Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said on Dec. 16, that PolitiFact was a “total communist outfit” and that employees at the organization should be arrested for naming Bill Clinton the most honest presidential candidate and Ben Carson the least.
Politifact
By Curtis Houck | May 8, 2015 | 5:02 PM EDT
The reliably liberal Politifact (through its Punditfact site) surprisingly took CNN’s New Day co-host Chris Cuomo took task on Thursday for his rather suspect claim on Twitter from Wednesday that “hate speech is excluded from protection” under the First Amendment. Through its Punditfact site, Politifact’s Lauren Carroll noted his numerous attempts to clarify his remarks and citations of case law, but still came to the conclusion that Cuomo’s original statement was “false.”
By P.J. Gladnick | April 5, 2015 | 8:11 PM EDT
Does anybody know what Barack Obama was doing during his college years? We know that he was the president of the Harvard Law Review but do we even know what articles, if any, he wrote for it? Beyond that his college years are almost completely blank as to his grades or activities to the extent that his time at Columbia University has been almost completely erased from memory. Compare that big MSM yawn to the recent mainstream media frenzy which included a 2223 word front page Washington Post story devoted to Scott Walker's college career which ended before graduation. And now we have something of an MSM Crime Scene Investigation carried out by Politifact Wisconsin about Scott Walker's claim that he recently purchased a sweater at Kohl's department store for only a dollar.
By Jack Coleman | June 11, 2014 | 11:50 AM EDT
Don't hold your breath waiting for any (further) glowing profiles of Rachel Maddow from the Gray Lady. MSNBC's in-house Victorian Gent has upped the ante in her years-long pissing contest with media watchdog PolitiFact, which ran a post critical of Maddow last week at one of its offshoots, PunditFact.
The PunditFact post took Maddow to task for claiming on her June 3 show that the Pentagon "made up" a narrative of Army Private Jessica Lynch as a Ramboesque super-soldier who bravely fought off Iraqi attackers, despite grievous wounds, when her company was ambushed three days after the start of the Iraq war in 2003. (Video after the jump)
By Jeffrey Meyer | May 30, 2013 | 11:19 AM EDT
On Wednesday May 29, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) announced that she will not seek reelection to Congress in 2014, and ever since the liberal media has had a field day mocking her political career. It appears the latest example of Bachmann-trashing has come from the Tampa Bay Times, which runs the liberally-skewed PolitiFact website, for having problems with their “Truth-O-Meter.”
In a piece published on Wednesday, Times staff writer Angie Drobnic Holan lambasted Bachmann for veering away from “verifiable fact.” At issue with Ms. Holan is the fact that PoliFact has labeled numerous statements by Ms. Bachmann has false or “Pants on Fire!” which according to the website, Ms. Bachman’s “first 13 ratings were False or Pants on Fire.” This article comes just two days after PolitiFact released a skewed study showing that Republicans were cited as dishonest three times as often as Democrats.
By Jack Coleman | May 8, 2013 | 3:52 PM EDT
For sheer entertainment on MSNBC, few things rival the spectacle of its marquee host, Rachel Maddow, in the throes of high dudgeon.
There she was again last night, the full shtick, wide eyed, arms waving, sentences ending with exclamation points, the fact checkers at PolitiFact the target of her wrath. (Video after page break)
By Matt Hadro | January 18, 2013 | 6:21 PM EST
It turns out that the Romney campaign was right to claim that Fiat, who owns Chrysler, would be making Jeeps in China instead of America, even though the media disparaged that case at the time with PolitiFact going so far as to declare the ad "Lie of the Year." According to PolitiFact, the campaign falsely implied the jobs would be outsourced, among other claims.
As Reuters reported yesterday, "Fiat (FIA.MI) and its U.S. unit Chrysler expect to roll out at least 100,000 Jeeps in China when production starts in 2014 as they seek to catch up with rivals in the world's biggest car market."
By Kyle Drennen | August 31, 2012 | 4:00 PM EDT
Immediately after Paul Ryan concluded his acceptance speech for the Republican Party's vice presidential nomination on Wednesday, the media sought ways to tear down the Wisconsin Congressman's indictment of the failures of the Obama administration. In particular, networks and newspapers attempted to knock down Ryan's accurate claim that President Obama promised to keep open a GM plant that closed in 2009.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and PolitiFact quickly labeled Ryan's criticism as "false," claiming Obama made no such promise and that the plant closed before he took office. But as The Examiner's Conn Carroll detailed on Thursday, that supposed "fact check" was false:
By Kyle Drennen | August 22, 2012 | 9:52 AM EDT
In what co-host Matt Lauer billed as a campaign ad "reality check" on Tuesday's NBC Today, a Romney ad criticizing the Obama administration for gutting Welfare reform was dismissed as ineffective, "too complicated" and "Pants on Fire" false. Meanwhile, an Obama ad slamming Romney over taxes was praised for making Romney look like a cross between wealthy Simpson's villain "Mr. Burns" and an "evil" version of Mad Men's Don Draper. [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]
Much of the commentary came from ad critic and MediaPost.com editor-at-large Barbara Lippert. She quickly rejected the Romney ad: "I don't think it's effective because it's such a battle of images....It's too complicated. You have to turn it around in your mind." Then she enthusiastically gushed over the Obama ad and threw in her own nasty jabs at Romney:
By Ken Shepherd | August 2, 2012 | 10:19 PM EDT
Yesterday, the Tampa Bay Times's Politifact unit assigned a "mostly false" label to a July 31 blog post by Americans for Tax Reform (ATR) which argued that American athletes winning medals in the London Olympic Games would pay hefty taxes as a result of their success. For example, a gold medal winner could pay up to nearly $9,000 for each gold medal victory.
Today, ATR Tax Policy Director Ryan Ellis issued a strong critique of Politifact's analysis and unfair conclusion, explaining how it is fundamentally flawed (portions bolded and underlined reflect my emphasis):