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.

PolitiFact: How can we rig this abortion fact check to help President Biden? Part II

Lo and behold, PolitiFact made changes to the fact check we critiqued in our previous post.

Recall that we lodged three main criticisms of PolitiFact's "Mostly True" confirmation of President Biden's claim the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision made the United States an outlier among developed nations.

1. PolitiFact cherry-picked its pool of "developed nations."
2. It misidentified "Great Britain" as a member of the G7, enabling it to ignore a Northern Ireland spanner in the works
3. It falsely stated members of the G7, except the United States, "have national laws or court decisions that allow access to abortion, with various restrictions."

PolitiFact partially fixed the second problem.

Fixing the second problem without fixing the third problem magnifies the third problem. And PolitiFact, again, failed to follow its own corrections policy.

Let's start with the "clarification" notice and work from there:

CLARIFICATION, June 27, 2022: This story has been clarified to reflect that the United Kingdom, which contains Northern Ireland, is a G-7 nation. It has also been updated to describe current abortion laws in Northern Ireland.

Note the "clarification" notice announces a clarification and an update.

What does PolitiFact's statement of principles prescribe for clarifications and updates?

Clarification:

Oops! PolitiFact's statement of principles offers no procedure for doing a clarification!

The either means that PolitiFact is following its principles because the principles allow it to do whatever it wants, or else it means that PolitiFact isn't really following a principle.

Update:

Updates – From time to time, we add additional information to stories and fact-checks after they’ve published, not as a correction but as a service to readers. Examples include a response from the speaker we received after publication (that did not change the conclusion of the report), or breaking news after publication that is relevant to the check. Updates can be made parenthetically within the text with a date, or at the end of the report. Updated fact-checks receive a tag of "Corrections and updates."

We think it clear that this policy calls for newly added "update" material within the original text to occur with clear cues to the reader where the material was added ("parenthetically within the text with a date"). Otherwise, the new material occurs at the end of the item after the update notice.

It's easier to find PolitiFact updates done incorrectly than ones done correctly. But this example shows an update done the right way:

 

The method shown communicates clearly to readers how the article changed.

This is infinitely more transparent than PolitiFact's common practice of an update notice at the end saying, in effect "We changed stuff in the story above on this date."

Understood correctly, PolitiFact corrected its story. It fixed its mistake in misleadingly identifying Great Britain as a member of the G7. And the "update" was not new information. It was information PolitiFact should have included originally but mistakenly did not.

The fact check continues to do readers a disservice by failing to inform them that the U.K. in 2019 forced Northern Ireland, via special legislation, to permit abortion. That still-missing fact contradicts PolitiFact's claim that members of the G7 other than the United States"have national laws or court decisions that allow access to abortion, with various restrictions." The legislation forcing Northern Ireland to permit legal abortion was not a national law, nor was it a court decision.

The law is specific to Northern Ireland.

We'll end with an image we created for Twitter. It's an image from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, using its comparison feature. Text highlighted in blue was changed from the original text, and we added red lines under the part of PolitiFact's fact check that remains false.

PolitiFact: How can we rig this abortion fact check to help President Biden?

Day by day, it's amazing to watch the kind of material PolitiFact publishes as supposedly "not biased" fact-checking.

From yesterday, June 24, we have this (red X added):

In what respect was President Biden claiming the United States counts as an outlier among "developed nations"? Here's how PolitiFact presented the president's statement:

"With this decision, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court shows how extreme it is, how far removed they are from the majority of this country," Biden said a couple hours after the ruling was released on June 24. "They have made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world."

How far removed is the Supreme Court from the majority in this country? If we start with the amount of legal education, the gulf between does seem obvious. But Biden surely meant the Court's attitude toward abortion, even though the Court was faced with ruling on what U.S. law says about abortion, and not how to transform popular American attitudes into national law.

And how had the Court "made the United States an  outlier among developed nations of the world"? PolitiFact has published items showing it at least understands that abortion law varies widely among comparably developed nations. If it's "Half True" that "'39 out of 42 (countries) in Europe have more restrictive abortion laws' than Mississippi" then how is PolitiFact supposed to pull Biden's fat out of the fire on this one?

PolitiFact called in the Spin Team (our term!) of Madison Czopek and Tom Kertscher. The team developed a PolitiFantastic interpretation of Biden's claim:

While the high court’s decision leaves in place state laws that permit abortion, it removes the national right to an abortion — something that is widely guaranteed by laws or court rulings in other developed nations.

So ... President Biden was just saying that Court made the United States, home of the 10th amendment, an outlier on the basis of  its newfound lack of an explicit or de facto national abortion access law?

But what other developed nations have something like the 10th amendment in their constitutions? If they lack such a thing then isn't this a pointless exercise? The U.S. is an outlier because of the structure of its federalist system, not simply because of the Court.

Damn those torpedoes! PolitiFact's going full speed ahead!

Would you believe ...

... no mention of 'federalism'?

PolitiFact came oh-so-close to unraveling the mystery of the missing federal law setting abortion policy nationally in the United States:

The high court ruled 6-3 to uphold a restrictive Mississippi law and 5-4 to reverse Roe, with the majority opinion saying "the Constitution makes no express reference to a right to obtain an abortion." The decision ended nearly 50 years of federally protected access to abortion and returned power to individual states to set their own laws.

That means access to abortion varies widely in the U.S.

 Correct, PolitiFact. It's almost like the European Union that way.

In the EU, Malta is the only country where abortion is still completely prohibited. But Poland has a near-total ban in place, and many EU states have a range of legal barriers to abortion, such as mandatory counselling, waiting periods between a request and the abortion, third party consent, low upper time limits and limited legal grounds that force many women to travel to other countries, and all the increased restrictions on travel due to Covid-19, especially where access to abortion pills and self-managed abortion have not been made available.

 It's going to be really something when these fact checkers discover the concept of federalism.

... 'developed nations' don't need to be restricted to just the G7?

PolitiFact cleverly removed Malta and Poland from the "developed nations" list by restricting that list to the G7:

Developed nations consisting of the world’s leading economies are sometimes referred to as the G7, or the Group of Seven, which includes the U.S. and six other industrialized nations. Unlike the U.S., those six have national laws or court decisions that allow access to abortion, with various restrictions.

Would you believe PolitiFact has no consistent history of confining "developed nations" to the G7?

... 'Great Britain' as a G7 nation?

Would you believe Great Britain isn't listed as a G7 nation even though PolitiFact includes "Great Britain" on its list?

Would you believe that Great Britain isn't the same thing as the United Kingdom with respect to abortion law?

Great Britain technically refers to the main British island, made up of England, Scotland and Wales. "Great Britain" is sometimes used as a synonym for the United Kingdom, but if PolitiFact meant it that way then it should have pointed out that the U.K. only passed a law later resulting in liberalized abortion law in Northern Ireland in 2019.

"U.K." literally means "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."

So the United Kingdom was the G7 outlier until 2019. The G7 went with no outlier for a couple of years before the SCOTUS struck down the Roe v. Wade precedent.

Why did PolitiFact miss all this stuff?

Probably because PolitiFact is biased. Very probably.