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.