'Just One Vote,' PolitiFact Defends Dem Senator's Spending Record

March 14th, 2024 1:21 PM

GOP Senate hopeful Eric Hovde has run afoul of the nitpickers at PolitiFact for correctly stating Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin's record on the national debt. The Thursday fact-check from Hope Karnopp defended Baldwin by claiming his statistics are unfair because the economy is larger than it has been historically and Baldwin is “just one vote in Congress.”

Column: AP 'Fact Focus' Elastically Redefines Terms to Defend Biden

March 8th, 2024 7:45 AM

Reading the “fact checkers” in the press sometimes triggers memories of the comic-book hero Plastic Man, who could contort into all sorts of shapes. Take the Associated Press, and immigration reporter Elliot Spagat in San Diego.

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PolitiFact: Don't Blame Mayorkas For Fentanyl, But Gender Can Change

February 14th, 2024 3:34 PM

It is a commonly accepted axiom that in politics the buck stops with the president or, if you like, his cabinet, but for PolitiFact applying this standard to the border and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is “false.” At the same time, PolitiFact will go to great lengths to insist that gender is something completely different from sex.

Column: PolitiFact Celebrates Fact-Checking Donald Trump 1,000 Times

February 14th, 2024 5:48 AM

Never call PolitiFact an “independent fact-checker.” They are every bit as liberal and biased as their fans in the liberal media. Recently, they announced they had published their 1000th “fact check” of Donald Trump.

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Factcheck.org Editor Dubiously Claims They Target Both Sides Equally

January 30th, 2024 4:31 PM

Factcheck.org may be the least offensive of all the fact-checking websites, but that is a low bar as it still has issues with case selection, but managing editor Lori Robertson claimed on C-SPAN’s Sunday edition of Washington Journal that they do not.

Snopes Claims Biden Didn't Wear Hard Hat Backwards (He Did)

January 27th, 2024 3:33 PM

David Emery, one of the fact-checking sleuths at Snopes, defended President Joe Biden on Friday against accusations that he wore a hard hat backwards during a recent photo op in Wisconsin. The only problem for Emery and Biden is that Biden did wear the hat backwards.

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PBS Mocks Trump's 'No Wars' Claim, Urges Reading WashPost Fact-Check

January 22nd, 2024 6:42 AM

PBS’s weekly political roundtable show Washington Week with The Atlantic lamented that Republican voters would never heed the wisdom of the Washington Post’s fact checker. In the latest edition, two Atlantic staffers responded to comments by Wall Street Journal reporter Nancy Youssef considering how potential candidates Biden and Trump could respond to the current…

CNN's 'Fact Checkers' Avoid the Facts to Rally Around Biden

January 13th, 2024 4:00 PM

Say what? This week, after his court appearance in New York where he is being prosecuted by New York Democrat Attorney General Letitia James, former President Donald Trump said in an appearance before cameras. 

Column: Joe Biden Launches 2024 Campaign with Fact-Checker Silence

January 10th, 2024 6:08 AM

President Joe Biden kicked off his re-election campaign with two speeches filled with his usual fact-challenged bombast. But since checking that might sound like “normalizing” bombastic Donald Trump, the “independent fact checkers” have filed nothing after his speech near Valley Forge on January 5 and his speech in Charleston on January 8.

NY Times 'Fact Checker' Says It's 'False' That FBI Targeted Catholics

January 6th, 2024 6:29 AM

The New York Times issued a sad “Fact Check” against claims of anti-Catholic persecution made by Donald Trump, mounting a reaction in the FBI’s defense that would have been seen as pathetic from a journalistic outlet in the pre-Trump era: “Biden’s Christian ‘Persecution’? We Assess Trump’s Recent Claims.” To make Trump a liar, Fichera went to frankly embarrassing lengths to tell the…

NBC ‘Misinformation’ Reporter DESTROYED for Downplaying Claudine Gay

December 22nd, 2023 1:24 PM

As the in-house ‘misinformation’ expert at NBC, Ben Collins peddles enough falsehoods to kill a fully grown African bull elephant. On Thursday when Ben took to X (formerly Twitter) to whine that some media outlets were actually covering the plagiarism scandal plaguing Harvard president Claudine Gay, commentators from across the political spectrum united to rake him over the coals.

'YIKES': PolitiFact Founder Urges More Social-Media Suppression

December 20th, 2023 4:00 PM

Bill Adair, a founder of PolitiFact, has a new piece at Nieman Lab complaining that "fact-checking is failing," that the old standard of posting your fact checks on a website isn’t working. The old standard of "informing democracy" isn't working, and he’s upset that conservatives and Republicans don’t trust fact checkers. But the problem isn’t their obvious tilt, it’s that their suppression…

NewsBusters Podcast: When 'Fact Checkers' Sound Like Lefty Columnists

December 15th, 2023 11:59 PM

They describe themselves as "independent fact-checkers," but they're not. They sound like liberal columnists, which is why conservatives and Republicans disdain their partisan rulings. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren have been "fact checked" very, very differently in the last decade. Alex Christy discusses the chapter he wrote with Brent Baker in the new book A Future for the News.

Apples and Bananas: The Necessity of Differentiating Facts and Opinion

December 15th, 2023 9:00 AM

In response to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour, whose show is simulcast in the United States on PBS, wrote, “Now, more than ever, we need to commit to real reporting across a real nation, a real world in which journalism and democracy are in mortal peril, including by foreign powers like Russia paying to churn out and place false news, and hacking into…