PolitiFact unfairly hammers Hannity for conditional claim it treated as an absolute

 As President Ronald Reagan was known to say on occasion, "There you go again."

PolitiFact habitually brings carelessness (or malice?) to its interpretations of claims originating from conservatives and Republicans. Sept. 18, 2025 gave us yet another example of the genre:

PolitiFact's fact check contains at least two monstrous problems, and Grok AI couldn't figure out the biggest one without prompting.

First, Hannity's claim was accompanied by qualifying language not hinted at in PolitiFact's initial presentation (image above). And though PolitiFact did quote Hannity's qualifying language in subsequent paragraphs it flatly ignored that language in its evaluation of the truth value of his claim.

PolitiFact provides the context:

"I can’t find a single, prominent conservative voice in the country that even remotely wanted or hoped or was pushing to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air," Hannity said Sept. 17 on his show "Hannity." "Nobody — it just was simple. People changed the channel. They didn’t watch him. Not one person can I think of. Maybe there’s one, but I can’t think of him." 

The supposedly absolute claim of knowledge is explicitly qualified by Hannity's own knowledge. Might there be an exception? Hannity grants it's possible.

A fact checker that dares to fact check a person's claim of what they're familiar with is a brave (that is, foolish) fact checker. How are we supposed to know what's in Hannity's head?

Second, PolitiFact ignored the context of Hannity's claim. He's talking about people calling for Kimmel's job on account of the latter's apparently false comments surrounding the ideology of Charlie Kirk's alleged murderer. For some reason PolitiFact didn't fact check Kimmel's claim that Tyler Robinson was a MAGA conservative. A MAGA conservative who said he hated Charlie Kirk and was apparently living with a transgender significant other. Totally fits the MAGA profile, right?

PolitiFact cinches its out-of-context interpretation of Hannity's comment with the evidence it tries to use to falsify Hannity's claim.

1. Trump, back in July 2025, said Kimmel would be "NEXT [sic] to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes." That's before Kirk was assassinated, so it ignores the context of Hannity's claim. Trump made a similar predictive comment on Aug. 6, 2025, likewise before Kirk was murdered.
   
2. On Sept. 17, 20205, after Kirk's assassination and Kimmel's comments, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr noted some had called for Kimmel to be fired and said "You could certainly see a path forward for suspension over this."
3. Folded in with the Carr example, PolitiFact used conservative podcaster Benny Johnson as another example. Johnson hosted Carr on his podcast, and the title of the podcast included a call for Kimmel's firing.

The Trump examples are anachronistic in terms of the context of Hannity's claim. Trump wasn't calling for Kimmel's cancelation in light of his deceptive comments about Tyler Johnson.

The Carr comments are ambiguous. Carr calls for action on Kimmel's comments to save the network from FCC scrutiny. But Carr doesn't explicitly call for Kimmel's firing.

The title of Johnson's podcast might contradict Hannity IFF 1) Hannity was aware of the title as Johnson's call for Kimmel's firing AND considered Johnson a prominent conservative.

The deep dive on the lone potentially contradictory example is beyond PolitiFact, of course.

It's another in a long line of fact check fails for PolitiFact.

LIberal group says one thing, PolitiFact fact checks something else. And it's "True"!!!

 Behold the bias.

Presto!

Change-O:

It's yet another case of Politi-Equivocation.

"Gun violence" implies one person trying to do harm to another. Cases where a gun accidentally discharges and results in death, as well as suicides by gun, don't fit neatly under the heading "gun violence."

Unless you're PolitiFact.

The fact check, without the slightest attempt at justification, classifies all deaths where the instrument of death was a firearm as "gun violence." Therefore, says PolitiFact, the liberal group "Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America" was telling us the unabashed truth.

If only PolitiFact were telling us the unabashed truth about that.

Afters (we don't trust AI except where we already know what it's saying is true. Take this with a grain of salt):

https://x.com/i/grok/share/mwfOcxIMSeEXpGD0P5ZyPmOCb

PolitiFact's first GOP "Pants on Fire" of 2025 is a stinker

Reminder: Just because we're pressed for time to publish at PolitiFact Bias doesn't mean PolitiFact has improved one iota.

PolitiFact took an unusually long time to publish a "Pants on Fire" targeting a partisan political figure in 2025. Unsurprisingly, it was a Republican and it was President Trump.

Also unsurprisingly, it's not a good fact check. As we have previously observed, the mere fact that a fact check has a "False" or "Pants on Fire" rating counts as a good sign that it's a bad fact check. That goes for bad ratings of Democrats as well as Republicans, though of course the latter get hit with more of the unfair ratings.

So, on to business. What have we got on Feb. 19, 2025?

Any time a fact-checked claim contains only one word quoted from the supposed claimant, it's worth looking into whether the fact checker distorted the claim.

PolitiFact does offer some context and a link to a video. Such links should indicate at what point in time the relevant words occur, by the way.

PolitiFact:

"I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well," Trump said [16:16 -ed] while answering reporters’ questions Feb. 18 at his Mar-a-Lago resort. "But today I heard (from Ukraine), ‘Oh well, we weren't invited.’ Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it three years — you should have never started it, you could have made a deal."

PolitiFact makes it easy to reconcile Trump's statement above with his later statement that Putin should not have gone into Ukraine by simply not introducing the latter as relevant context. In other words, if readers don't know Trump said that, then there's no need to reconcile the conflicting statements for their readers.

17:53 (transcript ours, bold emphasis added):

"Look, you have leadership--and I like him (Zelenskyy) personally--he's fine. But I don't care about personally, I care about getting the job done. You have leadership now that's allowed a war to go on that should've never even happened. Even without the United States. Look, we had a president who was grossly incompetent. He had no idea what he was doing. He said some very stupid things, like going in for portions and all of the things he made a lot of bad statements. But, uh, he's grossly incompetent and I think everyone knew that. But this is something that should've never happened. Would've never happened. And I used to discuss it with Putin. President Putin and I would talk about Ukraine and it was the apple of his eye, I will tell you that, but he never, there was never a chance of him going in, and I told him you better not go in, don't go in. And he understood that, and he understood it fully. But I'm only interested, I want to see if I can save maybe millions of lives, this could even end up in a World War III, I mean to be honest with you. You've been hearing now Europe is saying "Well, I think we're going to go in" and we're going to go. All of a sudden you're going to end up in World War III. Over something that should've never happened."

PolitiFact should have looked for clues in the context to help explain Trump's statement about "you should have never started it." With the added context, it seems plain Trump faults all the leaders involved, including Presidents Biden and Putin. Putin did end up going into Ukraine despite Trump's warnings, after all.

But why let context get in the way of a fact check "Gotcha!" story?

This gotcha story featured two bylines, Louis Jacobson and newbie Claire Cranford. Cranford's another from the Bill Adair-fed Duke pipeline.

Apparently nobody told her to scrub her social media of partisan commentary?

This is what you get when Big Journalism thinks "nonpartisanship" means not explicitly telling people who gets your vote.

Speaking of Bill Adair, he didn't see bias at PolitiFact then or now.

They're partisans who allow partisanship to affect their fact-checking.

We love this gem from PolitiFact:

We asked the White House for evidence that Ukraine had started the war and received no response.

Tell me you asked a loaded question in the name of journalism by, uh, telling me you asked a loaded question. That's how you help kill trust in your brand among moderates/independents as well as conservatives.

Here's how an objective journalist might ask about the quotation: "What did you mean when you said "They started it" while talking about Ukraine wanting a place at the table? Were you saying they started the war?"

Objective journalists do not insert their own opinions into questions they ask of others. They ask questions that free the interviewee to expound.

In this case, Trump had already expounded, though perhaps we could wish for even greater specificity. PolitiFact either didn't look for it or chose to ignore it.

Afters

We also like how PolitiFact identifies "they" as "Ukraine" except in the title of the fact check, where "they" turns into "Volodymyr Zelenskyy."

It's as though Zelenskyy chose "they" as one of his pronouns.

More Afters

It's hilarious what you can find in PolitiFact's work when you dig even a little. PolitiFact has a history of finding distinctly partisan experts to weigh in on its fact checks. Expert Erik Herron didn't have any partisan campaign giving history, but twiX ratted him out for canvassing for Kamala Harris.

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PolitiFact's "Pants on Fire" bias in 2024

For years, PolitiFact Bias has tracked the proportion of false ("False" plus "Pants on Fire") statements PolitiFact rated "Pants on Fire." As PolitiFact has never established an objective distinction between the two ratings, we infer that the difference between the two is substantially or wholly subjective. That makes this dividing line perhaps the best means of using PolitiFact's own ratings to measure its political bias.

As we are looking at proportions and not raw numbers for the bias measurement, the results cannot be dismissed on the basis that Republicans supposedly lie more.

The Tale of the Tape in 2024

Graphs-a-plenty this year!

We'll start with the dual graph of the PoF Bias number along with the story selection proportion number. The PoF Bias number could be expressed either of two ways. As the numbers pretty consistently have show an anti-Republican/pro-Democrat bias, this number shows that anti-Republican bias when the number is greater than 1. Using this option a PoF Bias Number less than 1 shows the PoF bias harmed Democrats. Our chart shows that occurring for four different years (2007, 2011, 2013, 2015). But it's important to point out that the state franchises accounted for the apparent relative evenhandedness for the latter three years. We tracked PolitiFact National separately, and only 2007 and 2017 showed the anti-Democrat bias. The year 2007 counts as a statistical anomaly, we would say. PolitiFact treated the "Pants on Fire" rating as a joke at first.

The chart shows that after 2007 Republicans consistently had more false ratings than Democrats. In 2024 that preference for GOP falsehoods fell just short of the record for 2020. For both years, PolitiFact gave the GOP more than five times the number of false ratings it gave Democrats.

Because Republicans lie more?

Not so fast! Here's where the PoF Bias number shows its value. The PoF Bias number compares the percentages of false statements rated "Pants on Fire" for each party. PolitiFact has never offered an objective means of separating ridiculously false statements from those that are merely false. As the number represents a proportion, it is immune from influence by the sheer number of false ratings. Put another way, it's entirely independent of the Selection Proportion number.

In 2024, PolitiFact was over six times more likely to (subjectively rate a Republican false claim "Pants on Fire" than a false claim from a Democrat. That figure easily eclipsed the old record of 4.58 times more likely set in 2020.

Democrats Lie Less?

Interestingly, the recent year spikes in the PoF Bias Number are not driven by increases in "Pants on Fire" ratings given to Republicans. Those have actually moderated. The driver of the higher bias number stems from PolitiFact having increasing difficulty bringing itself to rate a Democrat "Pants on Fire." In 2010, PolitiFact meted out 31 "Pants on Fire" ratings to Democrats. That number has shrunken pretty steadily over time, with the Democrats setting a new record for PoF avoidance. Only one false Democrat claim received a "Pants on Fire" rating, just 4 percent of the total false ratings.

PolitiFact encountered a similar distaste for giving Democrats false ratings of any kind. "False" and "Pants on Fire" combined fell from a peak of 135 in 2012 to 25 in 2024. That figure was the lowest for any presidential election year over PolitiFact's entire history.

Republicans Lie More and Less?

Probably thanks to social media dollars drawing fact checkers away from politicians and toward fake news and social media hijinx, PolitiFact is finding fewer false claims from Republicans. No! I'm not kidding.

Check the presidential election year peaks.

2008 : 55 (PolitiFact's infancy)

2012: 247 (Good ol' Romney)

2016: 237 (Dawn of the Trump)

2020: 253 (Day of the Trump)

2024: 132 (Return of the Trump)

PolitiFact barely gave the GOP half the false ratings it did in 2020. When former PolitiFact editor Bill Adair runs around in support of his new book decrying an explosion in political falsehoods, what is he talking about? PolitiFact has apparently cut Democrat falsehoods down to almost nothing and cut Republican falsehoods nearly in half.

No, of course we don't believe that. A fool would believe that. We say the "Truth-O-Meter" numbers give us information about PolitiFact, not about the figures on whom they stand in judgment.