Fact-checking fact-checkers

After Tuesday’s vice presidential debate between Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz, PolitiFact was at it again, rating Vance false 91 percent of the time and Walz false 29 percent of the time. While defenders of professional fact-checking may say, “Aha, that proves Vance lies more,” there were problems with PolitiFact’s assessments of both candidates.

PBS’s vice presidential debate favoritism began beforehand, in a political roundtable on Tuesday evening’s PBS News Hour in which White House correspondent Laura Barron-Lopez rolled out a list of Harris-Walz talking points. Predictably, Barron-Lopez embraced pro-Democratic “fact-checking” by CBS and defended the partisan "fact-checking" at last month’s ABC presidential debate.

Associated Press media reporter David Bauder reported on Friday that CBS News “says it will be up to the politicians — not the moderators — to check the facts of their opponents.” This upset "fact checkers" like former PolitiFact boss Angie Drobnic Holan, who want journalists to have the "courage" to challenge the candidates. Well, one party's candidates. 

It is a fact that under the governorship of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz, Minnesota removed a requirement that babies that survived abortions be given life-saving care. However, PolitiFact still slapped a “false” label on the claim on Wednesday.

During Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview session with the National Association of Black Journalists, on-stage fact-checking was nonexistent, but PolitiFact assigned itself to do the task online. Unfortunately, the difference between PolitiFact’s treatment of Harris’s NABJ appearance and Trump’s was just as stark as the candidates’ appearances themselves.

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler spun himself dizzy on Monday as he came to Kamala Harris’s defense as he gave former Minneapolis police officer Scott Creighton three Pinocchios for his characterization of her response to the 2020 riots.

On debate night, CNN “fact checker” Daniel Dale suggested that Kamala Harris might have fudged the truth just once in her ABC cuddle/debate. If you see Dale's face on TV, he's probably trashing the Republicans. Online on Saturday, Dale dug into the Harris X/Twitter account and its mangling of Trump.

The PBS News Hour relished the presidential debate between Vice-President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump, who they believe was fact-checked into oblivion and who succumbed to Harris’s baiting tactics. Co-anchor Geoff Bennett loved that “the former president was repeatedly fact-checked for inaccuracies” by ABC News’s hopelessly hostile moderators, before throwing the…

The debate debacle hosted by ABC underscored why the conservative half of America is hostile to “fact checkers.” Object to them, and the Left decrees it’s because you’re hostile to facts. But what conservatives actually oppose is leftist argumentation that’s poorly disguised as nonpartisan and devoid of opinion.

New York Times’ media reporter Michael Grynbaum made Wednesday’s paper with the smugly confident post-presidential debate “Media Memo,” “ABC’s Matter-of-Fact Moderators Built Factual Guardrails Around Trump.” He wrote: "Using calm and authoritative tones, Mr. Muir and Ms. Davis offered a model for real-time fact-checking that has been absent from many recent presidential debates."

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!