Biden-Loving PolitiFact Scours Conservative Sites Like Ours on 'Bird Poop' Story

Tim Graham
April 18th, 2022 5:07 PM

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Even the silliest content about President Biden can be grounds for punishing conservative sites.

Take the erroneous "Biden had bird poop on him" story. The president gave a speech in Iowa promoting how corn-enhanced gasoline could help reduce the price at the pump. PolitiFact didn't offer a "fact check" on anything Biden said, but it did trash conservative sites for what appeared on Biden's jacket.

It was "FALSE" to say “A bird pooped on Joe Biden during his speech” in Iowa. PolitiFact's Jeff Cercone summarized on April 13: 

  • President Joe Biden gave a speech in Iowa at a bioprocessing plant to discuss a new ethanol strategy to lower gas prices.

  • A substance landed on his jacket mid-speech, leading many to think a bird had left its mark.

  • Video from the scene clearly shows what one newspaper called distillers grains flying around from the top of a large pile near where the president was speaking.

    He cited the video in this tweet, noting it was posted at the conservative site RedState: 

    Notice Cercone didn't evaluate Biden blaming price hikes on Putin. He was poop-focused. But PolitiFact looks like a partisan site when Sen. Ron Johnson gets a "Mostly False" for blaming high gas prices on the Democrats and Joe Biden gets a Mostly True for claiming "The current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin."

    We found that in Biden's first year in office, PolitiFact checked Biden critics almost six times more often that they fact-checked Biden.

    Cercone was swaggering about the right-wingers:

    "A bird pooped on Joe Biden during his speech today. You can’t make this up," read the headline of a video posted on Facebook by conservative activist Ryan Fournier.

    Actually, you can make this stuff up. 

    Dan Evon at Snopes.com also leaped on the "bird poop" fact check.

    Based on the "fact checkers," Facebook has restricted our sister site MRCTV’s 3.3-million-follower page for the next three months for an article insisting that the president had the poopoo, and the article having now been branded with a “false information” label to protect the public from such damaging myths. The semi-suspension follows a series of Facebook-flagged MRCTV posts, including one image pointing out America's energy independence prior to the Biden administration, and a video of President Biden wandering aimlessly around the White House.

    MRC founder and president Brent Bozell cried foul (or fowl):