PBS’s biased coverage of Night Three of the Republican National Convention began even before the main event, on Wednesday evening’s PBS News Hour, aiming not only to fact-check the Republicans but even to suggest some Republican voting “misinformation” could lead to "political violence."
The tax-funded network’s first fact-check target was…reality TV star, Savannah Chrisley, who discussed her family’s legal woes in her speech. Lisa Desjardins, reporting from the convention floor, played the hypocrisy card before moving to the fact check.
Desjardins: But amid praise of Trump, on a night focused on law and order, Republicans generally ignored Trump's own 34 felony convictions, except as evidence of what they see as a weaponized justice system.
Savannah Chrisley: Today, we have a two-faced justice system. Just look at what they're doing to President Trump, all while, let's face it, Hunter Biden is roaming around free and attending classified meetings.
PBS pounced, with the help of their convention fact-check partners, the left-leaning PolitiFact .
Katie Sanders, Editor in Chief, PolitiFact: So this is unproven.
Lisa Desjardins: We spoke with PolitiFact's Katie Sanders. The organization is checking statements made at both 2024 conventions. In this case, the claim comes from an NBC report about Hunter Biden. But:
Sanders: That report did not say anything about Hunter Biden attending classified briefings. That would be something that would be illegal, because he does not have a security clearance to be in those sessions. So it's not a proven claim.
Desjardins gave a pass on the statement of a mother whose son died of fentanyl poisoning.
Desjardins: But several other statements didn't hold up, like this from [Republican Rep. Steve] Scalise:
Rep. Steve Scalise: On the border, Biden and Harris opened it up to the entire world. Prisons are being emptied.
Sanders was awfully confident: This claim is false. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not opened up the border. Even more egregious here is the idea that there's an organized effort to recruit people from prisons in other countries. We have done research to look into whether it's been documented that these governments, these countries, there's some group that's organizing prisoners and releasing them to the U.S. It's just not proven.
In the next segment, White House reporter Laura Barron-Lopez (who’s kept a low profile during the convention) fretted over the dangers of 2024 Republican election concerns.
Co-host Geoff Bennett: Some speakers here at the Republican National Convention have repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Democrats are rigging the presidential election, specifically about noncitizens voting.
….
Co-host Amna Nawaz: That claim is just one of many conspiracy theories about the security of America's election system that are being spread in the lead-up to November….
Laura Barron-Lopez: This lie dates back to 2016, Amna, when then-candidate Donald Trump said that he lost the popular vote because three to five million noncitizen immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton. That's -- of course is not true. But now it's become much more pervasive among Republicans this election cycle, going all the way from Republican nominee Donald Trump to House Speaker Mike Johnson, who has repeated this baseless claim over and over again….It's important to note, Amna, that it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote under federal law.
Republican voting concerns are certainly not “baseless,” given that many municipalities across the country have begun allowing non-citizens to vote in state and local elections.
The segment closed with Barron-Lopez raising up a familiar left-wing scarecrow, the Heritage Foundation (creators of the feared and loathed but rarely read Project 2025). Barron-Lopez ranted:
This is part of a larger effort, Geoff, to sow doubt about America's election system, to convince the electorate that the country’s system can't be trusted and that the -- and that, if Donald Trump were to lose, that that result is not legitimate. And an example of this comes from Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that has issued a blueprint for a potential second Trump term. Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project, said recently at an event that: "As things stand right now, there is a zero percent chance of a free and fair election in the United States of America." And that transition report from Heritage Foundation also claimed -- without any evidence -- that President Biden will retain power quote, "by force" and that President Biden will disregard the will of the voters, whatever the ultimate result is. Some fear from election security experts that I have spoken to is that what happens with all this disinformation if Donald Trump were to lose, that it could potentially result in some political violence in the end, Geoff.
(Surprise: The transition report itself is a bit more nuanced than that breathless rendering; the threat is posed as a hypothetical, not a certainty.)
During the actual convention coverage, PBS brought on PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders at 8:38 p.m. (ET) to issue three real-time “fact checks,” disputing Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson’s claim of “record-high inflation under the Biden administration” (it had been higher in the late 1970s and early 1980s). “It’s important to look up the numbers,” she stated smugly.
PBS brought in @PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders to act as Biden Defense Squad. Biden didn't cause "record-high inflation," Kamala Harris isn't really "Border Czar," and some of the two years without a combat death in Afghanistan were in Biden's term. #DemocratHelpers pic.twitter.com/vbk2SrP8Y9
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) July 18, 2024
Sanders also claimed that Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz calling Vice-President Kamala Harris “border czar” “needs context.” She assured PBS listeners that it was merely a nickname bestowed on Harris by hostile Republicans, and that Harris was tasked only to “investigate the root causes of immigration in Northern Triangle countries, he didn’t say, you’re in charge now, he left that to the Department of Homeland Security.” The problem with that assurance: The administration itself said one of her tasks was to curb the current flow of migrants!
The last fact-check involved an assertion in a speech by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich that “no American [had been] killed in nearly two years” in Afghanistan under Trump. Sanders again issued the classic, “needs a little context,” which PolitiFact is always eager to provide struggling Democrats.
NewsBusters’ Alex Christy has previously outlined the case that PolitiFact tips the scale against conservatives. And PolitiFact doesn’t just shriek its liberal fact checks into the void; it is a partner with Meta (the owners of Facebook) and TikTok “to help try and slow the spread of misinformation online…. Meta and TikTok flag posts that they believe may be factually inaccurate or misleading.”
