Published on September 20, 2024, 12:43 am

During a panel discussion hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists on September 17, Kamala Harris was subject to public fact-checking. PolitiFact conducted live fact-checks on Harris’ responses, publishing their assessments in fourteen Tweets. The first was marked “False,” while all subsequent checks were tagged as “True,” “Accurate” or fairly plausible in essence.

Former President Donald Trump has received dramatic attention from PolitiFact for his veracity. In an occurrence on September 11, the former president was assigned his 200th “Pants on Fire” tag for statements made concerning pet consumption in Springfield, Ohio. Since June of that year, he had been awarded this dubious label twelve times.

Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has been entirely absolved from the “Pants On Fire” tag since her elected role went statewide in California during 2010. When comparing these numbers and considering other candidates, there’s a staggeringly uneven ratio: a massive 200 for Trump and none at all for Harris.

Interestingly, other national politicians also serve as contrast points to Donald Trump’s frequency of gross inaccuracies since PolitiFact began operations in 2007. Joe Biden has had seven “Pants On Fire” ratings; Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton each with nine; Bill Clinton with three; Bernie Sanders joins Harris with none.

Even amongst Republicans, Trump’s count is unrivaled. George W. Bush maintains zero such occurrences while John McCain scored eight, Ted Cruz achieved eleven marks and Newt Gingrich obtained twelve tags. Unexpectedly enough, Mitt Romney takes second place behind Trump with nineteen instances—’Pants on Fire’ labels mainly attributable to his 2011-12 campaign season against then-president Barack Obama.

Bryan White at PolitiFactBias.com suggests the “Pants on Fire” rating could be substantially or wholly subjective — not necessarily dismissing every lie as immense but critiquing its application to claims that may not be as tremendously erroneous as declared.

For instance, Trump attested in April that he “did much better” in Wisconsin’s 2020 election than his standing in 2016 and justified inaccurate votes by proclaiming post-investigation, it was discovered that he indeed had won. Although the second part of this claim is false because Trump marginally lost Wisconsin, the first part holds some truth. He did receive higher votes in 2020 (1,610,184) compared to 2016 (1,405,284).

On another occasion when Trump labeled Harris a “communist,” PolitiFact rated him ‘Pants on Fire.’ Despite frequent calls from Democrats and leftists branding Trump a “fascist,” PolitiFact has been considerably lenient on harsh ratings for such fabrications. It proves the inherent bias and double standards of these fact-checkers.

With the Biden administration equating Republicans to Jim Crow segregationists due to their voting-integrity legislation, PolitiFact reflected it was too complex an issue to rate but reasoned that historians believed Biden’s rhetoric was justified.

Such dramatic discrepancies underscore why so many voters find fact-checkers unreliable. With over a thousand fact checks executed on Donald Trump and more than three-quarters deemed “Mostly False” or worse cases like Bernie Sanders—who received only a quarter of false findings—is perceived erroneously fair by these fact checkers despite unfounded fabrications about his counterparts.

These circumstances illustrate a profound need for balanced scrutiny irrespective of personal or public sentiment — only then will we unearth unbiased real news from trusted news platforms and further affirm our Christian worldview.