Fact-Checkers — what would we ever do without these ardent warriors for the truth? To answer that rhetorical question: Probably laugh a little bit less.
This faction of the news industry has become so easily dismissed and exposed as partisan hackery that one simply sits back and marvels at the manner in which they take themselves so seriously. And if you dare criticize them (something I do on the regular), they try to fire back that you are an enemy of the truth. How precious. Pointing out when they lie means you are the one who is lying is some twisted logic.
Politifact has just delivered its annual assessment of what it concluded to be the Lie of the Year. Now, this will come as a shock – Donald Trump was the “winner”! Yeah, we never saw this result coming. Despite rampant examples of lying from Joe Biden, an entirely fraudulent campaign run by Kamala Harris, and outright fabrications and stark misinformation in the press, Trump was a fixture in the news, so there was no way anyone else could be selected.
So here is what these viscounts of vé·ri·té declared to be the most monumental falsehood from 2024.
A lie marked a town and its residents in the name of campaign rage. It was absurd. It was consequential. Our Lie of the Year goes to Donald Trump and JD Vance for false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pet dogs and cats. https://t.co/tNXV83hk3T
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) December 17, 2024
If you have that palpable feeling of a target being missed, that is valid. Just on the surface, choosing this topic as the worst seen this year is a stretch. While it is a debatable subject, it was not without a foundation. Some social media posts alluded to this occurring, and at a town meeting, one resident detailed the immigrant arrivals had been hunting down ducks at local parks. So, while later, the police asserted they had been receiving no reports of this nature, it was not a case of Trump and JD Vance making the story up out of whole cloth.
Then, amazingly enough, in their “Fact-Check of the Year,” Politifact delivers misinformation. The site claims that Trump’s comments about the pets led to school closures due to bomb threats. This has already been dispelled, with the governor coming out with press conferences to state these threats had been hoaxes. Foreign bad actors were behind most of the threats made – something Politifact is fully aware of yet does not address in its LOY post.
In hindsight, there has been clarity on the issue, but does it stand as the biggest lie heard in 2024? Politifact leans heavily on how this lie was used in the campaign and had an effect on the election. Well, how about some other major falsehoods with election implications? The press told this country for months that Joe Biden was in perfect mental condition. “Sharp” was the preferred adjective used. Later, there was a coordinated effort to describe accurate footage of Biden consistently showing him in debilitating condition to be “cheap fake videos,” a consistent lie told by the press. These were completely blown apart by Joe’s dismal appearance at the debate.
How about the lies told concerning Kamala Harris once she ascended to the top of the Democrats’ ticket? She was not the Border Czar; she never called for gun confiscation; Kamala always favored fracking; and numerous other revisionist resume reports were delivered on her behalf, which were all provably false.
And sorry, but how does a debatable account of immigrants dining on animals rise above Joe Biden’s pledge that he would never pardon his son Hunter?? This was a lie that Biden and the White House wove for the entirety of 2024 and stretching as far back as the fall of last year. Not only did he go back on this promise, but Biden’s sweeping pardon spanned more than a decade and encompasses any as yet unknown crimes possibly discovered concerning his recidivist kid.
This is the sorry state of the fact-check industry. Sister Toldjah today noticed that Daniel Dale has ended his four-year vacation, avoiding Joe Biden’s term, and has undertaken his job description once again, because Trump has risen to power. (Hint for CNN’s diminutive diviner of facts: Joe Biden is still president.) This is the same Daniel Dale who, in September, came away from the Trump-Kamala debate to declare the vice president only made one comment that may have been off the mark. I had to compile the nearly two dozen other flat-out lies she poured out that evening.
Paging CNN Fact-Checker Daniel Dale: Here’s How to Do Your Job, Not the Debate Malpractice You Delivered
In the same manner this slanted approach is at play at another outlet, and that would be at Politifact. These fractured truth-tellers are now known for the deeply selective fashion in which they perform fact-checks, attribute false labels, or choose to avoid inconvenient assessments. These partisan hacks stack their deck by judging Republicans far more often, avoiding Democrat examples outright, or recalibrating accurate statements by conservatives to bend their scoring by applying arbitrary “needs more context” methods.
Additionally, in the rare instances when they do call out Democrats or other sympathetic sources, they play a little trick by not applying a Truth Meter at all, thereby ensuring that the subject does not accrue a negative score in their archives. It is all so lame in the blatant manner they pretend they do not use for the partisan hackery they present as adhering to the fact.
This latest example further buries the credibility the esteemed fact-checkers threw into a ditch long ago. Considering the amount of quadruped fecal matter contained in their work, that heap will be fertile ground for some time going forward.
