Fact-checking fact-checkers

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…

One of the concepts that put Republicans on edge during live events is the leftist media promising "fact checking in real time." It always carries the potential to be even worse than their "fact checking" that isn't rushed. Here are some of the lamest, dumbest fact checks from the third presidential debate in Miami.

On Friday, we noted NBCNews.com was trying to throw the "False" flag at pro-lifers in Ohio over the state's Issue One referendum. PolitiFact also ruled pro-lifers were "False" with a similar strategy. Opponents of abortion aren't allowed to speculate about what the abortion-rights language would allow.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler decided to detour from going after Republicans on Wednesday to condemn something President Biden said recently. Unfortunately, it was on the subject of Biden doubting Hamas’s casualty reports, labeling such…

The Democrats at PolitiFact jumped at the chance to “fact check” new House Speaker Mike Johnson’s acceptance speech after he was elected. They gave him a “Half True” for saying “Prices have increased over 17% in the last two years.” Johnson's office sent PolitiFact data that prices have increased that much under Biden, but they fussed "Johnson said two years, not two years and nine months."…

When it comes to "fact checking" conservatives, PolitiFact seems at war with plain English. The conservative group Americans for Prosperity offered an ad on Facebook criticizing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) as he seeks re-election in a tough battle with Republican Gov. Jim Justice."The Inflation Reduction Act led to higher taxes," the ad said. They ruled this is "Mostly False," when it's true…

AP fact-checker Philip Marcelo beclowned himself on Friday as he rated a claim that Hamas sympathizers chanted anti-Semitic remarks “false,” not because they didn’t—he admits that they did—but because the clip “is more than two years old.”

Former Al Jazeera producer turned Snopes fact-checker Nur Ibrahim warned on Thursday that discussions of Hamas beheading Israeli babies should be taken with a grain of salt and that “people should be wary of claims that echo Islamophobic rhetoric.”

If the fact-checking industry is going to insist that it should be able to throttle social media posts, at the very least, it should fact-check the claims the post is actually making and not straw men because Instagram posts have been deemed misinformation after PolitiFact and the USA Today accused the posters of attributing a 2020 “Death to America” chant in the Iranian parliament to…

Apparently The Washington Post’s in-house fact-butcher Glenn Kessler hasn’t learned his lesson. He regurgitated one of his already-debunked arguments spinning inflation data to protect President Joe Biden.

During Wednesday’s GOP presidential debate, the various reporters at The New York Times assembled to fact-check the various candidates and it did go well as they attacked them everything from “Joe Biden hides in his basement” to Iran to energy to transgenderism.