PolitiFact's 'Pants on Fire' bias in 2025 WOWZA

Since 2011 PolitiFact Bias has tracked PolitiFact's "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings, using the rate at which false claims are subjectively deemed "Pants on Fire" to measure ideological bias.

Last year proved a landmark year for the bias study. That's despite the fact that PolitiFact stymied any attempt to calculate a meaningful "PoF bias number" for 2025. That number represents the likelihood PolitiFact will issue a "Pants on Fire" rating to a false statement from a Republican compared to a Democrat. A PoF bias number of 1.5, for example, says a GOP falsehood is 50 percent more likely to receive the "Pants on Fire" rating than a Democrat. It's a simple matter of finding the total falsehoods for each party, then dividing the number of "Pants on Fire" ratings by the total number of falsehoods PolitiFact counted.

The PoF bias number occurs completely independently from the sheer number of falsehoods. But if a party receives no "Pants on Fire" ratings at all in a given year then we can't compare the percentages from each party to see which is more likely. In 2025 PolitiFact issued zero "Pants on Fire" ratings to Democrats.

Important note: After starting his post and creating the graphs, I discovered an error where I had undercounted by one the Democratic "Pants on Fire" by one a few years back. One PoF makes a significant difference in the numbers for the Democrats because they receive so few of them compared to the GOP.

We elected to publish the flawed crafts with this disclaimer. We have the error ironed out, so it's not likely to affect future graphs.

Interestingly, both parties have received fewer "False" and "Pants on Fire" ratings in recent years. That's likely explained by the distorting effect of paid social media fact-checking partnerships, though Facebook's termination of the partnership program in 2025 did not appear to upset the trend.

Despite no PoF bias number for 2025, the 2025 data helps reinforce the past data trends. The percentage of "Pants on Fire" ratings for the GOP was highly consistent with the average since 2007 (25.35 percent compared to 25.99 percent) That percentage over time remains consistent at a level that counts as downright creepy.

If we toss the outliers (Dems 2007, GOP 2023), the GOP slotted right in between 20 and 31 consistently. The Democratic Party side showed no such consistency, ranging from 0 to 30 and showing a relatively consistent downward trend.

What Are We Measuring?

Our research results drive us back toward the basic question: What are we measuring? Is there a tendency to fib that's consistent within the Republican Party, or is there tendency from PolitiFact, driven by bias, that creates the consistency in the numbers?

Given the apparent subjectivity of the "Pants on Fire" rating, the answer seems obvious. Subjective rating scales serve very poorly for measuring objective things. But they serve very well for measuring subjective things.

We at PolitiFact Bias assert that the numbers show us what PolitiFact subjectively believes about Republicans.

And what of the comparatively all-over-the-place numbers for Democrats? What do those show?

This one's tougher to pin down, but we have a few suggestions based on our years of observation.

New fact checkers start out trying to impress on readers their neutrality. We saw this repeatedly with PolitiFact's new state franchises. They tended to start out tough on Democrats and ease up very soon after. With their neutrality established for the readers they felt free to tell the truth (as they saw it) that the GOP lies more. Bryan's (my) Zebra Fact Check did very much the same thing. The first year I put more effort into fact-checking Republicans to give skeptical readers a measure of the website's fairness. Later I fact checked as I pleased.

The years 2010 through 2015 or so show heavy input from key state franchises like PolitiFact Texas and PolitiFact Wisconsin. The states were doing much of PolitiFact's fact-checking in those years, and (not counting PolitiFact Florida) tended to show less bias toward Republicans. 

I thought PolitiFact National emptied the states of their editorial control. But Iforgot PolitiFact's Louis Jacobson posted on X about his meeting with PolitiFact New York's editorial board, suggesting each state maintains a state version of the ruling editorial board.

We think the dwindling number of falsehoods attributed to Democrats simply shows PolitiFact has grown less interested in examining falsehoods from Democrats. There's no reasonable evidence Democrats simply stopped making false statements. Democrats in 2024 weren't held to account for finding President Biden sharp as a tack, for example.