At the PolitiFact Bias website we took PolitiFact and Louis Jacobson to task for tampering with a transcript in support of a false narrate it created about President Trump. In short, PolitFact removed the answer Trump gave to a interviewer’s question, in effect replacing it with a different answer via Trump’s next words. The overall effect was to support a narrative that Mr. Trump was not aware Sen. Thom Tillis remains a member of the Senate even after announcing he would not run for office again in the next election.
PolitiFact had produced yet another fantastic example of fact-checking done poorly.
We fired off a correction request to PolitiFact, which so far has drawn the traditional non-response. But we noticed PolitiFact had partnered with WMUR in New Hampshire to create a video version of the fact check. Jacobson posted it to X.com.
The partnership offers us ample excuse to seek answers also from Steve Bottari, who put his own reputation in the basket with PolitiFact’s by hosting the segment.
We sent an email message to Bottari on April 23, 2026 with the subject line “PolitiFact and Jacobson massaged the transcript” (bold emphasis for material PolitiFact elided):
Dear Steve Bottari,
Did you get a chance to treat PolitiFact and Lou Jacobson to the skepticism WMUR9 lauds in its news policy?
PolitiFact doctored the transcript. Look at the source transcript PolitiFact linked and it says (bold emphasis for PolitiFact’s omission, see afters for explanation of grammatical inconsistencies):
Maria Bartiromo: “And you think Kevin Warsh can get confirmed? Do you think Thom Tillis is going to give you a vote?
Donald Trump: “Well, we’re going to have to find out. He might not, but that’s why Thom Tillis is no longer a Senator.
It’s improper to take material out of the midst of what the audience sees as a transcript. The bold above and comments Trump made immediately after the rest of the transcript PolitiFact used made clear Trump understood Tillis will have a vote as senator on the Warsh nomination.
PolitiFact’s narrative suggests Trump has no idea Tillis is still a senator. PolitiFact and Jacobson try to emphasize that by contrasting the January comments where Trump said Tillis isn’t a senator but he added comments suggesting the reverse. But it was the same thing this time as it was in January. Trump literally said Tillis is no longer a senator before making remarks in apparent contradiction of his own claim.
Does a fact-checking reporter pick one side of the coin and give that a rating, or report both sides of the coin and note that “not a senator” probably isn’t meant literally? How about airbrushing the evidence to make it look like there’s only one side to the coin?
If you think PolitiFact and Jacobson (and you, in the video version) did defensible fact-checking I’d love to hear why you think so.
So far, it looks like Bottari will stick with the most common fact checker response to criticism: Ignore it.
We’ll update this item if Bottari offers any sort of response.
Afters: As noted above, the quoted transcript segment contains grammatical inconsistencies, specifically punctuation indicating the start of a quotation without any such punctuation indicating the end of the quotation. That’s on me, owing to carelessness. I should have stuck with something very close to the form of the source transcript, but decided to add quotation marks to enhance clarity. The effort to achieve clarity was undercut by my failure to use closing quotation marks for either Maria Bartiromo or Mr. Trump. The overall meaning comes through clear enough, but the result appears sloppy, and I could not fix it using “[sic]” without appearing to blame the problem on the original transcript. Hence this explanation.