Fact-checking fact-checkers

On "International Fact Checking Day," we discuss how PolitiFact can't find any Democrats saying false things with Matthew Hoy, author of the new book Fact-Checking Frauds: How Fact-Checkers Distract, Deceive, and Distort Our Politics. What tactics do they use? There's obvious selection bias -- in targets, in fact claims, and in expert testimony.

PolitiFact was demoralized by the idea that Donald Trump was re-elected in 2024, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped rigging their “fact checking” apparatus against the Republicans. What’s truly amazing about the first quarter of 2026 is that the number of occasions they have rated Democrats as “Mostly False” or worse is at zero.

When a military expert’s opinion is different than a politician’s, how are fact-checkers like PolitiFact supposed to adjudicate the politician’s claim? If a Friday article by Zoe Weyand is anything to go by, the answer is not at all, or at least if the politician is Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren. However, Weyand's standard for giving Warren a “true” rating for a recent claim she made about…

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer has repeatedly claimed that the SAVE America Act that makes voter ID mandatory is "Jim Crow 2.0." PolitiFact doesn't find that outrageous smear worth a "fact check," just as it failed to check when President Biden repeatedly asserted it. Instead, they nitpicked a mathematical claim about voter registration.

A bill barring West Virginia’s government from funding biased media ratings companies that unfairly blacklist conservative news outlets has passed the state’s House of Delegates and Senate and been sent to Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey’s desk for his signature.

There might be no more recklessly axe-throwing Democrat partisan in the Congress than Sen. Chris Murphy. But PolitiFact gave him a "Mostly True" rating for this claim on Sunday's Face the Nation on CBS: “There is no history … that shows an air campaign alone will result in positive regime change. In fact, there's not a single example of it in the entirety of American history.”

The State of the Union speech is an effective annual exercise to measure how journalists feel about a long speech on national TV by Donald Trump. They hate it intensely, like most children hate broccoli. They would like to scrape that steaming plate into the garbage.

The State of the Union is typically an eye-opening exhibit of how dramatically slanted our "independent fact-checkers" are. An overview of the most prominent traditional national media sites reveals a total of 123 "fact checks" on the president to four for Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.). One might say that Trump spoke much longer, but all four of Spanberger's evaluated claims were ruled as…

The Associated Press’s Melissa Goldin and Calvin Woodward were given the task of fact-checking President Trump’s Tuesday State of the Union address and, in some of their checks, they were so pedantic it bordered on self-parody.

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.