Fact-checking fact-checkers

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.

“Of course, these stats are B.S.,” Greg Gutfeld explained Wednesday, dissecting CBS’s claim that only 60% of illegal aliens arrested by ICE have no criminal past and that just 14% of all those arrested have been charged with, or convicted of, “violent” crimes.

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.

“Is Margaret Brennan stupid or does she just really hate facts?” the White House’s official “Rapid Response” team asked on X.com Sunday after CBS’s Brennan told DHS Sec. Kristi Noem’s she was wrong about DHS arrests of criminal illegal aliens.

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…

In a ranked-choice poll of more than 1,000 PolitiFact readers, the highest-ranking claim chosen as the year’s most serious falsehood went to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s July assertion of "no starvation" in Gaza. In other words, the "Gaza Health…

Back in August, Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib gave a vile, anti-American diatribe to the People’s Conference for Palestine. Over three months later, on Wednesday, Snopes’s Jack Izzo would ride to her rescue and give a “false” label to those who claimed she “publicly called for Hamas supporters to mobilize and take over America.” Izzo’s rating only came about after some straw man burning,…

When Republicans slam Democrats, one typical elitist-media rebuttal is to insist the GOP has "no evidence" of its claims. When Elissa Slotkin and her Democrat squad urged military personnel to disobey illegal orders, they had "no evidence" of any illegal orders from Trump. TV interviews have underlined repeatedly they denied having any proof. So naturally, PolitiFact lined up with the…

NewsBusters analysts reviewed PolitiFact articles from June to October 2025 that evaluated a named politician or public official with a “Truth-O-Meter” ruling, and their tilted version of the "truth" shows that PolitiFact is not nonpartisan. Republicans were tagged as "Mostly False" or worse more than 84 percent of the time, while Democrats landed on the False side only 19 percent of the time…

Sometimes the expression “better late than never” is not actually true. One such example came during a Tuesday Snopes article by Joey Esposito that fact-checked claims that Virginia Attorney General-elect Jay Jones “sent violent texts about GOP opponent and his children” and rated them “true” one week after Election Day.