Pre-Republication update/correction March 34, 2026: We put the wrong email in this post. We ssent a number of these to Slate with similar subject lines. Here, at last, is the correct email.
Zebra Fact Check sent Slate unequivocal evidence that its updated reporting on Donald Trump’s “Truth-O-Meter” record still contained falsehoods.Update June 7, 2024: Added a background color highlight to a quotation to help set it apart from the rest of the email text.
Dear Slate team,
I’m disappointed I received no explanation for your failure to rid your article of misleading information. A response would likely have pointed the way clearly to the source of your errors.
I assume that the presumably ambiguous “major politicians” “frequently fact-checked by PolitiFact” served as the infirm foundation for your final (as of now) clarification of the original story. Unfortunately for all of you (Slate, Jacobson, PolitiFact), the PolitiFact story you cited as the prompt for the entire article offers guidance as to how PolitiFact views major politicians and what counts as frequently fact checked:
Trump’s median rating of False is worse than a cross-section of frequently checked Democratic and Republican politicians. Politicians with median ratings of Half True include Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton; three senators who ran for president, Mitt Romney, R-Utah, Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and two longtime congressional leaders, Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Michele Bachmann ran for president and received a great deal of media attention while serving as a Republican member of the House of Representatives. And PolitiFact fact checked Bachmann 62 times (not the 72 I erroneously claimed in my previous email). That’s more fact checks than “frequently checked” figures Mitch McConnell (36) and Nancy Pelosi (54). If PolitiFact doesn’t think Bachmann was a “major politician” then why fact check her more than two politicians it clearly considers major politicians? It doesn’t add up.
You and PolitiFact are pulling a snow job with these articles. PolitiFact is publishing as fact its opinion that Trump is the least accurate politician it has ever fact checked, and you’re carrying that water.
Why does PolitiFact have an opinion on Trump that’s at odds with its “Truth-O-Meter” statistics? There’s a story, if you have the will to pursue it.
If you consider yourselves journalists with integrity, then please conspicuously correct the misleading record you, Jacobson and PolitiFact have established.