On April 16, 2026 PolitiFact Bias published my critique of a PolitiFact fact check focused on a claim from President Donald J. Trump. In that fact check we found a number of problems, but we’re looking at that fact check again to compare its reasoning to that from an April 30, 2026 fact check of Bernie Sanders.
Trump’s claim received a “False” rating.
Sanders’ claim received a “Mostly False” rating.
In both cases the politicians’ use of tense drove the rating. Senator Thom Tillis would stay a member of the Senate presumably through the end of his current term, so the tense of Trump’s claim jumped the gun.
The Sanders case showed a similar disregard for tense. Sanders said 15 million Americans lost healthcare as a result of the GOP “Big Beautiful Bill,” whereas the CBO estimate providing the bulk of that number came from a 10-year projection. PolitiFact said “That’s premature.”
But PolitiFact could have easily justified using the same reasoning in both cases. PolitiFact could have said 15 million haven’t yet lost health coverage and awarded Sanders a “False” rating. Or PolitiFact could have said there was “an element of truth” to Trump’s claim, Tillis leaving the Senate, and awarded Trump’s claim a “Mostly False” rating instead of the “False” rating it received. The Truth-O-Meter’s “element of truth,” lies in the eye of the beholder, that being PolitiFact’s “Star Chamber” group of editors that votes on the ratings.
It’s subjective.
There’s no fact or “element of truth” in either story to objectively move one rating to the other. Both statements were objectively false as to tense (ignoring other flaws in the Trump fact check)
”PolitiFact always justifies its ratings”
It’s a common refrain on Social Media that PolitiFact always justifies its ratings. We suppose that’s trivially true, but the proper test of a justification comes from its logic, cohesion and consistency. PolitiFact editors face an impossible task logically justifying subjective ratings. Subjective ratings by their nature transcend logic. Nobody needs a logical reason for preferring the color green as a matter of subjective taste.
PolitiFact will always produce examples like this until it abolishes its subjective rating system. And the examples will tend to unfairly harm the right/unfairly benefit the left until PolitiFact roots out its ideological bias.