In a March 19, 2018 column published by The Hill, liberal radio talk show host Bill Press declared that we can't believe what President Donald Trump says.
What evidence did Press have to support his claim?
PolitiFact.
Press (bold emphasis added):
Trump tells so many lies, so often, that not even Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan fact-checking website can keep score. But they do the most thorough job of anybody. Since he launched his 2016 campaign, Politifact has evaluated more than 500 assertions made by candidate and president Donald Trump, and they’ve rated an astounding 69 percent of them as “false,” “mostly false,” or, the worst category, “liar, liar, pants on fire.” Think about that. On any given day, you know that seven out of ten things Donald Trump says are not true!We at PolitiFact Bias have endlessly pointed out that even if one assumes that PolitiFact did its fact checks without mistakes that selection bias and subjective application of its rating system make claims like the one in bold ridiculous.
Claims mirroring the one above happen routinely, yet PolitiFact denies the evidence ("not a lot of reader confusion") and continues publishing its misleading charts and graphs with no explanatory disclaimer.
We can think of two primary potential explanations.
- PolitiFact truly doesn't see the abundance of evidence even though we jump up and down calling attention to it
- PolitiFact is deliberately misleading people
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