Fact-checking fact-checkers

On debate night, CNN “fact checker” Daniel Dale suggested that Kamala Harris might have fudged the truth just once in her ABC cuddle/debate. If you see Dale's face on TV, he's probably trashing the Republicans. Online on Saturday, Dale dug into the Harris X/Twitter account and its mangling of Trump.

The PBS News Hour relished the presidential debate between Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, who they believe was fact-checked into oblivion and who succumbed to Harris’s baiting tactics. Co-anchor Geoff Bennett loved that “the former president was repeatedly fact-checked for inaccuracies” by ABC News’s hopelessly hostile moderators, before throwing the…

The debate debacle hosted by ABC underscored why the conservative half of America is hostile to “fact checkers.” Object to them, and the Left decrees it’s because you’re hostile to facts. But what conservatives actually oppose is leftist argumentation that’s poorly disguised as nonpartisan and devoid of opinion.

New York Times’ media reporter Michael Grynbaum made Wednesday’s paper with the smugly confident post-presidential debate “Media Memo,” “ABC’s Matter-of-Fact Moderators Built Factual Guardrails Around Trump.” He wrote: "Using calm and authoritative tones, Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis offered a model for real-time fact-checking that has been absent from many recent presidential debates."

PBS’s coverage of Tuesday night’s Trump-Harris debate included live fact-checking from its partner PolitiFact, which has racked up a liberally slanted record. But when Harris falsely claimed Trump had promised a “bloodbath,” no one at PBS or PolitiFact corrected her. PBS has made the same fake claim on numerous occasions. Then it was on to abortion, when Donald Trump claimed “radical”…

GOP Rep. Michael Waltz joined CNN News Central host Brianna Keilar on Wednesday to recap the previous night’s presidential debate, and during the abortion part of the discussion, he was forced to fact-check someone on CNN who was attempting to fact-check him for the second time in the campaign.

In 2020, PolitiFact gave Georgia Sen. David Perdue a “pants on fire” rating for claiming that rival Jon Ossoff was a socialist. Now, PolitiFact is at it again, giving Donald Trump a similar “pants on fire” on Wednesday for rating for labeling Kamala Harris a communist.

The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS was most notable for NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro's ludicrously imbalanced fact-checking of Trump vs. Harris and host Jeffrey Goldberg’s accusations of double standards in media coverage of the campaign -- in favor of Trump!

Fact-checks should be, as the name suggests, about checking facts, but a Friday piece from Alex Kasprak at Snopes showed aspiring fact-checkers how not to do their jobs as he defended Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz on the accusation he banned Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in the state.

As the election looms and the media burrows deeper into the bag for the Democratic presidential ticket, the online headlines at PBS News Hour are getting sharper and more partisan, like this one to accompany a Wednesday evening segment by the show’s most partisan reporter, Laura Barron-Lopez: “Harris kicks off Georgia tour as Trump posts grievances on social media.” The contrast was…

With both party conventions now in the books, so too are PolitiFact’s nightly recaps. After four days of the RNC and the DNC, PBS’s new fact-checking partner, gave Republicans three times as many false ratings while giving Democrats three times as many true ratings.

The end of a Democrat convention really draws out proclamations of Historic Possibilities, and Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, and Stephen Colbert stood out in the gushfest. It's quite a contrast with how all the anchors summarized Donald Trump's acceptance speech. 

The Washington Post seems to be conducting a Democrat-boosting ad campaign on Twitter. The latest one was boosting their "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler attacking "a trio of silly, false claims" by J.D. Vance against Kamala Harris for being a leftist radical. But they've also promoted pro-Harris gush stories in Twitter ads.

Following days of controversy, PolitiFact officially gave GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance a “mostly false” rating on Friday for claiming his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, abandoned his National Guard unit prior to its deployment to Iraq. However, PolitiFact omitted some key details from those who served with Walz that could’ve changed the truth-o-meter.