PolitiFact.com is a project operated by the Tampa Bay Times, in which its reporters and editors "fact-check statements by members of Congress, the White House, lobbyists and interest groups...."[1] They publish original statements and their evaluations on the PolitiFact.com website, and assign each a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for completely accurate statements to "Pants on Fire" (from the taunt "Liar, liar, pants on fire") for outright lies.
The site also includes an "Obameter", tracking President Barack Obama's performance with regard to his campaign promises, and a "GOP Pledge-O-Meter", which tracks promises made by House Republicans in their "Pledge to America".
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PolitiFact.com was started in August 2007 by Times Washington Bureau Chief Bill Adair, in conjunction with the Congressional Quarterly. Adair remains PolitiFact.com's editor.[2]
In January 2010, PolitiFact.com expanded to its second newspaper, the Cox-owned Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas; the feature, called Politifact Texas, covers issues that are relevant to Texas and the Austin area.
In March 2010, the Times and its partner newspaper, The Miami Herald, launched Politifact Florida, which focuses on Florida issues. The Times and The Herald share resources on some stories that relate to Florida.
Since then, PolitiFact.com expanded to other papers, such as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Providence Journal, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The Plain Dealer, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and The Oregonian.
Since 2009, PolitiFact.com has every year declared one political statement from that year to be the "Lie of the Year".
In December 2009, they declared the Lie of the Year to be Sarah Palin's assertion that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 would lead to government "death panels" that dictated which types of patients would receive treatment.[3]
Columnist James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, writing in 2011, criticized this choice, saying that PolitiFact.com relied on an "out-of-context interpretation" of Palin's words, and that Palin's basic argument, that the act would lead to the government "drastically curtailing medical benefits", was in fact correct.[4]
In December 2010, PolitiFact.com dubbed the lie of the year to be the contention among some opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that it represented a "government takeover of healthcare". PolitiFact.com argued that this was not the case, since all providing of health care and insurance would remain in the hands of private companies.[5]
The 2010 "lie of the year" decision was quoted approvingly by Stephanie Cutter on the White House blog.[6] It was disputed, however, by libertarian Reason magazine journalist Peter Suderman, who called the government-takeover charge simply an "exaggeration with elements of truth",[7] as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who wrote that the health-care act "sounds like a government takeover to us."[8]
PolitiFact's "lie of the year" for 2011 was a statement by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) that a 2011 budget proposal by Congressman Paul Ryan, entitled The Path to Prosperity and voted for overwhelmingly by Republicans in the House and Senate, meant that "Republicans voted to end Medicare."[9] PolitiFact argued that, though the Republican plan would make significant changes to Medicare, it would not end it. This choice caused a great deal of controversy. PolitiFact had originally labeled this statement a "pants on fire" lie in April 2011;[10] this assertion was criticized at the time by left-wing blogs including the Daily Kos,[11] Talking Points Memo[12] and Firedoglake.[13] After it was named the lie of the year, the choice was criticized by commentators including Paul Krugman, who wrote that the DCCC statement was true and was chosen only because PolitiFact, having criticized conservatives in the two previous years, had "bent over backwards to appear 'balanced'"[14]; Steve Benen, who called the decision "credibility-killing"[15]; Jonathan Chait, who called PolitiFact a "shoddy, not-very-smart group"[16]; and David Weigel[17]. The choice was also criticized by conservative commentators, such as Taranto and Ramesh Ponnuru, who called the DCCC statement incorrect but a matter of opinion, not a lie.[18][19]
PolitiFact.com was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009 for "its fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters."[20]
PolitiFact.com has faced assertions among some politically conservative commentators that it is politically biased in its declarations of truth and untruth. Mark Hemingway of The Weekly Standard criticized PolitiFact, in addition to similar recently created fact-checking projects from other news organizations, writing that they "aren’t about checking facts so much as they are about a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths out of the conversation." Hemingway cited a study by the University of Minnesota Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs that found that, of 98 statements by American political figures that PolitiFact judged to be false from January 2010 to January 2011, 74 were by Republicans, while 22 were by Democrats.[21]
Taranto of the Wall Street Journal called PolitiFact.com "less seeker of truth than servant of power",[4] while a Wall Street Journal editorial wrote that PolitiFact is "part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and 'facts,' rather than differences of world view or principles."[8] In The American Spectator, conservative analyst Matthew Vadum, citing several of PolitiFact.com's analyses, called their content "political opinion masquerading as high-minded investigative journalism."[22]
Civil libertarian Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald wrote of PolitiFact that "it undermines its own credibility when it purports to resolve subjective disputes of political opinion under the guise of objective expertise" and that the sources it cites in its analysis tend to be "highly biased, ideologically rigid establishment advocates" presented "as some kind of neutral expert-arbiters of fact."[23]
In October 2009, PolitiFact.com fact-checked a skit on the sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live that showed President Obama stating that he had not accomplished anything thus far;[24] PolitiFact's appraisal was then reported on CNN. Wall Street Journal writer James Taranto called the fact-checking "a bizarre exercise", and added, "PolitiFact does not appear to have done the same for past "SNL" sketches spoofing Republican politicians... It's as if CNN and the St. Petersburg Times are trying to reinforce the impression that they are in the tank for Obama.".[25]
In February 2010, PolitiFact.com rated President Obama's statement that the Recovery Act had saved or created 2 million jobs in the United States as "half true", stating that the real figure was 1 million according to several independent studies.[26] Economist Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation responded that such a statement "belongs in an opinion editorial - not a fact check", since "there is no way to determine how the economy would have performed without a stimulus."[27]
In July 2010, Huffington Post blogger Ayo Adeyeye criticized them for labelling a statement by Arianna Huffington that the company Halliburton was "defraud[ing] the American taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars" as half-true, instead of fully true. [28]
In February 2011, Rachel Maddow criticized PolitiFact for stating that she denied that there was a budget shortfall in Wisconsin.[29]