'Fact-check' wars heat up

 Federalist:

PolitiFact botched a fact-check of a fact-check in a story exposing the group’s absence of a fact-check.

On Friday, PolitiFact Editor-in-Chief Angie Holan twice demanded The Federalist issue a correction to a story published Wednesday on comments the group was not very interested in fact-checking Vice President Kamala Harris.

“We’ve always been more interested in fact-checking the president than the vice president,” Holan wrote in an email Wednesday, when pushed on why the group had failed to fact-check demonstrably false comments from Harris. “That was true for the past two administrations as well.”

Harris claimed during an interview with Axios on HBO published this week that the Biden administration has been forced to start “from scratch” on coronavirus vaccine distribution.

“We’re starting from scratch,” Harris said, only to be directly contradicted by National Institutes of Health Director Anthony Fauci speaking to reporters a month earlier.

“We’re certainly not starting from scratch,” Fauci said. In fact, the Trump administration put team Biden on track to reach its initial goal of 100 million vaccines in the first 100 days. On the day after Biden was inaugurated, 1.3 million Americans were inoculated, according to Bloomberg News.

PolitiFact told The Federalist the group had no plans to fact-check Harris for the reason stated above, and added the fact-checking organization already fact-checked a similar claim when it was made by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain in January. The group rated Klain’s comments “mostly false.”

PolitiFact took issue with The Federalist story published Feb. 17, however, over the publication highlighting the group’s last fact-check of President Joe Biden dated for Feb. 10, one week earlier.

“Your report is wrong in multiple ways,” Holan wrote in a Friday email. “For one, we published three fact-checks on Feb. 16, so our last check on Biden was the day before your report was published. The link you use in the story shows that. Please issue a correction ASAP.”

Holan followed up two hours later, demanding an update.

The link embedded in the initial post to Biden’s fact-checks on the PolitiFact website, however, which remains unchanged, shows PolitiFact published three fact-checks after the story was published in The Federalist, of statements made on Feb. 16, including Biden’s remarks on vaccines. Contrary to Holan’s assertion, these fact-checks were published on Feb. 17 and 18, following the Federalist article.
...

I think they shy away from fact-checking Democrats in general because the genre appears designed to attack Trump and other Republicans.   It is a way the left highlights its disagreements with what Republicans say.

I do think it is just bizarre how both Biden and Harris as well as others in the administration continue to lie about the availability and distribution efforts of a vaccine produced in record time because of Trump's Operation Warp Speed.

See, also:

PolitiFact top editor says 'no clear-cut answers' on Cuomo allegedly covering up nursing home deaths

At this point, it looks like willful blindness by PolitiFact. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Washington Post: Some Democrats eye adding more justices to the Supreme Court to change its ideological bent The once-remote idea has gained the attention of liberals angered by the GOP push to remake the federal courts. Probably the easy way to defeat this court-packing scheme is for Trump to propose doing the same thing now.  It would lead to Democrat denunciations and claims that it would be wrong, thereby blowing up any attempt by them in the unfortunate event of Democrats winning a presidential election.
Read more

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Conn Carroll: A new survey of 368 midsize to large companies found that 29% of them are considering terminating their active employee health care plans when Obamacare is full implemented in 2014. Only 71% of employers surveyed said they did not expect to drop their health coverage, while 20% said they did not know and 9% said they were planning to exit. The latest survey, conducted by Towers Watson, echoes an ealier survey by McKinsey & Co. finding that 30% of private-sector employers were planning to drop their employee health insurance coverage by 2014. When the Congressional Budget Office crunched Obamacare's spending numbers, they estimated that only 7% of employees currently covered by employer-sponsored plans would lose their plans. ... This means the cost of the health care fiasco will be hundreds of billions more than estimated by the CBO and Congressional Democrat. It is also clear that Obama's pledge that you could keep your health care plan if you wanted t...
Read more

Is the F-35 obsolete?

Headline USA: Pentagon Fires Back after Musk Calls Its Most Expensive Project ‘Obsolete’ 'Yeah, as I'm sure you can appreciate, Mr. Musk is, currently, a private citizen, I'm not going to make any comments about what a private citizen may have to say about the F-35....'   ... ... Drones appear to be replacing jets for many operations.  The Russia-Ukraine war is an example of that.  Drones are often hard to detect and can be used for intelligence operations as well as for attacking enemy targets.  It would not surprise me to see drones engaging other drones in combat.  They also cost much less than manned fighters.  
Read more