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NewsBusters Podcast: Partisan PolitiFact Poobah Admits They're Partial
PolitiFact co-founder Bill Adair is still doing liberal-media interviews for his book on why Republicans lie more. It's titled Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Liars, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy. He's been promoted on CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and now on NPR stations. All the Republican-hating media are loving it.
He admitted to On The Media host Brooke Gladstone that the "Truth-O-Meter" is an imprecise, subjective measurement. Everything about the "independent fact-checkers" is loaded with partisan opinion.
Gladstone noted that in his book, he admits he lied on C-SPAN in 2012 when he tried to claim he doesn't differentiate between the political parties when it comes to fact-checking. He recalled telling a caller, "You know, I can honestly say I don't keep score." Well, we did keep score."
Today, PolitiFact's score-keeping is extremely tilted. I found from January to September, Donald Trump was rated "Mostly False" or worse on 57 occasions, and was rated "Mostly True" or "True" on zero occasions. In that time frame, Biden and Harris pretty much had an equal number of True and False ratings.
On the "Truth-O-Meter" ratings, Gladstone asked, "doesn't that open up Pandora's box of subjectivity?" Adair agreed: "Well, the whole thing is subjective. Ultimately, fact checkers at PolitiFact are taking journalistic work that they've done and then making a subjective rating on this imaginary device. So, yes, that can create challenges." He confessed that it's not always consistent: "PolitiFact's critics have had a field day looking for inconsistencies in things like that. It's a human enterprise. They do their best."
But Adair knows this leans strongly to the left: "I'm not sure that Truth-O-Meters are going to have an appeal to conservative audiences because they're associated with fact-checkers that probably conservative audiences have been told not to trust."
Later came this admission from Adair: "I think that we need to figure out what could appeal beyond this NPR-listening, New York Times-reading, New Yorker-subscribing audience."
NewsBusters and other conservative sites argue that "fact checkers" can't be trusted because they blatantly favor Democrats and excuse their largest lies, starting with the notion that President Biden was not in cognitive decline, but was at his best. Joe Scarborough professed in March "F-you if you can't handle the truth. This version of Biden intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever!"
Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts: Apple, Spotify, and so on.
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