On Wednesday, PolitiFact chief correspondent Louis Jacobson reported some self-interested news on their GlobalFact conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, organized by the International Fact-Checking Network. Both PolitiFact and the IFCN are projects of the Florida-based Poynter Institute for Media Studies.
Angie Holan, director of the IFCN and former editor of PolitiFact, preposterously claimed in Lithuania: "We have been under attack by political players who would shirk accountability for their false messages," she said. "We’ve been accused of bias even when we made every effort to be fair and nonpartisan."
Fact check: False! That's ridiculous. They haven't "made every effort" to be nonpartisan. We've documented that in the first three months of 2026 in "Truth-O-Meter" ratings for elected or appointed officials, the Republicans were rated “Mostly False” or worse in 22 of 32 fact checks (69 percent), and they drew zero “True” ratings and two “Mostly Trues.” By contrast, the Democrats were never rated as “Mostly False” or worse (zero percent), and were awarded one “True” rating, six “Mostly True” ratings, and four “Half Trues.”
There’s a disparity in the number of fact checks of 32 to 11, or almost three to one, and the disparity in “False” warnings is 22 to 0.
In 2025, we found Republicans were deemed "Mostly False" or worse in 124 of 146 fact checks (84.9 percent). The Democrats were tagged as "Mostly False" or worse in just 17 of 49 checks (34.6 percent).
So if you compare the numbers of "False" warnings, the party breakdown is 124 to 17, or 7.3 to 1. The number of checks are roughly 3 to 1.
PolitiFact can be accused of bias because their bias is blatantly obvious.
Jacobson added Holan also quoted Pope Leo XIV, whose recent encyclical on artificial intelligence included the guidance that "truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence."
Add to the list of pom-pom speeches the Poynter Institute's chairman, Neil Brown who equated their efforts with democracy -- and their critics with repression: "Misinformation is repression, and fact-checking is absolutely essential in the fight against repression. Why else would so many powerful forces be hard at work to try to undermine what we do? The work of fact-checking is hard, it is honorable, and it makes a difference."
You can't fact-check the fact-checkers. That's somehow anti-democracy. The arrogance of that is jaw-dropping -- especially since the badly named "independent fact checkers" were used to degrade and censor social-media messages they found False. So guess who was the keynote speaker at this event?
Nina Jankowicz — who was ousted from the U.S federal Disinformation Governance Board in 2022 amid a campaign by critics who accused it of government censorship — urged the fact-checking community to act with "solidarity," "audacity" and "courage," adding that the movement has not always been as unified as the moment requires....
"We were, and in many cases remain, too timid, too careful, too technical in a moment that rewards bold action and emotional connection," she said. "Now I’m not suggesting that we fight fire with fire, that we stoop to the level of the autocrats attacking us. We don’t need to traffic in AI slop and online abuse to gain ground in this battle. But we do need to meet people where they are and speak to them in a language they understand on topics they care about."
Jankowicz told attendees that if they remembered one thing from her keynote, she wanted it to be this: "We do not need to reinvent ourselves. We did not do anything wrong. The liars of this world have spent so much time and energy and money attacking us, precisely because what we are doing is working, and because we represent a formidable challenge to their power and their profit. … We need to keep fighting."
Late in the article, Holan made another obviously untrue claim: "Fact-checking is not censorship; it is not a partisan cause. It never was."
