Fact-checking fact-checkers

On Saturday, PolitiFact's Twitter account hinted at how they're tilting their "fact-checking" in the Ohio Senate race. Tim Ryan is overwhelmingly True, and J.D. Vance is typically False. 

Nikolas Lanum at Fox News reports that nearly every major fact-checker has completely ignored White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre since she took over for Jen Psaki. Fox has energetically pointed out KJP preposterously claimed no one walks across the Southern border, which no "fact checker" touched.

This is how tilted PolitiFact is: there was no "fact check" on Al Gore going on national TV and saying "climate deniers" are like the police in Uvalde that let children be murdered, but former Rep. Doug Collins drew a "False" for saying on Fox Business that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar got "fake arrests" on Capitol Hill to protest abortion.

In the Trump era, the Washington Post 'Fact Checker' squad kept a gaudy list of President Trump's "lies and false statements" and even put together a book titled Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth. But under Biden? The same squad is rushing to Biden's defense, most recently in attacking the "RNC Research" account on Twitter.

President Joe Biden's clumsy flub lit up the internet last week after he read the teleprompter's private instructions to “repeat the line” during a White House speech on pro-abortion tactics.

Washington Post "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler huffed and puffed on Tuesday about "The misplaced outrage over Hunter Biden and U.S. oil reserves bought by China." One of the "liars" in this outrage was the Washington Free Beacon. In an editorial, they replied "We at the Washington Free Beacon love the fact-checkers. When they’re 'fact-checking' us, we know we must be doing something…

PolitiFact has a tremendously annoying habit of tagging pro-life groups as "Mostly False" for saying something that's True. Blue states like Oregon, Vermont, and New Mexico have no prohibitions on abortions. But somehow it's "Mostly False" to say you can get an abortion at any time for any reason.

PolitiFact’s routine tendency to defend President Biden’s accuracy in his public proclamations continued within hours of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on Friday. Biden claimed America was now an “outlier among developed nations” in the world. They ruled "Mostly True"! In truth, America was an outlier before Friday.

Florida-based PolitiFact picked a fight with Christina Pushaw, the press secretary for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and she didn’t shrink from the fight. PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote a fundraising piece titled “PolitiFact reporters face online harassment; we keep fact-checking anyway.“

On Friday, New York Times "fact checker" Linda Qiu evaluated claims made by Sen. Ted Cruz and former president Donald Trump at the NRA convention in Houston. Her nitpicking of Cruz as "misleading" and "exaggerating" was especially selective and shape-shifting.

Facebook and Instagram censored conservatives for their American energy independence statements even though fact-checkers disagreed on essential facts underlying the censored posts.

The Associated Press desperately tried to defend the self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of disinformation” from her own words and ended up undercutting itself in the process.

Kudos to CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale for being the first (and so far, ONLY) of his kind to throw a flag at President Biden for his blatantly false tweet at 5:45 pm on Thursday that there was "no vaccine available" when he took office. This was blatantly obvious to any journalist with a memory, but CNN alone discussed it.

Conservative media outlets published a shocking story about the baby formula shortage, that illegal immigrants were getting formula where normal citizens were not. The "fact checkers" jumped in to proclaim this was missing context: the federal government was legally obligated to help illegal immigrants.