Reader: "PolitiFact is not biased. Republicans just lie more."

Every few years or so we recognize a Comment of the Week.

Jehosephat Smith dropped by on Facebook to inform us that PolitiFact is not biased:

Politifact is not biased, Republicans just lie more. That is objectively obvious by this point and if your mind isn't moved by current realities then you're willfully ignorant.

As we have prided ourselves on trying to communicate clearly exactly why we find PolitiFact biased, we find such comments fascinating on two levels.


First, how can one claim that PolitiFact is not biased? On what evidence would one rely to support such a claim?

Second, how can one contemplate claiming PolitiFact isn't biased without making some effort to address the arguments we've made showing PolitiFact is biased?

We invited Mr. Smith to make his case either here on the website or on Facebook. But rather than simply heaping Smith's burden of proof on his head we figured his comment would serve us well as an excuse to again summarize the evidence showing PolitiFact's bias to the left.


Journalists lean left
Journalists as a group lean left. And they lean markedly left of the general U.S. population. Without knowing anything else at all about PolitiFact we have reason to expect that it is made up mostly of left-leaning journalists. If PolitiFact journalists lean left as a group then right out of the box we have reason to look for evidence that their political leaning affects their fact-checking.

PolitiFact's errors lean left I
When PolitiFact makes a egregious reporting error, the error tends to harm the right or fit with left-leaning thinking. For example, when PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson reported that the Hobby Lobby's policy on health insurance "barred" women from using certain types of birth control, we noted that pretty much anybody with any rightward lean would have spotted the mistake and prevented its publication. Instead, PolitiFact published it and later changed it without posting a correction notice. We have no trouble finding such examples.

PolitiFact's errors lean left II
We performed a study of PolitiFact's calculations of percentage error. PolitiFact often performs the calculation incorrectly, and errors tend to benefit Democrats (caveat: small data set).

PolitiFact's ratings lean left I
When PolitiFact rates Republicans and Democrats on closely parallel claims Democrats often fare better. For example, when PolitiFact investigated a Democratic Party charge that Rep. Bill McCollum raised his own pay while in Congress PolitiFact said it was true. But when PolitiFact investigated a Republican charge that Sherrod Brown had raised his own pay PolitiFact discovered that members of Congress cannot raise their own pay and rated the claim "False." We have no trouble finding such examples.

PolitiFact's ratings lean left II
We have done an ongoing and detailed study looking at partisan differences in PolitiFact's application of its "Pants on Fire" rating. PolitiFact describes no objective difference in distinguishing between "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings, so we hypothesize that the difference between the two ratings is subjective. Republicans are over 50 percent more likely than Democrats to have a false rating deemed "Pants on Fire" false for apparently subjective reasons.

PolitiFact's explanations lean left
When PolitiFact explains topics its explanations tend to lean left. For example, when Democrats and liberals say Social Security has never contributed a dime to the deficit PolitiFact gives it a rating such as "Half True," apparently unable to discover the fact that Social Security has run a deficit during years when the program was on-budget (and therefore unquestionably contributed directly to the deficit those years). PolitiFact resisted Republican claims that the ACA cut Medicare, explaining that the so-called Medicare cuts were not truly cuts because the Medicare budget continued to increase. Yet PolitiFact discovered when the Trump administration slowed the growth of Medicaid it was okay to refer to the slowed growth as a program cut. Again, we have no trouble finding such examples.

How can a visitor to our site (including Facebook) contemplate declaring PolitiFact isn't biased without coming prepared to answer our argument?