Zebra Fact Check sent a correction request to PolitiFact on April 18, 2024. With the correction request we received no reply from PolitiFact. Typically we receive a standardized reply acknowledging receipt of the email.
Dear Truth-O-Meter,
Not long after I contacted you yesterday, PolitiFact’s X account announced the removal of the duplicate fact check:
Despite the supposed removal of the fact check and the fact that it no longer counts on Donald Trump’s “scorecard,” the URL remains live as of now.
If PolitiFact intends to keep the near-duplicate fact check live on its website, it needs a correction showing that the source of the claim was misidentified as TV and not radio.
Both versions should be corrected to clarify that Trump improved his performance in Wisconsin in 2020 compared to 2016 by gaining over 200,000 votes. When PolitiFact says Trump was “unequivocally” wrong about that improvement it’s flatly untrue. You could fix it by changing “unequivocally” to “equivocally,” though PolitiFact shouldn’t equivocate.
PolitiFact’s contentment with equivocation aside, here’s what you should do about the duplicate fact check. Archive it, as you’ve done with terminally flawed stories in the past. Include a note that you’re not bothering to fix the TV/radio error because it’s just an archive. Redirect from the original URL to either the archive or the earlier version of the story.
Finally, figure out some way to announce to readers of the website what happened and why. It’s not enough to announce it on social media. The Zebra Fact Check website offers an example of how you can do that. You come up with a “Corrections” category of stories and include that in your main feed. Those posts announce what happened along with what was corrected and why (specific example from ZFC), linking to the corrected story or the archive if applicable. That’s the type of thing you do if you subscribe to the Poynter Institute’s core principle of transparency.
You may also want to correct your social media remarks falsely suggesting to readers the duplicate post was removed from your website.
Correction March 4, 2026, pre-republication: We failed to notice that the old URL was only live in that it was set to redirect to the old URL. We used strikethroughs to cancel our invalid complaints.
It goes without saying that PolitiFact should not do a redirect without explaining the error that prompted the move.