Readers of THE WEEKLY STANDARD have been treated over the years to countless examples of malpractice from so-called media fact checkers. Some of those fact checkers are worse than others. It’s an open secret, and one the media don’t want to acknowledge, that PolitiFact in particular is horribly biased. Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial organization rates Republican claims “false” three times as often as Democratic claims.
But something even more troubling than liberal bias might be at work at PolitiFact. The Daily Caller News Foundation recently published a detailed investigation into a Clinton Foundation initiative to provide AIDS drugs in Africa and concluded that the program may have been responsible for dispensing ineffective “watered-down” drugs. PolitiFact turned around and “fact checked” the “conservative website,” saying it “wrongly ties the Clinton Foundation to bad HIV/AIDS drugs.” However, a subsequent response from the Daily Caller News Foundation pointed out quite convincingly that PolitiFact’s critique was riddled with errors.
And that’s not all. The Daily Caller News Foundation also dropped this bombshell: The Clinton Foundation initiative in question was funded with a $1 million grant from eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pamela. Their charitable foundation, the Omidyar Network, also gave a $225,000 grant to the nonprofit journalism foundation the Poynter Institute, which oversees PolitiFact. And that grant was earmarked for a partnership between PolitiFact and another group “to fact-check claims about global health and development.”
A lot of liberal groups and nonprofits might end up sharing donors by happenstance, but this points to a pretty specific conflict of interest and one that PolitiFact should address. It doesn’t help that PolitiFact initially denied receiving any funding from the Omidyars. Besides, the conflict might help to explain why their attempt to undercut the Daily Caller News Foundation’s investigation was so shoddy. Doing favors for donors, after all, seems to be fast becoming the new American way.
Of course, conflicted or not, PolitiFact’s work has been generally atrocious this year. They rated Hillary Clinton’s claim that she never sent classified information over her email “half-true” and later flip-flopped when details of the FBI investigation exposed their defense of her as nonsense. As another measure of just how off the mark they can be, they somehow managed to get a “fact check” of Donald Trump decisively wrong. It’s not as if he hasn’t said many untrue things. But they rated false his claim that crime is rising, and official FBI stats agreed with him. Most recently, they attacked Mike Pence for a line during the vice presidential debate in which he accurately characterized as “ransom” a $400 million White House payment to Iran on the day four hostages were released.
PolitiFact publishes enough fact checks that it no doubt gets some right. But whether as a result of bias, incompetence, dubious financial incentives, or perhaps all of the above, PolitiFact has taken a wrecking ball to its reputation. It should be ignored altogether, but so long as PolitiFact remains a useful vehicle for applying a veneer of credibility to politicized judgments, the rest of the media will no doubt continue to cite it as an authority and use it as a cudgel.
