Thb Media Research Center kicked off this year being mad that PolitiFact dared to fact-check Republicans. Tim Graham continued that streak in a Feb. 20 post complaining that it wouldn’t check out “that old Biden smear” that the Trump-supported SAVE America Act is “Jim Crow 2.0”:
Among the Democrats allowing this smear are the groups calling themselves the “independent fact-checkers.” PolitiFact has never evaluated Biden or Schumer for this “Jim Crow 2.0” nonsense. But Democrats can count on PolitiFact to attack Republicans. Amy Sherman put together an article asking “Does the US have stricter ID rules for buying beer than voting?”
Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) pointed out he has to show an ID to buy beer, but Democrats oppose an ID at the polls. “I think it’s nuts that we protect our beer in this country more than our ballots in jurisdictions,” Steil said. Sherman retorted: “Comparing ID rules for purchasing alcohol and casting a ballot is about as satisfying as a warm beer on a hot day.”
Why? Sherman unloaded her carefully selected Democrat experts to lecture against the Republican. The right to vote and the right to drink beer are not the same. “Voting is a right and is a public act,” said Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin political scientist. “Purchasing alcohol is a private activity.”
This gets everything backwards: if voting is an important public act, more important than buying a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, then why shouldn’t the voting-integrity measure of an ID requirement be more important?
Graham didn’t mention that despite his claim that voters generally support the individual components of the SAVE Act, they increasingly oppose the act the more they learn about it; as one pollster noted, opposition grows when it’s pointed out that the act would be “taking away voting access rather than bringing down costs” and the “additional barriers to voting the act would pose to millions of Americans.”
Graham went on to whine that “Sherman also thinks it’s fine if you call Trump ‘Hitler'” — yet we don’t recall him or anyone else at the MRC complaining when right-wingers smeared President Obama as Hitler.
Graham complained further in a March 7 post:
There might be no more recklessly axe-throwing Democrat partisan in the Congress than Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut. But the Democrats at PolitiFact gave him a “Mostly True” rating for this claim on Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS:
“There is no history … that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there’s not a single example of it in the entirety of American history.”
Louis Jacobson assembled seven experts to verify this claim. “Most of the seven military experts and historians we interviewed for this article agreed with Murphy.” Oh really? “A fewexperts cited a case or two that could undercut Murphy’s argument, but other experts pushed back against their interpretation.”
[…]PolitiFact can find all kinds of wild allegations from Murphy to check. But they carefully selected one (and edited it) to achieve their “Mostly True” wishes. He’s never been “Pants On Fire,” while PolitiFact just threw Fire Flag #222 at Trump.
Graham whined even more in a March 20 post:
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has repeatedly claimed that the SAVE America Act that makes voter ID mandatory is “Jim Crow 2.0.” PolitiFact doesn’t find that outrageous smear worth a “fact check,” just as it failed to check when President Biden repeatedly asserted it. It should be blatantly obvious that the Republicans aren’t trying to reinstall segregation and deny the vote to all black people.
On Thursday, Louis Jacobson nitpicked a different mathematical claim by Schumer:
The SAVE America Act “would force Americans to register (to vote) only in person, something only 5% of Americans do today.”
That was rated “Half True,’ because the SAVE Act does require registration in person, but in 2024, anywhere from 11 to 42 percent of voters registered in person, “depending on how many registrations stemmed from in-person visits to motor vehicle agencies, a data point that is not being collected.” If they were checking a Republican, it would probably be tagged “Mostly False.”
But the point here is the curious way PolitiFact chooses what to check, and who is checked. Schumer hasn’t been found “Mostly False” or worse since 2021.
Graham made no effort to identify any post-2021 statement by Schumer that he considered to be “mostly false” — and he didn’t prove that the SAVE Act was not Jim Crow 2.0.