Fact-checking fact-checkers

Factcheck.org may be the least offensive of all the fact-checking websites, but that is a low bar as it still has issues with case selection, but managing editor Lori Robertson claimed on C-SPAN’s Sunday edition of Washington Journal that they do not.

David Emery, one of the fact-checking sleuths at Snopes, defended President Joe Biden on Friday against accusations that he wore a hard hat backwards during a recent photo op in Wisconsin. The only problem for Emery and Biden is that Biden did wear the hat backwards.

PBS’s weekly political roundtable show Washington Week with The Atlantic lamented that Republican voters would never heed the wisdom of the Washington Post’s fact checker. In the latest edition, two Atlantic staffers responded to comments by Wall Street Journal reporter Nancy Youssef considering how potential candidates Biden and Trump could respond to the current…

Say what? This week, after his court appearance in New York where he is being prosecuted by New York Democrat Attorney General Letitia James, former President Donald Trump said in an appearance before cameras. 

President Joe Biden kicked off his re-election campaign with two speeches filled with his usual fact-challenged bombast. But since checking that might sound like “normalizing” bombastic Donald Trump, the “independent fact checkers” have filed nothing after his speech near Valley Forge on January 5 and his speech in Charleston on January 8.

The New York Times issued a sad “Fact Check” against claims of anti-Catholic persecution made by Donald Trump, mounting a reaction in the FBI’s defense that would have been seen as pathetic from a journalistic outlet in the pre-Trump era: “Biden’s Christian ‘Persecution’? We Assess Trump’s Recent Claims.” To make Trump a liar, Fichera went to frankly embarrassing lengths to tell the…

As the in-house ‘misinformation’ expert at NBC, Ben Collins peddles enough falsehoods to kill a fully grown African bull elephant. On Thursday when Ben took to X (formerly Twitter) to whine that some media outlets were actually covering the plagiarism scandal plaguing Harvard president Claudine Gay, commentators from across the political spectrum united to rake him over the coals.

Bill Adair, a founder of PolitiFact, has a new piece at Nieman Lab complaining that "fact-checking is failing," that the old standard of posting your fact checks on a website isn’t working. The old standard of "informing democracy" isn't working, and he’s upset that conservatives and Republicans don’t trust fact checkers. But the problem isn’t their obvious tilt, it’s that their suppression…

They describe themselves as "independent fact-checkers," but they're not. They sound like liberal columnists, which is why conservatives and Republicans disdain their partisan rulings. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren have been "fact checked" very, very differently in the last decade. Alex Christy discusses the chapter he wrote with Brent Baker in the new book A Future for the News.

In response to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, CNN International’s Christiane Amanpour, whose show is simulcast in the United States on PBS, wrote, “Now, more than ever, we need to commit to real reporting across a real nation, a real world in which journalism and democracy are in mortal peril, including by foreign powers like Russia paying to churn out and place false news, and hacking into…

To close out the Wednesday GOP Presidential Debate, the Washington Free Beacon’s Eliana Johnson asked the candidates which former president they would draw inspiration from and for his choice, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis selected Calvin Coolidge. For some reason, PolitiFact decided to fact-check this.

There are only three things certain in life: death, taxes, and professional fact-checkers condemning Republican politicians for lamenting the small size of the U.S. Navy. The latest installment in this nearly-decade long exercise of opinion-checking disguised as fact-checking came on Monday as PolitiFacat’s Louis Jacobson only gave presidential candidate Nikki Haley a “half-true” rating for…

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler has found a topic on which to consistently shame President Joe Biden: being too much against Hamas. Earlier, Kessler condemned Biden for not trusting Hamas’s casualty reports despite admitting combatant deaths are lumped in with non-combatants and on Wednesday, Kessler added the claim that Hamas beheaded Israeli babies.

PolitiFact and Factcheck.org are both part of Facebook’s fact-checking program that rates and suppresses online content, but what is Facebook to do when the two have a disagreement? A Wednesday article from PolitiFact rates a claim about the cost of Thanksgiving from White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “mostly true,” while Factcheck.org accused both her and the RNC of partisan…