Correction/Revision request sent to PolitiFact, Nov. 16, 2022

PolitiFact published an article on Nov. 14, 2022 bearing the title “Donald Trump, the least accurate politician we’ve ever covered, eyes another White House run.” The article later similarly claimed “Trump has the worst record of any politician fact-checked by PolitiFact.”

Given that PolitiFact does not rate politicians using a randomly selected set of stories and uses subjective judgments to reach its “Truth-O-Meter” decisions, we found it obvious PolitiFact could not in principle support its claims with evidence. The claims must count either as opinion or unsupported claim of fact. In either case, PolitiFact operates as something other than the unbiased fact checkers interested only in giving us the truth in politics that it claims of itself.

Accordingly, we sent an email to PolitiFact on Nov. 16, 2022 pointing out the problem and offering two means to resolve it: Either make clear the claim counts as opinion or else offer substantiating evidence. Note we do not count the latter option as a viable one.

We received PolitiFact’s form-letter-style standard response shortly after sending our email.