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.

.

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.