(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) After a streak of dubious fact-checking articles, conservatives are starting to show their frustration with websites like PolitiFact.
Since Oct. 1, PolitiFact has released four fact-checks, all of which were quickly contested by Right-leaning social media users and conservative commentators, Fox News reported.
The site recently rated a claim from Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who recently said that Democrats “suggested that the [2016] election was stolen.”
“People have concerns about the election process and, oh by the way, it’s not just Republicans; it’s Democrats. Let’s just remind ourselves that in 2016 Democrats suggested that the election was stolen,” the governor reportedly said.
This statement was rated as only “half-true,” with author Warren Fiske shooting down the governor’s argument and noting that Democrats did not question the “actual counting” of ballots in 2016 or that Trump had won the election.
He did acknowledge that several Democrats—such as Hillary Clinton—questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s 2016 win, but argued that their “skepticism” was different than alleging that the election was actually stolen.
PolitiFact has previously written that Democrats claims of elections being stolen in 2001, 2005, 2016 and 2017 were “mostly symbolic.”
Conservative commentator and KTTH radio show host Jason Rantz pushed back on the idea of alleged fact-checking altogether.
“They routinely ‘fact check’ in bad faith, purposefully taking comments either out of context to make a point or willfully misinterpret comments so that they can rate them false,” Rantz explained.
“It’s also about their choices on what to fact-check. They will take a meaningless comment from a Democrat to fact check (Joe Biden said his favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla when it’s really vanilla bean, so we rate this somewhat false) so they can claim they hold both sides to account.”
Rantz also alleged that PolitiFact is one of the most “transparently partisan” websites on the internet today, and is often used by the mainstream media to push political propaganda.
