I have long pointed out that PolitiFact is objectively biased. Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial “fact checking” news organization rates Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims and twice as much, respectively.
This election, rather unsurprisingly, the organization has more or less operated as if it was part of the Hillary Clinton campaign. Just to name a few examples, it has done this through astonishingly incompetent defenses of Clinton’s email lies, not adhering to its own standards for what is rated true, and even done fact checks of Donald Trump that are plainly wrong. (And given the way Trump stretches the truth, it’s a real feat to inaccurately fact check him.)
Well, now Mark Tapscott at the Daily Caller News Foundation has pointed out something very curious. It turns out that the Clinton Foundation and PolitiFact, which is funded through the Poynter Foundation, share a major donor. And there’s a serious conflict of interest as a result:
Read the whole thing. To recap, as previously mentioned, PolitiFact has an overwhelming problem with selection bias. Heading into the last election, it rated President Obama’s claim that people would be allowed to keep their health insurance under Obamacare true multiple times and attacked Mitt Romney for saying millions would lose it. The year after Obama was reelected, PolitiFact then flip-flopped after 8 million people—and counting—lost their health insurance and made Obama’s claim “lie of the year”, but not before offering up a spectacularly disingenuous defense of its error. According to PolitiFact, people who pointed out Obamacare’s flaws were “obsessed” and “oversimplifying” Obama’s cut-and-dried claim that “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.”
And now PolitiFact has done a fact check that exposes a serious conflict of interest between it and the presidential candidate it is supposed to be tenaciously covering. While the organization is not unique in that lots of journalistic endeavors have donors, the specific nature of this conflict raises very valid questions about whether it is tailoring its fact checks to appease a specific donor. And it’s also part and parcel of a larger pattern of questionable practices at PolitiFact. At this point, PolitiFact’s lack of institutional credibility simply can’t be ignored.
