Only hours after Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro issued a scathing attack targeting Politifact for announcing on Thursday that they had hired former Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson as a fact checker, Politifact backed down, tweeting their acknowledgement that hiring Grayson was a major boo-boo.
Politifact has been accused of being a left-wing apologist for years; in 2016 The Federalist offered a comprehensive essay as to how that accusation was accurate. The Federalist noted:
When fact-checked by PolitiFact, Democrats had an average rating of 1.8, which is between “Mostly True” and “Half True.” The average Republican rating was 2.6, which is between “Half-True” and “Mostly False.” We also checked Republicans without President-elect Donald Trump in the mix and found that 0.8 truth gap narrowed to 0.5. …
During the 2012 election season, PolitiFact assigned Mitt Romney 19 “Pants on Fire” ratings. For comparison, for every single Democrat combined from 2007-2016 the “Pants on Fire” rating was only assigned 25 times. This seems to indicate Romney wasn’t just a liar, but an insane, raving liar, spewing malicious deceit at every possible opportunity. In the mere two years he was in the spotlight as a Republican presidential nominee, Romney somehow managed to rival the falsehoods told by the entire party of Democrats over the course of a decade.