Politifact

Is it true that President Trump’s threats to hit Iranian power plants constituted a potential war crime? According to PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson, that depends on what day of the week it is. On April 7, Jacobson penned a piece that suggested Fox News’s Jesse Watters was probably correct in saying they would not be given historical precedents in places like Iraq, but Jacobson still refused to…

On "International Fact Checking Day," we discuss how PolitiFact can't find any Democrats saying false things with Matthew Hoy, author of the new book Fact-Checking Frauds: How Fact-Checkers Distract, Deceive, and Distort Our Politics. What tactics do they use? There's obvious selection bias -- in targets, in fact claims, and in expert testimony.

PolitiFact was demoralized by the idea that Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped rigging their “fact checking” apparatus against the Republicans. What’s truly amazing about the first quarter of 2026 is that the number of occasions they have rated Democrats as “Mostly False” or worse is at zero.

When a military expert’s opinion is different than a politician’s, how are fact-checkers like PolitiFact supposed to adjudicate the politician’s claim? If a Friday article by Zoe Weyand is anything to go by, the answer is not at all, or at least if the politician is Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. However, Weyand's standard for giving Warren a “true” rating for a recent claim she made about…

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has repeatedly claimed that the SAVE America Act that makes voter ID mandatory is "Jim Crow 2.0." PolitiFact doesn't find that outrageous smear worth a "fact check," just as it failed to check when President Biden repeatedly asserted it. Instead, they nitpicked a mathematical claim about voter registration.

There might be no more recklessly axe-throwing Democrat partisan in the Congress than Sen. Chris Murphy. But PolitiFact gave him a "Mostly True" rating for this claim on Sunday's Face the Nation on CBS: “There is no history … that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there's not a single example of it in the entirety of American history.”

The State of the Union is typically an eye-opening exhibit of how dramatically slanted our "independent fact-checkers" are. An overview of the most prominent traditional national media sites reveals a total of 123 "fact checks" on the president to four for Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.). One might say that Trump spoke much longer, but all four of Spanberger's evaluated claims were ruled as…

The media have a remarkable tendency to take the minority position on an 80-20 issue, most recently on requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. House Republicans have passed the “SAVE Act,” while Democrats have almost unanimously opposed it.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) could only toss that old Biden smear out, that the SAVE Act was “Jim Crow 2.0.”

Quiz: How many times has Barack Obama been "fact checked" by PolitiFact since he left office in 2017? Seven. Trump has 11 so far in 2026. So you can guess they won't be "fact checking" his latest interview, where he smears the Republicans as uncaring about the rule or law, or democracy, or the truth.

On Monday, PolitiFact’s Maria Briceno and Amy Sherman teamed up to give President Trump and other critics of the Minneapolis unrest a “false” rating for their true claims that at least some of the agitators are paid.

The left-wingers at PolitiFact used the breaking news of Renee Good's death for several "fact checks" defending her activism and attacking Trump. When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Good as a "domestic terrorist," many liberal-media operatives objected, including those "independent fact-checkers."

Even though PolitiFact editor Katie Sanders claimed on PBS on New Year's Eve that they were gut-checking their biases, in fact they were much rougher on the Republicans in 2025 than they were on Democrats -- 85 percent of their GOP checks were "Mostly False" or worse, and only 35 percent of the rarer Democrat fact checks were "Mostly False" or worse.

Liberals naturally gravitate to marking the fifth anniversary of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, and that includes the so-called "independent fact checkers." PolitiFact promoted its January 6 category page, and boasted of more than 100 "fact checks," but the tilt is dramatic. There are 44 "checks" of named conservatives or Republicans, compared to just three for Democrats, almost 15 to 1.…

For the fact-checking websites, 2025 marked the end of an era. Back in January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was ending their partnership with websites such as PolitiFact. However, one cannot be 100 percent certain Zuckerberg’s reversal is a purely principled one given President Trump’s return to the White House, so it can be good to remember the worst ten fact-checks of the…