Tim Graham vs. The Facts: 2022-23 Edition
The Media Research Center executive's campaign of lashing out at fact-checkers for fact-checking Donald Trump and other Republicans is undermined by not proving any of those fact-checks wrong.
For years, Media Research Center executive Tim Graham has been waging a dubious war on fact-checkers. This continued as part of the MRC’s biased coverage of the 2022 midterm elections — mainly in the form of complaining that Republican candidates were being fact-checked. He grumbled in a September 2022 post:
Keep an eye on how PolitiFact uses its “Truth-O-Meter” in the congressional races this fall. It’s going to be obvious that they’ll “finesse” their so-called “independent fact-checking” in favor of the Democrats, as they typically do.
Take the Ohio Senate race: this is how Democrat [sic] congressman Tim Ryan has been rated over the years: 12 “True” or “Mostly True” ratings, two “Half Trues,” and one “Pants On Fire” rating back in 2011. That’s basically a 12-to-1 True tilt.
By contrast, PolitiFact has five evaluations of Republican J.D. Vance: one “Mostly True,” versus one “Mostly False,” two “Falses,” one “Pants on Fire.” That’s a 4-to-1 False tilt. And the Mostly True is from 2018. It’s all False this year.
As usual, Graham offered no evidence (other than picayune nitpicking) that any of the fact-checks were false, or that Ryan and Vance tell falsehoods and the same rate in a way that warrants equivalent coverage.
Graham complained some more in a post later that month, this time that right-wing attacks on President Biden were being fact-checked:
This week, the Poynter Institute and their PolitiFact website are hosting their “United Facts of America” conference to “celebrate facts” with a cast of liberal journalists, including PBS anchor Judy Woodruff, NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, CNN “misinformation” reporter Donie O’Sullivan and CNN legal analyst Joan Biskupic.
We’ve also found the “fact checking” at PolitiFact has a liberal tilt. Earlier this year, a NewsBusters study of Biden’s first year in office – from January 20, 2021 through January 19, 2022 – found Biden was fact-checked 40 times, while Biden critics were checked on 230 occasions. In other words, they’re much more sensitive about someone mangling the truth about Biden than they are about Biden mangling the truth.
Now MRC analysts have updated the research to include another eight months to the count. The pattern continues. From January 20 to September 19, 2022, we counted 18 PolitiFact checks on Joe Biden, compared to 108 “fact checks” of Biden critics. That’s exactly a six-to-one ratio.
Put it all together, and over his first 20 months in office, Biden had 58 fact-checks, while Biden critics were checked 338 times. Overall, there were 5.8 fact checks of Biden critics for every one of the president.
Why shouldn’t false claims about Biden be fact-checked, as Graham suggests? He doesn’t explain — even though that’s the clear implication of his complaint.
Graham spent a November 2022 post complaining that fact-checkers keep finding that Republican Herschel Walker — whom the MRC had repeatedly defended throughout his failed Georgia Senate campaign — says things that aren’t true:
On a daily or on a yearly basis, it’s not hard to find those “independent” critics at PolitiFact telling the public that Democrats are factual and Republicans are liars.
Take the Georgia Senate race: Sen. Raphael Warnock’s ratings in 2022 are three “Mostly True” checks and one “Half True.” Not a single rating in the False category:
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Then look at Warnock’s challenger, Herschel Walker, and you get the exact opposite. In 2022, Walker drew two “False” ratings, two “Mostly False” ratings, and one “Half True.” There was no rating on the “True” side.
Rather than, you know, find a false statement by Warnock that PolitiFact missed, Graham instead spouted his cynical talking point that fact-checking Republicans too much is evidence of bias:
Graham then gave away the game:
As we often point out, these “Fact Checkers” don’t have to be wrong about the facts to be biased. It’s obvious in their “target selection” that they’re helping out the Democrats, defending their records and blatantly attacking Republican talking points. PolitiFact is often Exhibit A.
But that’s a classic, dishonest heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument. if Walker lies much more than Warnock, as appears to be the case — and which Graham makes no effort to disprove — there’s no reason to enforce artificial parity on fact-checking.
Graham doesn’t want Republicans to be held accountable for making false and misleading claims — period. To do that, he must try to discredit fact-checkers. He hates journalism and accountability, and all who stand for that must be targeted by his MRC through the sowing of microaggressions designed to engender mistrust and portray the mere act of fact-checking a Republican is insidious “bias.” That’s all he’s doing here — he’s certainly not acting in good faith.
He did it again in a January 2023 column:
House Republicans carried out a pledge to vote to repeal a $71 billion increase in spending for the Internal Revenue Service that was included in Joe Biden’s so-called “Inflation Reduction Act.” Reporters called this a “messaging bill,” since there’s no chance it will pass a Democrat-controlled Senate or be signed by President Biden.
Chief Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler broke out the “Four Pinocchios” rating under the headline “’87,000 IRS agents’ is the zombie falsehood setting the House agenda.”
The IRS never announced they would hire 87,000 agents to audit your taxes, although a Treasury Department report estimated they could hire 86,852 new full-time employees.
“We originally gave this claim Three Pinocchios because at least Republicans could point to a number in a Treasury report,” Kessler proclaimed. “But now, after repeated fact checks, there is really no excuse, and we are upping the rating to Four Pinocchios.” He called it “untethered from reality.”
Kessler reported the IRS has about 79,000 employees now, and “The Congressional Budget Office assumes, absent additional funding, IRS staffing would keep falling to about 60,000 in 10 years, so the funding would allow a doubling from that base.”
Fun fact: PolitiFact threw a “Mostly False” rating at Sen. Tom Cotton for saying, among other things, the Biden bill “doubles the size of the IRS.”
Doubling the IRS workforce obviously means the government will collect a lot more in taxes.
Note the deception Graham is using here: He’s claiming it’s correct to claim that IRS employment will double if you use a number from 10 years in the future, not the the current employment number most people assume is the case when Republicans push that talking point.
Graham went on to whine that the right-wing “87,000 IRS agents” was debunked as well:
Many of the “independent fact-checkers” rained fire on the claim the IRS would hire 87,000 new agents. Reporters like Mychael Schnell at The Hill asserted that the money would likely go for “customer service” or “computer science.” Others have suggested the hiring of janitors.
Kessler made a list of his allies in this anti-Republican crusade. PolitiFact threw a flag in August. Actually, it threw at least five “Mostly False” flags, because they couldn’t stand this GOP talking point. The Kessler list also included FactCheck.org, USA Today, Reuters, The New York Times, and Time magazine. He somehow left out the other tilted referees at the Associated Press and Snopes.com.
Graham doesn’t actually dispute that debunking, which he tried to hide by attacking the fact-checkers as “tilted.” But how “tilted” can they be if you can’t dispute the accuracy of the fact-check?
Then, to further distract from the fact that the fact-checkers were correct, he played whataboutism:
By contrast, President Biden uncorked a series of lies and smears that voting laws like those passed by Republicans in Georgia were some version of “Jim Crow,” or made “Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle.” All these “fact checkers” took a nap on that hyperbolic excess, even after the voter turnout in Georgia in 2022 set new records.
Apparently, the “Jim Crow” lies result in heavier voter turnout, so “fact checking” in this case is….unhelpful. (Kessler flagged Biden for inaccurately claiming the Georgia bill “ends voting hours early,” but left the Jim Crow junk alone.)
Since Election Day on November 8, Kessler has a “perfect” record of checking only Trump and conservatives – on seven occasions – not counting “year in review” posts. This makes sense, since Kessler’s Twitter page celebrates how the leftist comic strip “Doonesbury” noticed his self-righteous aggression on Trump.
Graham has already admitted that he’s trying to discredit fact-checkers by portraying the mere act of fact-checking anyone on the right as inherently biased, since he can’t actually prove the fact-checkers wrong, and it’s an narrative he repeated at the end of his column: “These fact-checkers describe themselves as ‘independent,’ but their seemingly inevitable leftward tilt and herd mentality make a mockery of the word. Even if their checks are factual, they appear to half of Americans as a vital cog in the Democratic Party’s messaging apparatus.”
Or, you know, Republicans could simply not lie and deceive. Graham seems not to have thought of that.
In a February 2023 post, Graham raged that a TikTok video ranting that “Joe Biden signed away our sovereignty as a nation” was fact-checked:
Facebook flagged this post with a warning from all three fact-checkers -- in case you thought America failed to exist.
The document, a "Declaration of North America," is one of those "shared goals" statements leaders issue after a meeting. It began with a joint pledge on "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion," noting the leaders "reiterated their joint commitment to protect civil rights, promote racial justice, expand protections for LGBTQI+ individuals and deliver more equitable outcomes to all." They also singled out "Indigenous Peoples." No "fact checkers" wondered if "DEI" is actually the opposite of inclusive or equitable.
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We have no doubt the "fact checkers" are correct, only that they have an exquisite shared sensitivity to misinformation harmful to the Democrat [sic] side.
If Graham has “no doubt the ‘fact checkers’ are correct,” why did he even write this? He’s simply angry that fact-checkers are blowing up false right-wing narratives.
Hunter Biden derangement
Graham served up his own twist on his employer’s long-running Hunter Biden Derangement Syndrome in a May 2023 post complaining that a fact-checker brought up an old MRC poll while fact-checking Donald Trump’s CNN town hall:
Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler somehow thinks it’s a terrible idea to do a poll asking about how the 2020 election could have turned out differently. That’s odd, since The Post did polls for several years asking if the Russians made the 2016 election turn out differently. Robert Mueller didn’t find that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians, but that didn’t stop the incessant journalism promoting that idea.
After the CNN “town hall” with Trump, Kessler took on something Trump said about the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression, and veered into attacking our Media Research Center poll, which Trump didn’t mention. On all the social-media censorship and media bias by omission, Kessler asserted “there’s no evidence it made a difference in the election result.”
Twitter briefly blocked users from sharing the New York Post story on Hunter Biden’s laptop — a decision officials later said was a mistake. We’ve previously examined a poll often cited by Trump allies that suggests telling the tale would have swayed the election. The poll was done by the Polling Company, a conservative pollster founded by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, on behalf of the Media Research Center. Our analysis found that the poll conveniently supported a line that Republicans are pushing — that a lack of media coverage related to the Hunter Biden laptop made a difference in the presidential election.
But when you dig into the results, which are swayed by aggressively misleading questions, it shows that for all but a tiny percentage of Biden voters, the story would not have made a difference — even if framed as a still-unproved scandal. The questions in the poll are similar to messages the Trump campaign used in the final weeks before the election — and it still fell short.
As Rich Noyes explained at the time, we asked about some negative Biden themes and positive Trump themes that the media didn’t want to discuss.
Graham strangely didn’t even link to the Kessler fact-check of Trump he’s criticizing here. But he’s really complaining about how, back in February, Kessler called out the poll the MRC bought after the 2020 election in an effort to prove that the election was “stolen” from Trump because the Hunter Biden laptop story wasn’t sufficiently covered when that poll was referenced by Republicans during an GOP-led anti-Biden hearing. Note that Graham stayed silent when Kessler pointed out the wildly biased poll questions (except to huff that they were purportedly questions that “the media didn’t want to discuss,” though that in itself is a biased assessment) and the bias of the pollster. He also didn’t mention that the MRC bought this biased poll even as it was screeching about pre-election media polls purportedly being “deliberately wildly wrong” because they showed Biden winning bigger than he ultimately did. (By contrast, the MRC never lashed out at pollsters in 2022 when their midterm polling showed a “red wave” that never happened.)
Instead, Graham went on to play victim, baselessly suggesting that Kessler was targeting the MRC because it “regularly criticizes The Fact Checker.” He also responded to Kessler pointing out the biased nature of the poll by noting that “some polls are structured to produce the desired result,” by playing whataboutism: “Oh, that never happens at The Washington Post polling shop?” And he got really mad when Kessler argued that Biden’s own campaign messaging trumped the right-wing laptop narrative:
Kessler doesn’t seem to fathom that the liberal media obviously felt that the Hunter Biden laptop story could be a defining story in the election. Doesn’t all the suppression suggest their fear of its impact? But you can only laugh when Kessler claims that blaming media bias is a “stretch.”
But all of the lines that were tested were staples of the Trump campaign’s messaging. MRC suggests that media bias prevented those messages from getting through to voters and changing their minds to vote for Trump or even not vote at all. As we noted, that’s a stretch, because it assumes the Biden campaign was not offering its own messages to woo voters that, in the end, were more compelling.
Funny, I thought “Democracy dies in darkness” when the Washington Post isn’t putting its big thumbs on the scale.
We don’t recall Graham complaining that the New York Post was putting a thumb on the scale when it put out the original laptop story. Nor has he complained that the New York Post botched things by failing to provide independent verification of the laptop that would have overcome objections to the October-surprise nature of a story promoted by a pro-Trump publication and sourced to pro-Trump partisans.
More than two years after the fact, Graham was unable to admit the likelihood that the laptop story simply wasn’t strong enough to overcome voters’ concerns about an increasingly unstable Trump, and he absolutely will not admit that the MRC’s own polling to manufacture its version of a “stolen election” conspiracy theory is simply too biased to be treated as a reliable indicator of anything, as he demands. He’s putting narrative before facts — which is what he’s being paid to do.
More fact-checker rage
Graham continued to spew more rage at fact-checkers for doing their job (the accuracy of which he doesn’t even dispute) throughout the rest of 2023. He grumbled in a June 21 post:
Over his first 20 months in office, President Biden had 58 fact-checks, while Biden’s critics were checked 338 times. Overall, there were 5.8 fact-checks of Biden critics for every one of the president.
In an interview with the liberal website The Verge, NBC’s Chuck Todd exemplified the media’s defiance of anyone who dares to assert a liberal bias. “I hear the attacks on fact checkers where they ‘fact-check Republicans six times more than they fact-check Democrats.’ Yeah. Perhaps the Republicans are being factually incorrect more often than the Democrats.”
Someone who asserts the Republicans lie six times more often than Democrats sounds like a Democrat. Chuck Todd is obviously a Democrat. And so are the “independent fact checkers.”
And anyone who denies that Republicans lie six times more often than Democrats without bothering to prove it is obviously a Republican.
Graham brought on a supposed fact-checker-basher in a Sept. 20 podcast:
As the 2024 presidential campaign kicks into gear, we know that journalists think "fact checking" is an essential tool in keeping conservative "misinformation" from helping Republicans win. Their suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop and their lying "hallmarks of Russian disinformation" spin has not shamed them. It still encourages them.
So we turned to Matt Palumbo, author of the book Fact-Checking the Fact Checkers: How the Left Hijacked and Weaponized the Fact-Checking Industry. Matt shared his thoughts about fact-checking Trump and Biden and how Big Tech uses the fact-checkers to crush conservative communication. MRC Business associate editor Joseph Vazquez joined me in the questioning, since he and Matt are both George Soros investigators.
A big part of the fact-checking weaponization is in target selection. Republicans are much more likely to be "checked" and much more likely to be tagged for dishonesty. PolitiFact has thrown 180 "Pants On Fire" lie ratings at Donald Trump. Joe Biden has 7, and only one as president. George Soros has never been subjected to a PolitiFact evaluation. They don't check their financial backers.
Graham didn’t mention the fact that Palumbo’s credibility is dubious at best because he accepted money from right-wing Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui — who has since been found guilty of defrauding his followers of more than $1 billion — to write nice things about him in propaganda articles that Guo front groups then paid to publish at right-wing websites like Newsmax and Gateway Pundit.
Graham whined in a Nov. 27 post about a non-right-wing journalist getting an award:
Joe Schaffer at Liberty Nation pointed out one way you can tell that the “fact checkers” are outside the mainstream is who they choose to honor. On November 18, the Poynter Institute, the bosses of PolitiFact, threw a “Bowtie Ball” honoring CNN host Anderson Cooper.
“The Poynter Institute’s annual Bowtie Ball showcases the most dazzling and lively personalities in journalism as we gather in Tampa Bay for one electric celebration,” Poynter gushed on its website. “Anderson Cooper will receive the 2023 Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism during the fundraising gala this year….Cooper is one of the most influential, trusted and dynamic broadcast journalists working today.”
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You can tell they love him, because Cooper doesn’t even have a page at PolitiFact -- zero fact checks of his "fearless" work. Meanwhile, his former 8 pm competition Tucker Carlson has 28 “fact checks” from the Poynter pugilists, and 26 of the 28 (or 93 percent) are “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants On Fire.” Just meeting Cooper is presented as a great reason to fund the "independent fact-checkers."
Graham cited no instance in which Cooper got anything wrong. He ranted in his Dec. 15 podcast:
They describe themselves as "independent fact-checkers," but they're not. They sound like liberal columnists, which is why conservatives and Republicans disdain their partisan rulings. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren have been "fact checked" very, very differently in the last decade.
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In the Trump years, CNN (and PBS) host Christiane Amanpour proclaimed that “now more than ever, we need real reporting” mantra. The New York Times did that “now more than ever” advertising when Trump came in to build a hard-left subscriber base. It underlines who they always think the threat is.
And Graham is not trying to appeal to a hard-right reader base, where attacks on fact-checkers play well?