One of the ways that “independent fact-checkers” tilt in favor of Democrats is by their careful selections of what to check. That starts with barely fact-checking them, and ends with carefully selecting things they can present as factually correct.
Take Kamala Harris and PolitiFact. As vice president, Politifact has only checked on Harris six times, and four of them are “Mostly True” ratings. She’s 66 percent on the True side. There were no fact-checks in 2022, and just two “Mostly True” reports in 2023.
Compare that to former vice president Mike Pence, who also has six PolitiFact checks during this administration. None of them – zero percent – were “True” or “Mostly True.” It was three “False” bombs and three “Half True” reports.
The latest thumbs-up for Kamala came on May 16, as they checked on an interview Harris did with the Spanish-language network Telemundo. She said:
"Latino small businesses are 1 in 4 new businesses, but only 1% of venture capital funding goes to Latino businesses."
That doesn’t sound like a controversial statement, and the upfront summary explained part of this was true, because Democrats said so:
Latino small businesses account for 1 in 4 new businesses, according to a 2021 brief from Democratic members of a congressional committee and research from a nonprofit.
PolitiFact’s Marta Campabadal Graus went to the Harris staff, and they gave them a Joint Economic Committee report when Democrats were in the majority. For the one-percent number, they were handed a report from the bankers at Bain & Co., who were pushing for more investment in Latino-owned businesses.
PolitiFact could not engage when the Vice President went on Meet the Press and stumbled into saying “the border is secure,” which is a Pants On Fire lie, but she’s never drawn a “Pants on Fire” rating from PolitiFact. She also claimed in 2021 “We’ve been to the border” when neither Biden nor Harris had been to the border.
Harris was fact-checked only three times in 2020, and only once after being selected as Biden's running mate in August. By contrast, Pence was fact-checked into the boards by PolitiFact -- 12 checks, and again, zero of them were on the "True/Mostly True" side. There were three "Half True" ratings and nine on the False side, including one "Pants on Fire" alarm.
Weirdly, PolitiFact managed to do 15 checks on Harris in 2019, when she was failing as a presidential candidate. In that year, she was only on the “True/Mostly True” side five times, or 33 percent. (Two were "Half True.")
But overall, in 35 checks, she’s landed on that True side 48.5 percent of the time.
By contrast, in 70 fact checks of Mike Pence, PolitiFact only found him accurate 17 percent of the time.
