The liberals at PolitiFact are so unhappy that Donald Trump's in the White House again that they proclaimed that 2025 is "Year of the Lies." In addition to their tradition of picking a "Lie of the Year," they also let their readers choose, which underlined that PolitiFact readers are like MS NOW die-hards.
In a ranked-choice poll of more than 1,000 readers, the highest-ranking claim chosen as the year’s most serious falsehood went to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July assertion of "no starvation" in Gaza. In other words, the "Gaza Health Ministry" run by a terrorist group is a more reliable source of truth than a conservative politician.
In its original report, PolitiFact's Madison Czopek relied heavily on the anti-Israel bureaucrats of the United Nations, just as the liberal media do. But she even underlined that Hamas has proven reliable: "The U.N., WHO and groups that track conflict casualties cautioned against outright dismissal of the Ministry’s data, which the organizations said was fairly reliable in past conflicts."
The fuller context of Netanyahu's remarks was that Israel was not engaging in a war crime of starving Gazans, as Hamas wanted everyone to believe. "Israel is presented as though we are applying a campaign of starvation in Gaza," Netanyahu said in Jerusalem. "What a bold-faced lie. There is no policy of starvation in Gaza. And there is no starvation in Gaza."
PolitiFact put this statement on their Lie of the Year ballot even though the idea of mass famine -- heavily plugged by "pro-Palestinian" press -- seemed to vanish once there was a ceasefire.
In their reader-poll video, Politifact "LGBTQ+ Reporter" Grace Abels said the readers picked Netanyahu as the year's biggest liar "based on the human impact of Israel’s blockades. They said the statement contradicted widespread images and reports of suffering on the ground." Weirdly, Politifact used a Trump statement as backing them up!
In second place: Trump’s Pants on Fire statement that former FBI director James Comey and former Democratic presidents Obama and Joe Biden "made up" the Jeffrey Epstein files. That's a whopper.
Another Trump claim took third place, that each boat strike off the coast of Venezuela "saves 25,000 U.S. lives." Technically, that's not a lie, it's an estimate. You can find that unbelievable, but if the boats were carrying fentanyl, what would the estimate be? But to go back to Gaza, the UN agencies were projecting mass starvation, which did not happen. Was that a "Lie of the Year" candidate?
PolitiFact put its reader poll results at the bottom of a long editorial by PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders lamenting 2025 as "Year of the Lies," and as usual, their primary villain was President Trump:
The last 10 years have been an ugly era for facts, marked by a drumbeat of untruths and near-constant charges of "fake news" from the decade’s most influential player, President Donald Trump.
The trouble with drumbeats is, as a matter of survival or sanity, we tend to tune out or grow numb to them. Even people with influence who might lament "misinformation" move on to other fights. The word itself is downgraded — at best it’s a red flag, at worst it’s a punchline.
You can read into this that PolitiFact finds that the left is so depressed over Trump in power again that they wonder why they should send money to PolitiFact any more.
