Fact checkers – what would we ever do without these passionate fighters for the truth? To answer this rhetorical question: probably laugh a little less.
This faction of the news industry is so easily dismissed and exposed as partisan hacks that one simply sits back and marvels at how seriously they take themselves. And if you dare to criticize them (which I do regularly), they try to tell you that you are an enemy of the truth. How precious. Pointing out that you are the one lying when someone is lying is twisted logic.
Politifact just gave its annual Lie of the Year rating. This will come as a shock – Donald Trump was the “winner”! Yes, we never expected this result. Despite numerous examples of lying by Joe Biden, a completely fraudulent campaign by Kamala Harris, and outright fabrications and blatant misinformation in the press, Trump was a fixture in the news, so there was no way to pick anyone else.
So here is what these Viscounts of Vé·ri·té declared to be the most monumental lie of 2024.
A lie marked a city and its residents in the name of electoral fury. It was absurd. It was momentous. Our Lie of the Year goes to Donald Trump and JD Vance for false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio ate dogs and cats. https://t.co/tNXV83hk3T
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) December 17, 2024
If you have a palpable feeling that a goal is being missed, that is justified. On the face of it, calling this issue the worst issue of the year is an exaggeration. Although it is a controversial issue, it is not without foundation. Some social media posts suggested this, and At a town meeting, a resident provided details The arriving immigrants had hunted ducks in local parks. Although police later claimed they had not received any reports of this nature, it was not a case of Trump and JD Vance completely making up the story.
Surprisingly, Politifact then provides misinformation in their “Fact Check of the Year”. The website claims that Trump’s comments about pets led to school closures due to bomb threats. This has already been debunked, with the governor stating at press conferences that these threats were hoaxes. Foreign villains were behind most of the threats – something Politifact is fully aware of but does not address in its LOY piece.
In hindsight there is clarity on this issue, but does it remain? largest Lie heard in 2024? Politifact relies heavily on how this lie was used in the campaign and what impact it had on the election. Now, how about some other large falsehoods with election implications? The press reported to this country for months that Joe Biden was in perfect mental health. “Spicy” was the preferred adjective. Later, there was a coordinated effort to label right footage of Biden repeatedly showing him in a debilitating state as “cheap fake videos.”“,” a consistent lie from the press. These were completely undone by Joe’s dismal performance at the debate.
How about the lies that were spread about Kamala Harris when she rose to the top Democratic nomination? She was not the border tsarina; She never called for the confiscation of weapons; Kamala has always been a supporter of fracking; and numerous other revisionist CV reports were presented on her behalf, all of which were demonstrably false.
And I’m sorry, but how can a controversial report about immigrants feeding on animals go beyond Joe Biden’s promise that he would never pardon his son Hunter? This was a lie that Biden and the White House had spread throughout 2024, going back to the fall of last year. Not only did he break that promise, but Biden’s sweeping pardon spanned more than a decade and included any previously unknown crimes that may have been discovered related to his recidivist child.
This is the melancholy state of the fact-checking industry. Sister Toldjah noted today that Daniel Dale has ended his four-year leave to avoid Joe Biden’s term and has reassumed his job description because Trump has come to power. (Note to CNN’s pint-sized soothsayers of facts: Joe Biden is still president.) This is the same Daniel Dale who walked out of the Trump-Kamala debate in September to declare that the vice president had made only a single comment that might next to it mark. I had to piece together the nearly two dozen other outright lies she spouted that night.
Paging CNN fact checker Daniel Dale: This is how you do your job, not the debate error you delivered
In the same way, this slanted approach is also applied at another outlet, namely Politifact. These fractured soothsayers are now known for the highly selective manner in which they fact-check, assign false labels, or choose to avoid uncomfortable assessments. These partisan hacks score points by judging Republicans much more often, avoiding Democratic examples entirely, or recalibrating right statements from conservatives to improve their ratings by applying arbitrary “needs more context” methods.
Furthermore, on the infrequent occasions that they call out Democrats or other sympathetic sources, they play a little trick by not applying a truth meter at all, thereby ensuring that the issue does not receive a negative rating in their archives. It’s all so lame in the blatant way they pretend they’re not using it for the partisan hacking they portray as clinging to the fact.
This latest example further undermines the credibility that respected fact-checkers long ago abandoned. Considering the amount of four-legged feces involved in their work, this pile will be fertile ground for some time to come.
