Tim Graham is the Media Research Center’s chief complainer that his fellow right-wingers get fact-checked, and he complained again in his Oct. 24 column:
Every once in a while, the “fact checkers” at PolitiFact publish reader comments, and this one stuck out. “Your site seems to be mostly about Trump all the time,” came one comment in an email. “How about a little less Trump, and write more about any other falsehood subjects?”
PolitiFact’s audience chief Ellen Hine acknowledged they’ve published over 1,000 “fact checks” on Trump, but then trotted out the false claim that their targeting is nonpartisan: “Without keeping count, we try to select facts to check from all sides of the political spectrum. At the same time, we more often fact-check the party that holds power or people who repeatedly make attention-getting or misleading statements.”
That “without keeping count” is an obvious excuse. Anyone who attempts to count what they’re doing will quickly realize they’re very partisan in their targeting — and in their ratings on truth and falsehood.
In the first five months of 2025, PolitiFact performed 68 “Truth-O-Meter” fact checks on Republicans to just 23 on Democrats. Even so, this website found the Republicans “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants On Fire” liars in 85 percent of those articles, while the Democrats landed on the false side only 39 percent.
[…]Trump is tagged as “False” when he calls New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a “communist,” and Mamdani has never been fact-checked. Trump was “Pants On Fire” when he called Kamala Harris a “communist,” but the Democrats can call him a “fascist” daily and there is no checking.
This isn’t “independent fact-checking.” It’s weaponized public relations.
At no point does Graham bother to disprove any fact-check by PolitiFact. Instead, he praises a right-wing TV host the next day for pushing “ugly facts” on a Democratic governor:
Democrats have controlled most big cities for decades, if not half-centuries or more. Our Democrat-enabling media outlets don’t press mayors or governors when blue-city governance fails. They don’t present the ugly facts. Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D-Illinois) showed up for an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier on Special Report on Thursday, and found himself struggling with the facts.
Note the ellipses Graham tucks into Pritzker’s defense:
Pritzker kept with his murder-rate mantra: “Our murder rate has been cut in half…we’ve been doing the things that are necessary to bring crime down…we’ve invested in community violence interruption. We’ve invested in police. I’ve added more state police than any governor in quite a long time.”
Neither Graham nor Baier disputed that Chicago’s murder rate has dropped.
Graham whined about PolitiFact again in a Nov. 12 post:
Someone should “fact check” the promotional language of PolitiFact. They claim: “We’re a nonpartisan, independent newsroom dedicated to fact-checking journalism….The reason we publish is to give citizens the information they need to govern themselves in a democracy.” They claim they improve the quality of the “information ecosystem.”
But nearly every study of their “Truth-O-Meter” since PolitiFact was founded in 2007 has demonstrated a dramatic partisan tilt. From June to October, in the months before the Democrat Party sweep of off-year elections, how tilted was PolitiFact’s “fact-checking newsroom”?
NewsBusters analysts reviewed PolitiFact articles from the last five months of 2025 that evaluated a named politician or public official with a “Truth-O-Meter” ruling, and their tilted version of the “truth” shows that PolitiFact should not be described by anyone as “nonpartisan.”
For President Trump and the Republicans, PolitiFact tagged them as “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants On Fire” on 52 of 62 occasions (84 percent).
It’s very different than the Democrats, who were rated “Mostly False” or worse in just four of 21 checks (19 percent).
Again, Graham does not dispute the accuracy of any of those fact-checks, nor does he explain why Democrats must fact-checked at the same rate that the Republicans who actually run the government are.
Graham lashed out further at PolitiFact in a Dec. 20 post:
The liberals at PolitiFact are so unhappy that Donald Trump’s in the White House again that they proclaimed that 2025 is “Year of the Lies.” In addition to their tradition of picking a “Lie of the Year,” they also let their readers choose, which underlined that PolitiFact readers are like MS NOW die-hards.
In a ranked-choice poll of more than 1,000 readers, the highest-ranking claim chosen as the year’s most serious falsehood went to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July assertion of “no starvation” in Gaza. In other words, the “Gaza Health Ministry” run by a terrorist group is a more reliable source of truth than a conservative politician.
Graham went on to complain that Netanyahu’s clear remark required “context”:
In its original report, PolitiFact’s Madison Czopek relied heavily on the anti-Israel bureaucrats of the United Nations, just as the liberal media do. But she even underlined that Hamas has proven reliable: “The U.N., WHO and groups that track conflict casualties cautioned against outright dismissal of the Ministry’s data, which the organizations said was fairly reliable in past conflicts.”
The fuller context of Netanyahu’s remarks was that Israel was not engaging in a war crime of starving Gazans, as Hamas wanted everyone to believe. “Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza,” Netanyahu said in Jerusalem. “What a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza. And there is no starvation in Gaza.”
PolitiFact put this statement on their Lie of the Year ballot even though the idea of mass famine — heavily plugged by “pro-Palestinian” press — seemed to vanish once there was a ceasefire.
Graham’s whining continued:
In second place: Trump’s Pants on Fire statement that former FBI director James Comey and former Democratic presidents Obama and Joe Biden “made up” the Jeffrey Epstein files. That’s a whopper.
Another Trump claim took third place, that each boat strike off the coast of Venezuela “saves 25,000 U.S. lives.” Technically, that’s not a lie, it’s an estimate. You can find that unbelievable, but if the boats were carrying fentanyl, what would the estimate be?
If Trump presented an estimate as fact, he’s lying. Strange that Graham can’t see that.