The Media Research Center has been lustily cheering the demise of fact-checking in general — and, of course, it’s lashing out at those who lament that demise. Alex Christy did so in a March 8 post:
Former CNN reporter Maria Ressa won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for her “efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.” However, as the heads of the social media platforms move past their relationship with fact-checking companies and towards greater freedom of speech, she warned Comedy Central’s The Weekly Show podcast host Jon Stewart that America is sliding towards “kleptocracy.”
[…]Musk’s purchase of Twitter has its origins in the platform banning the sharing of a New York Post article about Hunter Biden and jokes about Rachel Levine. Fact-checkers could throttle access to content even though fact-checkers themselves need to be fact-checked. What kind of freedom of expression advocate is Ressa?
Christy failed to mention that the Twitter ban on the Hunter Biden story was only for a short time. Christy returned for an April 3 post to bash one particular fact-checker:
Most people probably do not know who Angie Drobnic Holan is, but they should. Holan is the director of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, and on April 2, or International Fact-Checking Day, she wrote an op-ed bemoaning the setbacks the industry has taken in 2025 from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and the Trump Administration.
The entire column displayed a tragic lack of self-awareness on how the industry has failed to learn from its mistakes and the problems stemming from its overinflated view of its importance. Holan writes, “But this year’s fact-checking day also marks a very serious moment for the fact-checking community. We are facing multiple challenges to our ability to do our journalism, and it’s not clear what the next few years will bring. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, which connects 170 organizations around the world all adhering to high standards in fact-checking, I see a community under intense pressure. Not everyone loves fact-checking, and there are powerful political forces that would simply like it to go away.”
Holan thinks people are opposed to factual accuracy when they’re simply opposed to partisan spin pretending to be fact-checks. Nevertheless, Holan claimed that without them, the world would just dissolve into chaos where relativity replaces truth:
Chrsity and the rest of the MRC believe that merely fact-checking a Republican equates to “partisan spin,” so that argument is bogus. He went on to huff:
Conspiracy theories arise because of a lack of trust in “official” sources, and, whether Holan likes it or not, some people are going to say to themselves, “If they lie about how many genders there are, they must also be lying about vaccines.”
The MRC played a role in spreading lies and misinformation about vaccines during the COVID pandemic, so Christy is in denial about facts. Instead, he went into lecture mode:
Later, Holan continued to show no self-awareness, “Fact-checking’s effectiveness, in fact, may be why it is under such harsh attack in 2025. Fact-checking holds the line on reality for history’s sake. It builds evidence-based records that can withstand political pressures. Politicians who want to create their own realities are fighting hard against fact-checking, and they’re strong-arming tech companies and social media platforms into helping them.”
It doesn’t. On everything from naval strategy to vice presidential debates, fact-checkers have said things that are straight-up not true, but the fact-checkers got used to their power to be able to throttle social media posts for things they said were untrue, but Holan was eager to pretend that didn’t happen, “Politicians have led the charge that fact-checking is ‘censorship,’ but that self-serving argument is fundamentally a mischaracterization of what fact-checkers do. We’re more like nutrition labels for online content. Nobody thinks a nutrition label on a bag of potato chips or a gallon of milk is censorship.”
In the real world, when a Republican calls a Democrat a communist, they get such a label, but when a Democrat calls a Republican a Jim Crow throwback, they don’t. Sometimes, fact-checkers don’t even agree with each other. Everyone should agree that a democratic society should operate in factual reality, but people who appoint themselves the final arbiter of what is true should be a little humbler and more consistent in how they adjudicate controversial claims.
Actually, Christy is complaining once again that Republicans get fact-checked — a key narrative at the MRC. Indeed, Christy’s own year-end list of “The 10 Most Egregious ‘Fact’ Checks of 2024” didn’t prove any of them to be wrong; rather, he merely nitpicked them in order to further right-wing narratives, since pushing right-wing narratives is his job.
If Christy agrees that “a democratic society should operate in factual reality,” why does he champion the destruction of fact-checkers? Because they fact-check people of his right-wing ideology, and the right simply can’t allow that.