Fact-checking fact-checkers

PBS’s coverage of Tuesday night’s Trump-Harris debate included live fact-checking from its partner PolitiFact, which has racked up a liberally slanted record. But when Harris falsely claimed Trump had promised a “bloodbath,” no one at PBS or PolitiFact corrected her. PBS has made the same fake claim on numerous occasions. Then it was on to abortion, when Donald Trump claimed “radical”…

GOP Rep. Michael Waltz joined CNN News Central host Brianna Keilar on Wednesday to recap the previous night’s presidential debate, and during the abortion part of the discussion, he was forced to fact-check someone on CNN who was attempting to fact-check him for the second time in the campaign.

In 2020, PolitiFact gave Georgia Sen. David Perdue a “pants on fire” rating for claiming that rival Jon Ossoff was a socialist. Now, PolitiFact is at it again, giving Donald Trump a similar “pants on fire” on Wednesday for rating for labeling Kamala Harris a communist.

The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic on PBS was most notable for NPR senior political editor Domenico Montanaro's ludicrously imbalanced fact-checking of Trump vs. Harris and host Jeffrey Goldberg’s accusations of double standards in media coverage of the campaign -- in favor of Trump!

Fact-checks should be, as the name suggests, about checking facts, but a Friday piece from Alex Kasprak at Snopes showed aspiring fact-checkers how not to do their jobs as he defended Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz on the accusation he banned Christians, Jews, and Muslims from teaching in the state.

As the election looms and the media burrows deeper into the bag for the Democratic presidential ticket, the online headlines at PBS News Hour are getting sharper and more partisan, like this one to accompany a Wednesday evening segment by the show’s most partisan reporter, Laura Barron-Lopez: “Harris kicks off Georgia tour as Trump posts grievances on social media.” The contrast was…

With both party conventions now in the books, so too are PolitiFact’s nightly recaps. After four days of the RNC and the DNC, PBS’s new fact-checking partner, gave Republicans three times as many false ratings while giving Democrats three times as many true ratings.

The end of a Democrat convention really draws out proclamations of Historic Possibilities, and Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, and Stephen Colbert stood out in the gushfest. It's quite a contrast with how all the anchors summarized Donald Trump's acceptance speech. 

The Washington Post seems to be conducting a Democrat-boosting ad campaign on Twitter. The latest one was boosting their "Fact Checker" Glenn Kessler attacking "a trio of silly, false claims" by J.D. Vance against Kamala Harris for being a leftist radical. But they've also promoted pro-Harris gush stories in Twitter ads.

Following days of controversy, PolitiFact officially gave GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance a “mostly false” rating on Friday for claiming his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, abandoned his National Guard unit prior to its deployment to Iraq. However, PolitiFact omitted some key details from those who served with Walz that could’ve changed the truth-o-meter.

The first rule of fact-checking is to examine what the person you are fact-checking actually said, but MSNBC’s Ali Velshi broke this simple rule on Wednesday as he guest-hosted Alex Wagner Tonight and took GOP vice presidential nominee JD Vance out of context in order to rule him “entirely false” for condemning his Democratic counterpart, Tim Walz, for misrepresenting his military…

Tiffany Hsu, who covers “misinformation and disinformation” for the New York Times, took the reins of the paper’s “On Politics” newsletter Wednesday under the headline and issued the latest hypersensitive mainstream media defense of the newly minted Democratic nominee under the inflated headline, “Tackling the falsehoods about Kamala Harris.” Yet much of what the paper condemned as “…

On Wednesday, PolitiFact beclowned itself as it claimed it is “mostly-false” for Republicans to say Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed “border czar.” However, that was not all. Also on Wednesday, PolitiFact tried to attack the party for…

The nitpickers, who style themselves as fact-checkers at PolitiFact and USA Today, have rushed to Vice President Kamala Harris’s defense by slapping “false” labels on those who seek to label her as the Biden Administration’s “border czar” in order to claim that her failure to stem illegal immigration proves she is unqualified to be president.