Study Finds PolitiFact Is Nearly 6 Times More Likely to Defend Biden Than Correct Him

That so-called “fact checkers” are just biased left-wing gatekeepers is obvious to anyone that’s followed their track record.

PolitiFact in particular has done a poor job of concealing their partisanship, having assigned different ratings to nearly identical statements based on the ideology of the person making it. One in particular case, Ron Paul (a Republican) and Jim Webb (a Democrat) made a nearly identical statement about taxes and received different rulings from the site. Ron Paul’s statement was only determined to be “half-true,” while Webb’s was “mostly true.”

In one amusing case of reality slapping them in the face, Politifact initially rated Obama’s claim “if you like you healthcare plan, you can keep your healthcare plan” as “true.” They’d later have to reevaluate the claim, which they determined to be the “lie of the year.” If they couldn’t even correctly fact check a claim they themselves would later have to admit was the biggest political lie of the year, what else did they miss? (A lot).

In addition to their poor quality of work, they also strive to give the appearance that there’s an abundance of right wing misinformation out there simply by disproportionally choosing to “fact check” right wingers while ignoring left wing misinformation.

Despite the disastrous first year of the Biden presidency, they’ve been especially protective of the senile Commander in Chief, a new study has found.

According to NewsBusters’ Tim Graham:

At the end of Biden’s first 100 days, we [Newsbusters] reported our study of PolitiFact found they published 13 fact checks of the president, and 106 fact checks of the president’s critics. In other words, they’re much more sensitive about someone “lying” about Biden than they are about Biden lying. 

Now, after reviewing Biden’s first year, a NewsBusters study shows the same pattern continues. Overall from January 20, 2021 through January 19, 2022, MRC analysts found Biden was fact-checked 40 times, while Biden critics were checked on 230 occasions.

In the last 265 days of Biden’s first year, there were 28 Biden fact checks, and 124 checks of Biden critics, so the disparity was a little more than five to one, as opposed to the eight-to-one ratio of the first 100 days.

Over his first year, Biden landed on the “Mostly False” or worse side in 19 out of 40 fact checks (45 percent). But the “Fact Checks About Joe Biden” were overwhelmingly negative – 201 out of 230 fact-checks were “Mostly False” or worse (87.4 percent). There were only three that were “True,” four were “Mostly True,” and 22 were “Half True.”

There were zero “Pants on Fire” rulings about President Biden in his first year. He has only six in his entire career since PolitiFact began in 2007. Biden can say the evacuation from Afghanistan was an “extraordinary success”, and the Republicans are pushing “Jim Crow on steroids,” and there will be no fact checks.

As Graham points out, many of the “pants on fire” ratings for Biden’s critics were claims laughably pointless to fact check. That included fact checking claims such as “Biden is computer generated,” debunking photoshopped pictures of Biden sniffing people (though there are plenty of real ones), and refuting a report that Biden was handed a “vile of blood” from a child on a walk back to the White House.

Matt Palumbo is the author of The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros