NewsBusters Podcast: Zuckerberg's Big Blast on Biased 'Fact Checkers'

Mark Zuckerberg fired the so-called "independent fact-checkers" from the Meta websites. He said they're so biased they "destroyed more trust than they created." That's correct, but we didn't expect Daddy Zuckerbucks to say it out loud. It sounds like what we've been saying about the "fact-checkers." Free Speech America VP Dan Schneider says this is a big victory.

The New York Times posted an article with this headline: 

Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.

The Times reporter dutifully repeated that "Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.

“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s fact-checking partners.

On PolitiFact, Brown added, "Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything." In the Times, we read:

“We did not, and could not, remove content,” wrote Lori Robertson, the managing editor of FactCheck.org, which has partnered with Meta since 2016, in a blog post. “Any decisions to do that were Meta’s.”

This is like we sentenced articles to the death penalty, but "we didn’t do the executions."

NewsBusters has repeatedly found that PolitiFact tilts Left. Donald Trump has been tagged as a "Pants On Fire" liar 204 times, while Kamala Harris has zero. Our study of the first nine months of 2024 showed Republicans were ruled as "Mostly False" or worse 82 percent of the time, but the Democrats were only "Mostly False" or worse 41 percent of the time. 

Schneider points out that the radical tilt is underlined when funders of groups like PolitiFact are leftists like George Soros, and teachers union bosses like Randi Weingarten want their "media literacy lessons" taught in schools.

Meanwhile, CNN's Brian Stelter was tweeting "The very notion of fact-checking is under assault by a wide array of fact-challenged politicians and interest groups...he 2016 phrase "war on truth" comes to mind..." It just sounds like the more anti-Trump you are, the more "pro-truth" you are. That's a long-standing CNN pose. 

Schneider expressed that the Republicans that Zuckerberg has recently hired are authentic conservatives, not pseudo-Republicans like Adam Kinzinger or Ana Navarro. Is it a new era? The new song sounds promising.

Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.