James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal took on the strange conflict that is PolitiFact picked a “Lie of the Year” they’ve repeatedly defended as “Half True.” Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that if you liked your health plan, you could keep it once he passed his badly named "Affordable Care Act." He called it "PolitiFact's Forked Tongue."

PolitiFact has only drawn a yellow Hi-Liter through what’s wrong with liberal media-elite “fact checking” patrols: It exploits their "objective" image as it declares a campaign promise as factual (or not) prematurely, before there’s any factual reality to judge. From the beginning of the “truth squad” tendency in the 1992 presidential campaign, we’ve found this disturbing tendency.

Almost as soon as word leaked that Mitt Romney had chosen Paul Ryan as his running mate, liberal reporters stepped forward to help define the Wisconsin congressman as too conservative, a heartless budget-slasher who might repel as many votes as he might attract to the GOP ticket. Chris Matthews, for example, on Saturday derided Ryan as someone whose plan “really screws the people who desperately need Medicare and programs like that.”

The script is always a little different, but the trend is always the same. The Media Research Center has monitored campaign coverage for 25 years, including the media’s reaction to four Republican vice presidential selections: Dan Quayle (1988); Jack Kemp (1996); Dick Cheney (2000); and Sarah Palin (2008). While most of the candidates usually received initially positive introductory coverage, in each case journalists quickly pivoted to emphasizing the attack lines pushed by the Democratic campaigns.

In an interview with former Vice President Dan Quayle on Thursday's NBC Today, co-host Matt Lauer pushed Quayle to admit that Mitt Romney was wrong to oppose Obama's auto bailout: "[He] said, 'You know what? Let Chrysler fail.'...There would have been thousands of jobs lost. Did he get it wrong? Did President Obama get it right by bailing out the auto industry?"
 
Quayle endorsed Romney on Tuesday, prompting Lauer to ask: "You've seen the polls, he's always between 20 and 25%. Conservatives have tried to find anybody to pass him....why is he the Rodney Dangerfield of the race, Mitt Romney, why doesn't he get any respect?" The headline on screen throughout the segment read: "Decision 2012; Dan Quayle on Volatile GOP Race."

 Saturday’s Good Morning America on ABC, the Today show on NBC, and the NBC Nightly News all gave attention to potential Republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee’s recent words from the Michael Medved Show lamenting the example set by the unwed pregnancy of actress Natalie Portman. But, while Huckabee might have been better served if he had also made a point of praising her for keeping her child and planning to marry the father during his original comments, the reports on ABC and NBC mostly ignored that it was host Medved who decided to bring up Portman, and Huckabee was responding to him rather than making a point of bringing her up on his own.

But only Saturday’s Today show even briefly mentioned that Medved introduced Portman into the conversation as substitute anchor Savannah Guthrie read a statement from Huckabee on the matter.

Saturday’s Good Morning America on ABC devoted a full report to former Vice President Dan Quayle’s son Ben’s run for Congress in Arizona, focusing primarily on perceived gaffes by both him and his father. As anchor John Berman set up the report, he gave the impression that he views the former Vice President primarily as a joke: "It's time to dust off the jokes and hold on to your potatoes. Who can forget the vice presidency of Dan Quayle? His mortal feud with TV's Murphy Brown. His battles with the dictionary. Well, now, one of his children wants to follow in his footsteps and is making some headlines of his own, not all intentional."

During the piece which recounted a number of activities and statements by Ben Quayle that have come under criticism, or have come across to some as gaffes, correspondent T.J. Winick played a clip of the time that Dan Quayle infamously told a school boy that the word "potato" should have an "e" added to the end during a spelling lesson at a school. Winick did not inform viewers that it was the teacher who led Quayle astray as she had misspelled the word on the word list she had given to the then-Vice President to check the children’s spelling.

Winick also described what he called a "shocking ad" in which Ben Quayle labeled President Obama "the worst President in history," and promised to go to Washington and "knock the hell out of the place." The ABC correspondent also informed viewers that Quayle had been criticized for using a photograph of himself with his nieces in campaign literature because he has no children of his own.