Media Research Center official Tim Graham loves ranting about fact-checkers, and he continued that dubious legacy in an Aug. 14 podcast:
President Trump’s temporary takeover of law enforcement in DC caused an outburst of media protest, that somehow crime was at a “historic low” — if you use bogus numbers. Plus to celebrate the 20th anniversary of NewsBusters, we remember some of the most outrageous examples of network nonsense with Geoffrey Dickens.
Anyone who’s lived in or around the nation’s capital is aware that it’s had a crime problem for decades. The body count may go up and down, but the danger on the streets seems omnipresent. Nobody is thrilled when you suggest the annual number of murders has gone down from 274 to 200.
So every liberal who touted “historic lows” isn’t paying attention to the story on how a police official manipulated statistics to get to that claim, or how the locals feel.
Graham is not a DC “local” — he lives somewhere in suburban Washington, presumably close to the MRC offices in Herndon, Va.
Graham groused in an Aug. 24 post:
In August, PolitiFact has been obsessing over President Trump like they’re Daniel Dale at CNN, and as usual, everything he says is “false.” On Thursday, they broke up the Trump-bashing – ultraliberal California Gov. Gavin Newsom received a “Mostly True.”
PolitiFact’s Loreben Turquero carefully selected this Newsom utterance from an August 17 podcast with leftist Brian Tyler Cohen: “Democrats have voted for national independent redistricting. Republicans have not.”
This comes as Newsom has asked for voters to crumble (temporarily?) the independent redistricting commission in California. So Newsom is performing a version of the old lefty joke about Vietnam — “we have to destroy the village in order to save it.”
In this case, Newsom and the Democrats favored independent commissions nationwide, and they want credit for that, while they crumble the one in California.
Turquero was so selective in her “fact checking” that she skipped over the very next sentences after the ones she chose. Follow her YouTube link, and you discover that right after he touted Democrats favoring national independent redistricting, Newsom added “So spare me the crocodile tears on Fox and everyone else, saying ‘oh, everybody does this, oh, these guys have been gerrymandering for years and years and years’ – not like these folks have! And we’re at least willing to call that out.”
Newsom denied gerrymandering in New York and Illinois and elsewhere. PolitiFact leaves that alone.
Graham never offers any proof that Democrats have committed gerrymandering. He went on to whine:
Trump has seven checks so far in August, including two “Pants On Fire” rants. PolitiFact has performed forty “Truth-O-Meter” ratings on Trump in 2025…39 rated “Mostly False” or worse.
If Graham wants Trump to stop being fact-checked, he should tell Trump to stop saying false things.
Graham huffed further in a Sept. 8 post:
It’s ordinary, and yet extraordinary: CNN’s “Facts First” page of “fact checks” is all about President Trump. On their dedicated web page this morning, Trump is featured in 32 of 32 articles going back to late March. Everything Daniel Dale has written obsesses over Trump, just like his TV appearances.
The aggression is demonstrated by a massive April 28 article on “Debunking 100 Trump false claims from his first 100 days” that CNN.com promises is a “27-minute read.”
Graham then nit-picked about a fact-check CNN did on a Democrat:
Dale’s list of 100 Trump false claims included lame Democrat arguments like Kamala Harris wasn’t the Biden “border czar,” since they claimed they didn’t use the term, although on March 24, 2021, as CNN reported, Biden clearly announced Harris would “lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.”
Graham unironically followed this with a claim about a “comical exercise in nit-picking Trump’s success.” He groused some more in a Sept. 20 post:
The furor over Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension exposed PolitiFact once again as a very partisan outfit – not an “independent fact-checker.”
They offered no fact check for Kimmel’s nationally broadcast lie: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Instead, they threw a “False” rating on Thursday at….Sean Hannity.
“I can’t find a single, prominent conservative voice in the country that even remotely wanted or hoped or was pushing to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air,” Hannity said Sept. 17 on his show Hannity. “Nobody — it just was simple. People changed the channel. They didn’t watch him. Not one person can I think of. Maybe there’s one, but I can’t think of him.”
It should seem plain that Hannity was talking about this week, after Kimmel’s lying comment. But PolitiFact’s Madison Czopek stuck with her website’s persistent loathing of President Trump:
At least one major conservative advocated for the demise of Kimmel’s show in recent months: Trump. And he did so repeatedly.
What would you call this tactic? You ignore the original lie from the liberal, and then tag the conservative responder as the liar? Czopek shamelessly quoted Kimmel’s lie — without ever identifying it as false.
How does Graham know that Hannity was referring only to Kimmel’s comment? He doesn’t. He’s just trying to pretend that Hannity didn’t lie by playing the Kimmel distraction. That’s the tactic Graham is using.
Graham went on to rage in his Sept. 24 column:
President Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly was the latest example of how our “independent fact-checkers” are better defined as Democrat-dependent messaging machines. Their selection bias is transparent.
PolitiFact was live-blogging, and throwing “Pants on Fire” rulings on their X account. For example, Trump claimed we were losing 300,000 Americans to fentanyl, which is exaggerated. Trump can’t say grocery prices are down. They’re up 1.9 percent in 2025.
CNN’s Daniel Dale was on speed dial from Canada for a televised pounce. Like the other “independents,” Dale couldn’t stand Trump taking credit for ending a list of wars, and then comes the nitpicking that some of these were disputes, not hot wars, and temporary ceasefires could be temporary. CNN’s “Facts First” website is dedicated to attacking Trump.
One may certainly argue that an American president making a speech at the United Nations is a news event worth fact-checking. But it’s all in the targeting. Try to remember Daniel Dale or PolitiFact touching on President Biden’s speech to the UN last year. Biden was a “lame duck” in an election year, so why bother?
Note that Graham wouldn’t call Trump a liar despite catching him in two distinct lies. Why? Is he that afraid of Trump? Instead, he ranted that people kept finding Trump’s lies:
Here again, PolitiFact was perfectly partisan. There was no fact check for Kimmel’s shameless lie. But they threw a “False” flag at Fox host Sean Hannity when he suggested “I can’t find a single, prominent conservative voice in the country that even remotely wanted or hoped or was pushing to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air.” He meant over the last few days. PolitiFact cried “False” – because Trump had previously tweeted that untalented Kimmel shouldn’t be on the air.
Jimmy Kimmel only has two PolitiFact checks over the 18 years of their existence. “Comedians” get a break when they lie. Trump has 213 “Pants on Fire” punishments. Trump’s attacks on liberals are very likely to be tagged as falsehoods, but almost everything is considered “fair game” when you attack Trump.
Of course, Trump is a politician who should be held to a higher factual standard than an entertainer like Kimmel. Graham doesn’t seem to understand the difference.