In Brief: PolitiFact Defiles the Truth
“Fundraising email claims website is dedicated to ‘holding our leaders accountable.’ (Fact check: It is not.)”
We in our humble shop have expressed our distaste for Leftmedia “fact-checkers” on occasions too numerous to count. Not because we’re opposed to facts, of course, but because we understand all too well the consequences brought on by these self-appointed arbiters of truth.
The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Stiles shares our view, and in a tongue-in-cheek piece, he takes PolitiFact to task for false advertising.
PolitiFact, the allegedly “independent” fact-checking website, is soliciting donations to fund its “fact-based, unbiased reporting.” Unfortunately, these fundraising efforts have already been tainted with disinformation.
“Help us hold politicians accountable,” PolitiFact’s audience director, Josie Hollingsworth, wrote in a fundraising email on Monday.
FACT CHECK: Mostly false.
Stiles notes that the claim not only “lacks crucial context” but “grossly misrepresents the truth about the organization’s priorities.” To prove it, the Beacon analyzed “nearly 300 PolitiFact posts dating back to March 10, 2022.”
Our analysis found that more than half the PolitiFact fact checks published in the last two months involved random content posted on social media. More than a third (112) of the website’s 290 fact checks over that period involved content posted on Facebook, which has enlisted PolitiFact and other so-called nonpartisan organizations to “identify and review false information.”
PolitiFact has been “holding our leaders accountable” by devoting it resources to fact-checking the asinine claims of random Facebook users: that John F. Kennedy Jr. is still alive and leading QAnon, that “paying taxes is optional,” and that Hillary Clinton is imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. All three were given a “pants on fire!” rating, in case you were wondering.
Such silly efforts, Stiles says, “comprise the majority of PolitiFact’s output since early March.”
For the sake of comparison, the website has published just three fact checks involving statements from President Joe Biden during that same period, which amount to roughly 1 percent of the organization’s output. The most recent Biden fact check, published on April 22, involved the president’s claim that “for four years, I was a full professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” PolitiFact conceded that the claim was technically false—Biden was not a full professor and only held the position for two years—but nevertheless assigned it a rating of “half true.”
As for the partisan split, Republicans were obviously the subjects victims of these “fact-checks” at a far greater clip than Democrats — 62-24. And the majority of Republican claims were “debunked,” while Democrats were about half and half.
Does that really constitute “holding politicians accountable”?
The findings of the Free Beacon analysis will not come as a surprise to observers of the professional fact-checking industry. Like their ideological cohorts in the White House press corps, who complain that their jobs are “boring and difficult” now that a Democrat is president, professional fact-checkers are markedly less enthusiastic about “speaking truth to power” in the post-Trump era.
Stiles concludes that, somehow, many journalists “remain flummoxed as to why so many ordinary Americans regard the mainstream media as irredeemably partisan and don’t trust them to get their facts straight.”
