it possible that Johnson simply confused the rabbi with the administration. If that is true, then Jacobson should’ve written another one of PolitiFact’s explainer articles that do not feature the truth-o-meter.
Christy spent a July 13 post raging that PBS was partnering with PolitiFact on election coverage:
PolitiFact, one of the fact-checking outlets with the ability to censor your Facebook posts, and PBS, the news channel subsidized by your tax dollars, announced in a joint statement on Friday on their respective websites that they are teaming up for the remainder of the 2024 election cycle, formalizing their June 27 Debate segment..
The statement involved plenty of mutual back-patting, “As the rise of misinformation and disinformation continues, fact-based and impartial journalism is more important than ever during this historic election. Together, PBS News and PolitiFact share a mission of equipping their audiences with the information they need to discern fact from fiction and hold elected officials accountable.”
It further reports “PolitiFact’s fact-checking reporting and research will appear across PBS News programming and digital platforms during major political events such as the Republican National Convention, the Democratic National Convention and all upcoming presidential and vice presidential debates. The news organizations will also explore opportunities to co-produce content.”
Meanwhile, senior executive producer of NewsHour Productions and WETA senior vice president Sara Just played the democracy card, “Trust and accuracy are the coin of the realm in journalism. Efforts to erode that trust and cast doubt on media accuracy does profound damage to our democracy and we in the media are duty bound to protect and build that trust up.”
Christy huffed in response that “While Just tries to claim that doubting media accuracy is dangerous to democracy, the truth is just the opposite.” But all he offered was examples of right-wing nitpicking, not of anything PolitiFact actually got wrong. Meanwhile, Christy’s employer insists that the mere act of fact-checking is “censorship.”
There are many more examples to come.