Left-wing PolitiFact’s editor Angie Drobnic Holan denied her site’s political bias in a Thursday interview with C-SPAN.
“We are a fact-checking news site,” said Holan, echoing her site’s description of its own purpose as “[rating] the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics.”
Holan described PolitiFact as generally committed to an equal volume of fact-checking between Republicans and Democrats. While quantitatively balanced in its fact-checking of both parties, Nolan noted that PolitiFact was not committed to qualitative equality of analytical outcomes between both sides’ claims.
“We try to fact check an equal number of Democrats and Republicans,” said Holan. “We don’t balance the ratings in any way because we think the facts need to speak for themselves. So the ratings are whatever they are.”
Here is a small sampling of PolitiFact’s deceptive work over recent months.
Denies that Clinton said she would raise taxes on the middle class – presumably a misstatement – despite clear video and audio to the contrary.
Denies that the “Iran Deal” will fund more Islamic terrorism via its releasing of $150 billion to Iran, despite acknowledging Iran’s Islamist regime is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.
Denies that unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are misleading, ignoring the fact that its most cited metric, the U3, does not include discouraged workers who have stopped seeking employment.
Accepts the false premise that the “Iran Deal” will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Accepts the false premise that Mexican immigrants – both legal and illegal – are more law-abiding than U.S. citizens, despite its own article providing contrary data.
Demeans Mark “Oz” Geist as a liar, a former CIA security contractor who defied a stand-down order from his station chief to defend Americans in peril at the US diplomatic compound in Benghazi during the Islamic terrorist attack on September 11, 2012.
Demeans Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) as a liar over his claim that 350,000 people illegally enter the country every year, assuming that the number of apprehensions along America’s borders exceeds the number of successful illegal entries.
During her interview, Holan’s fact-checking included contextualization, inferences, and editorializing in ways beneficial to Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump received the opposite treatment.
Like most left-wing media outlets, PolitiFact attempts to bolster its credibility by operating upon false pretenses of objectivity and neutrality.
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