Free Republic

Politifact sounds unbiased and sooooo journalistic. But it’s often not—especially when the “fact-checkers” are the same dishonest journalists who deliver daily deception in the form of fake news. “Politifact is non-partisan” or so they say. Sure. And Hollywood is politically diverse. The self-anointed “fact-check” operation explains its mission is to “sort out the truth in American politics.” There’s obviously a typo in there. I’m pretty sure they meant, “filter out.” Politifact was created by the Tampa Bay Times…which needs some serious fact-checking itself (see here).In a recent Politifact “fact-check”, W. Gardner Selby plays a pathetic game of semantics to arrive at a false conclusion...

So it all comes down to, who are the fact-checkers? A Facebook employee stated at the press conference that approved fact checkers will be those who have signed on to Poynter’s international fact checking network principles. You can see the list of signatories at the link; the only one that I recognize as more or less conservative is the Weekly Standard. Facebook has already said that it will use Politifact and Snopes, both left-leaning, as fact checkers. At the press conference, it got even worse: In the US, we recently announced a partnership with The Associated Press to use their...

I realize it's a small point and that I'm weeks late to this absurdity, but I've decided to call attention to it anyway because it further underscores the ludicrousness of treating Politifact like a nonpartisan fact-checker.  I sometimes take issue with determinations made by the Washington Post or FactCheck.org's truth-assessing outfits, but they at least seem interested in impartiality.  Politifact is a different story, having earned a reputation as a liberal, anti-Republican institution.  Evidence of this has arisen time and again, and now there's another laugher to add to their rap sheet.  In the course researching this post about vulnerable...

“I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ ” That, as reported by The Washington Post, was Donald Trump boasting during a private fund-raising dinner about lying to Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada, our northern neighbor and closest ally. When caught in the lie, Trump did what Trump does: Repeats the lie, louder, stronger, and more stridently. After the lie was reported, Trump tweeted: “We do have a Trade Deficit with Canada, as we do with almost all countries (some of them massive). P.M. Justin Trudeau of...

The most recent Politifact story “fact-checking” President Trump is a perfect example of why no one should trust this organization — other than liberals looking to buttress their beliefs with partisan hackery. Sorry, it’s just really that bad. This sort of breakdown can be done on fact-check after fact-check after fact-check. The assessment ranges from overtly biased negativity for Republicans and Trump and positivity for Democrats and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. This is measurable below. During the presidential campaign, Politifact rated well-known truth-purveyor Clinton as true or mostly true 51 percent of the time. Trump came in at a...

On Thursday morning, Politifact announced that it would be hiring former Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson to help its team of fact-checkers as a "reader advocate." Just two hours later, however, Politifact publicly severed their agreement with Grayson after receiving sustained and intense backlash on social media. We sought out a Democrat and Republican to critique our work in order to try to improve the trust and credibility in fact-checking and PolitiFact. It has become clear our choice of Alan Grayson did not meet that threshold to many. pic.twitter.com/uJuoHhiObI— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) February 1, 2018 Most of the opposition to Grayson's hire...

Elizabeth Warren might never live down the charge of falsely claiming Native American roots. The controversy emerged during the Democrat’s successful Senate run in Massachusetts in 2012, and it continues to dog her. In the throes of the 2016 presidential race, then-candidate Donald Trump tagged her with the nickname Pocahontas, and he has trotted it out virtually every chance he gets — even at a White House ceremony to recognize Native American soldiers who fought in some of the fiercest battles of World War II. Warren’s central offense dates back to the mid 1980s, when she first formally notified law...

A mountain of evidence points to a single fact: Russia meddled in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. In both classified and public reports, U.S. intelligence agencies have said Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered actions to interfere with the election....(read more)

Facebook warned Breitbart News on Friday that the author of a completely factual story concerning the accuser of Alabama Senate candidate Judge Roy Moore needed to consult “additional reporting” from the liberal fact-checker Politifact. The story, published on Friday morning, detailed how Beverly Young Nelson, who accused Roy Moore of sexually assaulting her when she was a teenager, admitted to adding “notes” to part of her yearbook, which she claims Moore signed. This revelation came despite Nelson claiming at her initial press conference alongside her lawyer Gloria Allred, that the entire yearbook document was solely Moore’s handwriting. In a message...

The synchronized leftist response to this latest attack on normal Christians was pre-planned, and it didn’t matter that this time it was another militant atheist weirdo instead of an ISIS-loving foreigner. The memes and the lies were all prepped and ready, and the villain was already chosen. No surprise – once again, it was you, the normal American who keeps and bears arms to protect yourself, your family, your community and your Constitution. But this time it didn’t go the way they wanted. Sure, they were giddy at first – the liberals got to trash people of faith for praying,...

PolitiFact advertised on its home page an article on “Fact checking” Hillary’s campaign book What Happened. Don’t be shocked: PolitiFact didn’t find anything that they would call “False,” let alone “Pants on Fire.” This isn’t that surprising, since the website has only evaluated Hillary once since last November — a “Mostly False” in a complaint about voter suppression in Wisconsin in June. Her overall count of “Pants on Fire” rulings is only 7…compared to 69 for Donald Trump. PolitiFact started by noting that Hillary cites them in the book to defend her own honesty:Okay, first we did what anyone did...

Further, these "fact checkers" have taken advantage of their platforms to select and evaluate politicians' and pundits' claims in a decidedly unfair and unbalanced manner. Finally, thanks to the willing cooperation of the world's dominant search engine and the leader in social media, "fact checkers" are transitioning into roles which could ultimately position them as de facto news censors.

Sean Keeley of The American Interest noticed a curious statement from National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster when he briefed reporters on the Syrian strike. And the one thing that I will tell you though, there was an effort to minimize – to minimize risk to third-country nationals at that airport – I think you read Russians from that – but that – and we took great pains to try to avoid that. […] And then there were also measures put in place to avoid hitting what we believe is a storage of sarin gas, so that that would not be ignited...

PolitiFact has pulled a 2014 fact-check on remarks about Syria by former Secretary of State John Kerry after the claim the Obama administration “got ‘100 percent’ of chemical weapons out of Syria” turned out to be false. In a post about the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria, PolitiFact admitted, “The outcry leads us to revisit a 2014 claim from former Secretary of State John Kerry.” “Kerry said in a television interview that in Syria, ‘we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.’ Syria had agreed in 2013 to an ambitious program to destroy its chemical stockpiles under international...

Fact-checking website PolitiFact on Wednesday retracted a 2014 article that found it "Mostly True" the Obama administration helped broker a deal that successfully removed "100 percent" of chemical weapons from Syria. "We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out," then-Secretary of State John Kerry said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in July 2014.

Politifact decided to fact-check one of President Donald Trump’s tweets Sunday and found that “the numbers check out.” The fact-checking site then rated the tweet “mostly false.”“The media has not reported that the National Debt in my first month went down by $12 billion vs a $200 billion increase in Obama first mo,” Trump tweeted.The tweet from Trump came after Gateway Pundit reported on the change in the national debt under the two respective presidents and after former Godfather Pizza CEO Herman Cain brought up the figures on Fox News.Politifact wrote: “The numbers check out. And in fact, the...

The back-and-forth between President-elect Donald Trump and civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., dominated news coverage over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. It began on Jan. 14 with an excerpt from an interview that Lewis did for NBC’s Meet the Press, in which he said that while he believes in forgiveness, "it's going to be very difficult" to forge a relationship with Trump. "I don't see this president-elect as a legitimate president." In his Meet the Press interview, Lewis underlined the importance of his concerns about Trump by saying, "It will be the first (inauguration) that I...

Mollie Hemingway over at The Federalist has made a list of "5 Major Problems With Facebook’s Attempt To Limit ‘Fake News’." The most passionate argument was with PolitiFact. The second problem listed was "PolitiFact is a joke. They should be trusted with nothing. They are the worst candidates to adjudicate fakery in the entire media establishment. Even among the disreputable 'fact' 'checking' class, they are noteworthy for their awfulness." They cannot be trusted with hard facts on Planned Parenthood. To give but one example, PolitiFact took a statement by Casey Mattox that is 100 percent true and rated it “half...

Were there 3 million illegal votes from undocumented immigrants in this year’s presidential election? That’s what some websites are saying... The information comes from tweets made by [Gregg] Phillips on Nov. 11 and Nov. 13... But Phillips will not provide any evidence to support his claim, which is undermined by publicly available information...

Irony: Hillary Is too Dishonest; Trump is too Honest The “fact checkers” claim that Trump lied and continues to lie significantly more than Hillary did and does. The flaws in their bogus “statistics” are that more of Hillary’s lies are intentional and significant, whereas more of Trump’s “lies” are actually exaggerations or witticisms taken out of context, and misrepresentations by the media and other Hillary supporters (not by Trump) when intentionally misquoting or distorting what Trump has actually said.