PolitiFact's inept defense of Hakeem Jeffries, with bonus flub

Why does PolitiFact so often appear defensive of Democrats? Ha ha, it's probably just my own bias that makes it seem that way. On the other hand, PolitiFact's habit of using inconsistent standards that unfairly aid Democrats while unfairly harming Republicans makes it seem maybe like I've got a point?

And that brings us to Democrat Hakeem Jeffries and the accusation of violent rhetoric.

Note PolitiFact tries to rig the game a bit right out of the box. Can a comment about redistricting double as a call to violence if the rhetoric meets a minimum violence threshold? We don't see why not, though don't look to us to set that bar.

PolitiFact sort-of tries to do the article the right way. It's always important to consider context. PolitiFact tells us Jeffries used the "maximum warfare" line strictly in the context of the partisan gerrymandering contest:

While Jeffries used those words, the soundbite lacks larger context.

Jeffries’ said "maximum warfare" to describe Democrats’ efforts to secure more House seats after Virginia voters passed a constitutional amendment on redistricting April 21, seen as a win for Democrats.

The problem? PolitiFact unwittingly gave its readers obvious evidence it wasn't giving the full context.

The photograph PolitiFact included with its story showed the poster the Democrats prominently displayed before, during and after Jeffries' speech. The poster has the "Maximum Warfare. Everywhere. All the Time" language with Trump in the foreground and key administration figure Stephen Miller in the background.

We fault PolitiFact for not considering the poster's impact on the context of Jefferies' speech. Displaying the poster puts everything that was said under the color of that image. There was plenty about battling Republican policies, suggesting redistricting was one such battle. 

It's also worth emphasizing the prominence of the Trump image in the poster. As noted, the poster doesn't do anything to suggest a connection to redistricting. It does suggest an intense conflict between Democrats and Republicans.

While we allow some legitimacy to the PolitiFact defense where GOP critics focused on Jeffries' use of the words, it counts as a significant error to omit mention of the poster while explaining the context of the speech.

And then there's the bonus flub.

Bonus Flub: Pirate's Code #9463

How often have we said PolitiFact treats its principles more as guidelines than actual rules, as with the "Pirate's Code" from the film "Pirates of the Caribbean"?

PolitiFact, stemming from its origins with the St. Petersburg Times, has a policy discouraging the use of anonymous sources. Here's how it's expressed in PolitiFact's statement of principles:

We emphasize primary sources and original documentation. We seek direct access to government reports, academic studies and other data. It’s not sufficient for us to get something second-hand. We don’t rely on what a campaign or elected official tells us -- we verify it independently.

In cases where PolitiFact must cite news reports from other media that rely on unnamed or unattributed sources (usually due to the extreme newsworthiness of the report), we note that we cannot independently verify their reporting.

The Jeffries defense traces the "Maximum Warfare" phrase to an anonymous source quoted in The New York Times. There's no admission PolitiFact was unable to confirm the report:

It wasn’t his first time using the phrase in a redistricting context— and Jeffries didn’t come up with it. It came up from someone on Trump’s side months earlier in media coverage of state redistricting battles.

In August 2025, The New York Times examined the consequences of Trump pushing Texas Republicans to redistrict, leading Democrats to talk about fighting "fire with fire." The Times wrote: "One person close to the president, who insisted on anonymity to describe the White House's political strategy candidly, summed it up succinctly: "Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time."

That's good enough for the fact checkers who supposedly rely on on-the-record sourcing.

PolitiFact fact checkers stink.

PolitiFact's Fallacious "Burden of Proof" Bites a Democrat? Or Not

We're nonpartisan because we defend Democrats unfairly harmed by the faulty fact checkers at PolitiFact.

See how that works?

On with it, then:

Oops.

Okay, we made a faulty assumption. We thought when we saw PolitiFact's liberal audience complaining about the treatment of Nelson that it meant Nelson had received a "False" rating based on Nelson not offering evidence to support his claim.

But PolitiFact did not give Nelson a "Truth-O-Meter" rating at all. Instead of the "Truth-O-Meter" graphic for the claim (there is none), PolitiFact gave its readers the "Share The Facts" version:

Republicans (and perhaps Democrats) have received poor ratings in the past where evidence was lacking, which PolitiFact justifies according to its "burden of proof" criterion. But either the principle has changed or else PolitiFact made an(other) exception to aid Nelson.

If the principle has changed that's good. It's stupid and fallacious to apply a burden of proof standard in fact checking, at least where one determines a truth value based purely on the lack of evidence.

But's it's small consolation to the people PolitiFact unfairly harmed in the past with its application of this faulty principle.


Afters:

In April 2018 it looks like the "burden of proof" principle was still a principle.

As we have noted before, it often appears that PolitiFact's principles are more like guidelines than actual rules.

And to maintain our nonpartisan street cred, here's PolitiFact applying the silly burden of proof principle to a Democrat:

If "burden of proof" counts as one of PolitiFact's principles then PolitiFact can only claim itself as a principled fact checker if the Nelson exception features a principled reason justifying the exception.

If anyone can find anything like that in the non-rating rating of Nelson, please drop us a line.

PolitiFact disallows Trump's underlying point?

PolitiFact's defenders sometimes opine that PolitiFact always justifies its rulings.

We accept that PolitiFact typically includes words in its fact checks intended to justify its rulings. But we detect bias in PolitiFact's inconsistent application of principles when it tries to justify its ratings.

Our example this time comes from an Aug. 31, 2017 fact check of President Donald Trump's claim that illegal border crossings have slowed by 78 percent.

Zebra Fact Check on Aug. 30, 2017 published criticisms of the way PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker handled this claim. PolitiFact's latest version corrects none of the specified problems, including the failure to attempt a reasonable fact check of how much of a drop in illegal Southwest border crossings Trump can claim.

As with its earlier fact check, PolitiFact offers examples of various cherry-picked statistics, implicitly demonstrating that cherry-picking leads to a divergent set of outcomes:

Here’s how the number of apprehensions have changed:
• From July 2016 to July 2017, down 46 percent;​
• From June 2017 to July 2017, up 13 percent;
• From November 2016 to July 2017, down 61 percent.

As I explained over at Zebra Fact Check, a serious attempt to measure a drop in border crossings explains the use of a proxy measure (border apprehensions) and then picks a representative baseline against which to measure the change.

Zebra Fact Check calculated a 56 percent change. FactCheck.org calculated 58 percent.

PolitiFact has yet to make a reasonable attempt to establish a representative baseline. The best attempt in the cherry-picked set we quoted was the comparison of July 2016 to July 2017, showing a 46 percent change. That comparison suffers from offering a narrow picture, made up of individual months separated by a year in time. Also, 2016 was not a typical year for border apprehensions under the Obama administration. But at least it compared Trump to Obama in an apples-to-apples sense.

PolitiFact's 46 percent figure ends up in the ballpark with the 58 percent figure FactCheck.org produced.

That's where the problem comes in.

Where is Trump's underlying point?

Back in 2008, PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair published an article trying to explain how PolitiFact treats numbers claims.

To assess the truth for a numbers claim, the biggest factor is the underlying message.

Adair used as one of his examples a claim by then-presidential candidate Barack Obama that his mixed-marriage birth was illegal in 12 states when he has born. PolitiFact found it was illegal in 22 states but rated the claim "Mostly True." That is the potential power of the underlying argument. If one makes Obama's claim into "My mixed marriage birth was illegal in many states when I was born" then it's essentially accurate, but you can drop Obama down to just "Mostly True" since he underestimated the number of states by 10.

Does Trump have an underlying point that illegal Southwest border crossings have decreased under his watch?

It appears that he does, and it appears that PolitiFact offers him no credit for it. PolitiFact's fact check shows no interest at all in Trump's underlying point.

Why?




Correction Sept. 1, 2017: Swapped out "Did" for "Does" in the third-to-last paragraph.

PolitiFact editor: Principles developed "through sheer repetition"

PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan this week published her ruminations on PolitiFact's first 10 years of fact-checking.

Her section on the development of PolitiFact's principles drew our attention (bold emphasis added):

We also have made big strides in improving methodology, the system we use for researching, writing and editing thousands of fact-checks, more than 13,000 and counting at PolitiFact.com.

Through sheer repetition, we’ve developed principles and checklists for fact-checking. PolitiFact’s Principles of the Truth-O-Meter describes in detail our approach to ensuring fairness and thoroughness. Our checklist includes contacting the person we’re fact-checking, searching fact-check archives, doing Google and database searches, consulting experts and authors, and then asking ourselves one more time what we’re missing.

The line to which we added bold emphasis doesn't really make any sense. One develops principles and checklists by experience and adaptation, not by "sheer repetition." Sheer repetition results in repeating exactly the procedures one started out with.

PolitiFact's definitions for its "Truth-O-Meter" ratings appear on the earliest Internet Archive page we could load: September 21, 2007, featuring the original definition of "Half True" that PolitiFact not-so-smoothly dumped around 2011. So the definitions do not appear to have resulted from "sheer repetition."

The likely truth is that PolitiFact developed an original set of principles based on what probably felt like careful consideration at the time. And as the organization encountered difficulties it tweaked its process.

Does the contemporary process count as "big strides" in improving PolitiFact's methodology?

We're not really seeing it.

When PolitiFact won its 2008 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, one of the stories among the 13 submitted was a "Mostly True" rating for Barack Obama's claim that his uncle had helped liberate Auschwitz. Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet army. Mr. Obama's uncle was not part of the Soviet army. A false claim received a "Mostly True" rating.

This week, PolitiFact California issued a "Mostly True" rating for the claim a National Academy of Sciences study found undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. If PolitiFact had looked at the claim in terms of raw numbers, it would likely prove true. Native-born Americans, after all, substantially outnumber undocumented immigrants. Such a comparison means very little, of course.

PolitiFact California simply overlooked the fact that the study looked at immigrants generally, not undocumented immigrants. We wish we were kidding. We are not kidding:

We started by checking out the 2015 National Academy of Sciences study Villaraigosa cited. It found: "Immigrants are in fact much less likely to commit crime than natives, and the presence of large numbers of immigrants seems to lower crime rates." The study added that "This disparity also holds for young men most likely to be undocumented immigrants: Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men.

While the latter half of the paragraph hints at data specific to undocumented immigrants, we should note two important facts. First, measuring crime rates for Guatemalan immigrants in general serves as a poor method for gauging the criminality of undocumented Guatemalan immigrants. The same goes for immigrants from other nations. Second, PolitiFact California presents this information as though it came from the NAS study. In fact, the NAS study was summarizing the findings of a different study.

Neither study reached conclusions specific to undocumented immigrants, for neither used data permitting such conclusions.

Yet PolitiFact California found the following statement "Mostly True" (bold emphasis added):

"But going after the undocumented is not a crime strategy, when you look at the fact that the National Academy of Sciences in, I think it was November of 2015, the undocumented immigrants commit less crimes than the native born. That’s just a fact."

False statement, "Mostly True" rating.

If PolitiFact has learned anything over the past 10 years, it is that it can largely get away with passing incompetent fact-checking and subjective ratings on to its loyal readers.

Newsbusters: "PolitiFact's Pretzel Twist for Democrat Gwen Moore: 'Mostly True,' But Not 'Literally Speaking'"

Tim Graham of Newsbusters scores a hit on PolitiFact Wisconsin with his Aug. 2, 2017 item on a rating from PolitiFact Wisconsin.

Rep. Gwen Moore (D--Wis) said, according to PolitiFact, "If you’re killed at 31 years old like Dontre Hamilton, who was shot 14 times by police for resting on a park bench in Milwaukee, nursing home care is not your priority."

PolitiFact Wisconsin admitted Moore's statement was not literally true:

Literally speaking, Hamilton was not killed simply for resting on a bench. He was shot after striking an officer with the officer’s baton.

PolitiFact Wisconsin rated the false statement "Mostly True."

In PolitiFact Wisconsin's defense, it imagined into being a way of viewing Moore's statement as true:

But in making a rhetorical point, Moore is correct that Hamilton had done nothing to attract the attention of police but fall asleep in a park.

Bless PolitiFact's heart for relieving Moore of the responsibility for using appropriate words to make her supposed rhetorical point. Moore did not talk at all about simply "drawing the attention of police." She talked specifically about Hamilton being shot (14 times) "for resting on a park bench."

This case helps illustrate how PolitiFact's "star chamber" feels little constraint from its stated definitions for its "Truth-O-Meter" ratings. PolitiFact defines "Mostly True" as "The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information."

In what manner was Moore's statement accurate without PolitiFact rewriting it to focus on the way Hamilton drew the attention of police?

If PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" definitions were worth anything, then no false statement like Moore's would ever receive a rating of "Mostly True" or better. But it happens often.

Is it any wonder that people do not trust mainstream media fact checkers like PolitiFact?



Update March 24, 2019: Updated URL leading to PolitiFact's statement of principles. PolitiFact changed its statement of principles under a new URL. The old URL redirects to the new one. So we're now using the version from the Internet Archive from August 2017.

PolitiFact absurdly keeps "True" rating on false statement from Hillary Clinton

Today we were alerted about a story from earlier this week detailing a New York Times correction.

Heavy.com, from June 30, 2017:

On June 29 The New York Times issued a retraction to an article published on Monday, which originally stated that all 17 intelligence organizations had agreed that Russia orchestrated the hacking. The retraction reads, in part:

The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies — the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community.”

It should be noted that the four intelligence agencies are not retracting their statements about Russia involvement. But all 17 did not individually come to the assessment, despite what so many people insisted back in October.

The same article went on to point out that PolitiFact had rated "True" Hillary Rodham Clinton's claim that 17 U.S. intelligence agencies found Russia responsible for hacking. That despite acknowledging it had no evidence backing the idea that each agency had reached the conclusion based on its own investigation:

Politifact concluded that 17 agencies had, indeed, agreed on this because “the U.S. Intelligence Community is made up of 17 agencies.” However, the 17 agencies had not independently made the assessment, as many believed. Politifact mentioned this in the story, but still said the statement was correct.

We looked up the PolitiFact story in question. Heavy.com presents PolitiFact's reasoning accurately.

It makes for a great example of horrible fact-checking.

Clinton's statement implied each of the 17 agencies made its own finding:

"We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election."

It's very easy to avoid making that implication: "Our intelligence agencies have concluded ..." Such a phrasing fairly represents a finding backed by a figure representing all 17 agencies. But when Clinton emphasized the 17 agencies "all" reached the same conclusion it implied independent investigations.

PolitiFact ignored that false implication in its original rating and in a June 2017 update to the article in response to information from FBI Director James Clapper's testimony earlier in the year:

The January report presented its findings by saying "we assess," with "we" meaning "an assessment by all three agencies."

The October statement, on the other hand, said "The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident" in its assessment. As we noted in the article, the 17 separate agencies did not independently come to this conclusion, but as the head of the intelligence community, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence speaks on behalf of the group.

We stand by our rating.

PolitiFact's rating was and is preposterous. Note how PolitiFact defines its "True" and "Mostly True" ratings:

TRUE – The statement is accurate and there’s nothing significant missing.
MOSTLY TRUE – The statement is accurate but needs clarification or additional information.

It doesn't pass the sniff test to assert that Clinton's claim about "17 agencies" needs no clarification or additional information. We suppose that only a left-leaning and/or unserious fact-checking organization would conclude otherwise.

Another nugget from the Hollyfield interview

In an earlier post we pointed out how managing editor Amy Hollyfield of PolitiFact described its "Truth-O-Meter" in terms hard to reconcile with those used by PolitiFact's creator, Bill Adair.

The Hollyfield interview published at The Politic (Yale University) contains other amusing nuggets, such as this howler (bold emphasis added):

We take accuracy very seriously. Transparency is one of the key things we focus on, which is why we publish all the sources for our fact checks. We flag every correction and have a subject tag called “correction,” so you can see every fact check we’ve put a correction on.

We find Hollyfield's assertion offensive, especially as it occurs in response to a question about this website, PolitiFact Bias.

PolitiFact does a poor job of consistently adding the subject tags to corrected articles.

We pointed out an example in December 2016. PolitiFact California changed the rating of a fact check from "True" to "Half True," publishing a new version of its fact check from months earlier. Weeks later, PolitiFact California has yet to add a tag to the article that would make it appear on PolitiFact's "Corrections and Updates" page.

Maybe PolitiFact California does not regard rewriting an article as a correction or update?

How about PolitiFact Pennsylvania from January 2017? Lawyers pointed out that the Pennsylvania PolitiFact franchise incorrectly described the standard of evidence courts use for criminal cases. PolitiFact Pennsylvania ran a correction (the correction made the fact check incoherent, but that's another story), but added no tag to the story.

So, contrary to what Hollyfield claims, the corrected story is not transparently presented on its "Corrections and Updates" page.

PolitiFact's spotty compliance with its statement of principles is not new. We even complained about the problem to Paul Tash, the president of the Tampa Bay Times (Nov. 18, 2016). But we've noticed no improvement.

PolitiFact does not have a page that transparently informs readers of all of its corrections.

Will you believe Amy Hollyfield or your own lyin' eyes?

The biased "True" rating for Michelle Obama's claim the White House was built by slaves

Over the years we've built up quite a bit of evidence of PolitiFact's bias, based largely on PolitiFact's inconsistent application of standards.

A PolitiFact fact check of Michelle Obama's speech to the Democratic National Convention supplies yet another strong example.

One could easily read Obama's statement to mean that the White House was built exclusively with slave labor. That was not the case, as the text of the fact check concedes. Not telling a significant part of the story often leads to PolitiFact rating a true claim "Mostly True" or worse.

Not this time (bold emphasis added):

Obama said the White House "was built by slaves." Strictly speaking, the White House was not exclusively built by slaves; it was built by a combination of slaves, free blacks and whites. But slaves were significantly involved in the construction of the White House, so we have no quarrel with the way Obama worded her claim. We rate it True.

Obama's claim was imprecise and people might be misled by it. However, PolitiFact has no problem with the way she worded her claim.

That's tossing principles on the scrap head, not that PolitiFact is consistent enough in applying its principles that they deserve the term "principles."

Need a comparison? There are many. How about this one?

PolitiFact's summary draws the perfect contrast:

Trump has a point here, but he should have used different words to make it. We rate his claim Mostly False.

PolitiFact has no problem with Obama's word choice. But Trump should have used different words to make his valid point.

These two political figures are not being judged according to the same standard.

Fact-checking. This is why so many cannot take PolitiFact's brand of fact-checking seriously. The great mystery is why the folks at PolitiFact think it is okay to check facts this way.

If they know it is not okay and yet do it anyway, well, that puts the problem in a different light.


Afters:

We often hear the excuse from PolitiFact's defenders that PolitiFact always justifies its ratings.

To those people, we ask if you would have accepted this explanation from PolitiFact:

Trump said Chevrolet in Japan "does not exist." Strictly speaking, there are some Chevrolet vehicles in Japan though the number is relatively small compared to the more popular makes. Since the number of Chevrolets is so small we have no problem with the hyperbolic way Trump worded his claim. We rate it True.

Always justifying the rating does not help if the justifications do not follow consistent principles.