The PolitiFact Wisconsin story

 This article is a companion to Bryan's forthcoming review of former PolitiFact editor Bill Adair's book, "The Big Lie."

In my review of Bill Adair's book I refer to the way PolitiFact's state operations like PolitiFact Wisconsin tended to favor Republicans during years Adair excluded from his dataset. Readers of that Substack article may find this explanation helpful.

Research published here at PolitiFact Bias has examined the bias PolitiFact applies in the use of its "Pants on Fire" ratings. The difference between "False" and "Pants on Fire" appears entirely subjective and based squarely on the term "ridiculous." Until PolitiFact defines "ridiculous" in a reasonably objective way, its descriptions up through this point strongly encourage the view that the term is subjective.

Until 2020, a "Wisconsin" tag on a PolitiFact story dependably indicated that staffers from PolitiFact's affiliate performed the fact checks. We stopped tracking state data after 2020 because the stories could as easily come from PolitiFact National staffers. We also had reason to believe the state affiliates were no longer in charge of determining the "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.

"Pants on Fire" Bias at PolitiFact Wisconsin

Wisconsin was unusually tough on its Democrats compared to most other PolitiFact operations. Whereas PolitiFact National gave Democrats a "Pants of Fire" for about 17 percent of their false statements from 2007 through 2019, PolitiFact Wisconsin gave them over 27 percent, slightly higher than the 27 percent average Republicans received from PolitiFact National.

Raw Numbers at PolitiFact Wisconsin

Adair's claim that Republicans lie more doesn't rest on percentages, though. Adair sticks with raw numbers of disparaging ratings.

There, too, PolitiFact Wisconsin moderated the bias of the larger organization.

Republicans "earned" about 40 percent more "False" plus "Pants on Fire" ratings than did Democrats from PolitiFact Wisconsin. In contrast, PolitiFact National gave Republicans over 300 percent (3x) more such ratings than Democrats.

The tendency in Wisconsin, as this graph helps show, matches that for PolitiFact as a whole. It isn't that Republicans lie more. It's that Democrats lie less and less.

Where did the Democrat lies go? Did PolitiFact and other fact checkers force them to clean up their act? Did fact checkers at long last realize that they had been too tough on Democrats early on?

Did narrative increasingly conquer objectivity?