Study Shows Fact-Checkers Are Bad at Their Jobs

PolitiFact exposed again

What's interesting about media fact-checkers is that, while they often prove to be subjective in their findings, they do allow others to objectively evaluate them since they append value judgments such as true or false to statements. I've previously noted two university studies, one at the University of Minnesota and another at George Mason University, that simply quantified PolitiFact's results over a specified period and cross-referenced the results with partisanship,. The results were unsurprising to those who regularly marveled at PolitiFact's reasoning—the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact checker rates Republicans as telling falsehoods much more often than Democrats (rates of 3:1 and 2:1, respectively). There's really no other way to explain it other than the organization has, at a minimum, a serious selection bias problem.