Tim Graham’s Year Of Lashing Out At Fact-Checkers
The Media Research Center executive spent pretty much the entirety of the 2024 presidential election raging at those who document the lies that Donald Trump and other conservatives spread.
One of Tim Graham’s main jobs at the Media Research Center is to reflexively lash out at fact–checkers for fact-checking conservatives (not that the fact-checks aren’t justified, mind you) and that they don’t fact-check liberals nearly enough (though he often lacks evidence to justify that conclusion). As such, Graham pushed this narrative through the 2024 presidential election process. He huffed in a Jan. 10 post:
President Joe Biden kicked off his re-election campaign with two speeches filled with his usual fact-challenged bombast. But since checking that might sound like “normalizing” bombastic Donald Trump, the “independent fact checkers” have filed nothing after his speech near Valley Forge on January 5 and his speech in Charleston on January 8.
But USA Today leaped to Biden’s defense on January 7, censoring Facebook posts that claimed Biden didn’t condemn political violence after the race riots in the summer of 2020. In Charleston, Biden glorified “the historic movement for justice” at that time, which is whitewashing some history.
It’s unclear what Graham means by claiming that USA “censored” Facebook posts — something it has no power to do — and the USA Today article specifically noted that “critics claimed on Facebook that Biden had not condemned violent protests by activists from Black Lives Matter and antifa.” Proving someone factually wrong isn’t “censorship.”
Graham returned to his old chestnut about Trump getting fact-checked in his Feb. 14 column:
Never call PolitiFact an “independent fact-checker.” They are every bit as liberal and biased as their fans in the liberal media. Recently, they announced they had published their 1000th “fact check” of Donald Trump.
“American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump’s disregard for factual accuracy,” they proclaimed. “Ever since he descended the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, we have encountered a firehose of claims.”
In those 1,000 checks, PolitiFact tagged Trump on their “Truth-O-Meter” as “Mostly False,” “False,” or “Pants on Fire” in 757 of them (75.7 percent). Trump was found “True” or “Mostly True” in only 121 checks (12.1 percent).
Barack Obama is currently in second in the “fact check” count with 603. PolitiFact was founded in 2007, when Obama was running for president. Donald Trump was a real-estate developer until 2015.
But look at the difference in “Truth” ratings. Almost half of Obama’s “checks” were “True” or “Mostly True” – 289 of them (48 percent). Only 143 (or 25 percent) were “Mostly False” or worse. Obama has been rated “Pants on Fire” nine times. Trump’s been found flammable 184 times.
Hillary Clinton came in third with 301 checks. She has an even better “True” side percentage – 148 out of 301 (49.1 percent). Only 83 (26.5 percent) landed on the “False” side, and only nine “Pants on Fire” warnings.
Joe Biden is fourth with 286 checks. He hasn’t been blessed with the magic that the other two top Democrats have.
Graham offered no evidence that Obama, Clinton or Biden has told as many falsehoods as Trump, so his comparison fails.
Graham spent a March 8 column nitpicking a fact-check of Trump he didn’t like:
Reading the “fact checkers” in the press sometimes triggers memories of the comic-book hero Plastic Man, who could contort into all sorts of shapes. Take the Associated Press, and immigration reporter Elliot Spagat in San Diego.
The headline was “Fact Focus: Claims Biden administration is secretly flying migrants into the country are unfounded.” Spagat had to redefine all sorts of words like “secretly” to defend President Biden’s fly-over-the-border policies.
The Spagat dispatch began: “In his Super Tuesday victory speech, former President Donald Trump elevated false information that had gone viral on social media, claiming the Biden administration secretly flew hundreds of thousands of migrants into the United States.”
AP noted that on January 26, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (if you can call them that) reported 327,000 immigrants were vetted and authorized for travel. The government flew in more than 67,000 Cubans, 126,000 Haitians, 53,000 Nicaraguans and 81,000 Venezuelans.
Trump said, “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown — migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders … It was unbelievable.”
How was this false? Spagat elastically argued, “But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly.” Trump never said “randomly,” or “secretly.” He said “parts unknown.”
Trump referred to an article by the Center for Immigration Studies, which AP calls a “group that advocates for immigration restrictions.” Todd Bensman of CIS found CBP’s migrants arrived at 43 airports, but the CBP refused to divulge which ones, using an exemption under the Freedom of Information Act for “law-enforcement sensitive information.”
But this doesn’t look like law enforcement. It looks like government-enabled illegal immigration.
Graham offered no evidence to back up his claim that it was, in fact, “government-enabled illegal immigration” — meaning that he’s taking refuge in the ambiguity to falsely cast aspersions on the AP fact-check. He inadvertently demonstrated the the AP cares about facts and he doesn’t.
For a March 29 post, Graham lashed out at PolitFact again over another Biden remark that he had been on the now-collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore “many, many times commuting from the state of Delaware either on a train or by car.” The bridge didn’t have train tracks, and a White House spokesperson later stating that Biden “is clearly describing driving over the bridge while commuting” is somehow a cop-out in Graham’s view: “In other words, ‘the President is clearly describing what he MEANT to say, not what he actually said.'” Of course, Biden did also say he traveled over the bridge by car, so his original claim wasn’t completely inaccurate.
Graham raged at more Trump fact-checking in an April 3 post:
On April Fools Day, [New York Times podcast] host Michael Barbaro brought on Times political reporter Jim Rutenberg to discuss “Ronna McDaniel, TV News, and the Trump Problem.” Rutenberg should be best known for his infamous 2016 front-page editorial announcing objectivity was officially going in the trash can (as if it was vibrantly observed before).
Rutenberg described the Trump Problem: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?”
Rutenberg proclaimed the “objective” media must now be “oppositional.” Then The Timesunfurled the arrogant motto “Truth. It’s More Important Now Than Ever,” and put it on T-shirts.
This created another “Trump problem.” The Republican half of the country would dismiss them as Democrat messengers (if they weren’t dismissed before).
Republican listeners could break out a middle-fingers salute at the end of this podcast. They discussed how temporary CNN boss Chris Licht thought CNN “put on a jersey, took a side,” which they obviously did.
But Graham didn’t dispute the accuracy of anything Rutenberg said — he simply rebranded any criticism of Trump, no matter how factual, as “liberal” without evidence to back that up. (Also, we don’t recall Graham ever complaining how Fox News put on a jersey and takes a side.) He then played whataboutism by whining about Hunter Biden’s laptop and effectively denying that Trump was lying about election fraud:
They seize on Trump’s election denial as if it’s the only issue. Both shows never touched on the Hunter Biden laptop or any other issue where the media suppressed true facts. NPR executive Terence Samuel infamously said “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories.” It was a “pure distraction.” Then The Times and other liberal outlets acknowledged the laptop was real…in 2022.
This never came up because both shows failed to include any conservative guests. Because when you’re for the “true facts,” why should the “lying” side get any airtime on tax-funded radio?
When the non-conservative side gets space at NewsBusters to rebut its partisan attacks, then Graham might have a basis for criticism.
In an April 21 post, Graham declared that Trump’s falsehoods are merely “opinion” and, thus, cannot be fact-checked:
CNN’s resident “fact checker” Daniel Dale usually shows his face on air when CNN wants to attack Donald Trump. On Thursday’s The Lead with Jake Tapper, Dale confessed that Trump’s statements during jury selection were mostly just opinion, but he mocked the “false conspiracy theory” that President Biden had something to do with Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution, even though an Associate Attorney General [Matthew Colangelo] joined Bragg’s team.
[…]
At least CNN is mentioning Colangelo in passing. If this were a Trump Justice Department official arriving on a Biden prosecution, it would be a major scandal of partisanship. CNN would be aggressively digging for anonymous insiders to decry this plot.
Again, Graham offered no evidence to back up Trump’s bogus conspiracy — correlation doesn’t equal causation after all. He then weirdly bashed Dale as a “Canadian Trump-basher,” as if his nationality has any relevance whatsoever to his job and only real Americans are allowed to fact-check others.
The whining continues
Graham’s whining continued as election season did. He groused in an April 29 post:
On Monday morning, Washington Post “Fact Checker” Glenn Kessler was tossing his “Four Pinocchios” Liar rating at Donald Trump again, this time over rent-support payments for migrants in the Democrat-run state of Michigan.
In recent months, Kessler has emptied a bucket of Pinocchios on Trump and his aides, but he’s conveniently avoided throwing a single Pinocchio at Joe Biden, not even when Biden blamed Trump for massive Covid deaths: “We lost over 1,200,000 people because of the slow start in all this [vaccination] process.”
Kessler ruled in February that “Biden’s phrasing is sufficiently subtle that a link is not so easily established.” That’s ridiculous. It looks like Glenn Kessler (D-D.C.).
[…]
Then he relies on “the state” to break down their rental-subsidy handouts, with this loaded summary: “In any case, more than half of the people who have been approved for rental subsidies are Afghan and Ukrainian refugees — a far cry from the murderers that Trump claims are overrunning the country.”
Kessler also lined up the Biden administration to rebut Trump: “An HHS spokesman said the refugee office funds could not be used for asylum seekers….A White House spokesman also disputed Trump’s claims in a statement.” None of these statements were going the be challenged by Kessler. They were just going to be repeated.
But Graham offered no effort to factually dispute those statements, which makes it look like he’s trying to distract from his own laziness abut accusing Kessler of being lazy.
Graham began his May 8 column this way:
You can tell when the PolitiFact website is going to negotiate around the facts. On May 7, their top headline on the home page asked: “Are ‘outside agitators’ co-opting campus protests?”
This isn’t quite the right question. The media have presented these events as “student” protests, so if half the participants aren’t college students, how would they describe the non-students?
Graham made a big deal out of a notable number of protesters at the colleges being non-students, but he offered no evidence any of them fit the description of “outside agitators. Then he groused the definition used, with added whataboutism:
PolitiFact typically seeks out “experts” to match the narratives it wants to underline. They don’t like people suggesting these protesters aren’t local and they might be paid to protest. They found William & Mary law professor Timothy Zick to define the outside agitator spin: “It was used as sort of a phrase that would link protesters, no matter how peaceful they were, to Communists and other infiltrators who were causing disruption.” The term is used to cast doubt on protester “sincerity.”
Angus Johnson, “historian of student activism” at Hostos Community College in New York, explained, “The idea behind the concept of the outside agitator is that dissent can never be coming from the people who are expressing that dissent.” They also turned to Johnston to underline, “Some experts have been quick to note the main goal of a protest is to get others to join in.”
This spin is nothing like how the media spun the Tea Party protests against ObamaCare legislation. They sought to discredit them as donor-funded “Astroturf” (not grass-roots). They went looking for the most racist or ignorant-sounding sign they could find, to present protesters as a kooky “fringe” movement. NBC’s Chuck Todd decried “town hall madness.” The front page of The Boston Globe lamented the “quarrelsome masses hollering questions downloaded from activist websites.”
Graham didn’t dispute that outside agitators fueled tea party protests.
For his May 10 column, Graham spun away Trump’s lousy jobs record as president by invoking the pandemic:
On May 8, President Biden took the very unusual step of submitting to an interviewer who was an actual journalist (not a Howard Stern or Drew Barrymore). It wouldn’t be long before he started mangling his record – and Donald Trump’s.
CNN’s Erin Burnett began with how Trump’s promises of new jobs in Wisconsin didn’t come true: “Why should people here believe that you will succeed at creating jobs where Trump failed?” Biden bragged: “He’s never succeeded in creating jobs and I have never failed. I have created over 15 million jobs since I have been president.” He did it all by himself! He claimed other than Herbert Hoover, Trump’s “the only other president who lost more jobs than created in his four-year term.”
There’s a massive asterisk – the global Covid pandemic. Trump’s employment record in the first three years of his presidency was strong. The raw number of employed Americans reached new records. In October 2018, it had reached more than 165.6 million. The unemployment rate hit record lows across demographics: for women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and youth.
Obviously, the severe lockdowns during the pandemic – most aggressively pushed by the Democrats and their media allies – drove massive job losses. Non-farm payroll employment in the United States declined by 9.4 million in 2020. So Democrats blame that on Trump, and when the pandemic was over, they took credit for the economy climbing out of that hole.
On the other hand, the MRC spent much of 2024 contrasting economic numbers under Trump and President Biden in an attempt to make Biden look bad, and at no point did it factor in a pandemic allowance for things like low gas prices or higher inflation in making those comparisons. No asterisks here, even though they’re as needed as the one Graham demands on on job numbers.
Graham then huffed that Dale fact-checked Trump further, which he dismissed as “brag checks” (as if bragging should never be fact-checked):
Some of these fact checks are “brag checks.” Trump will say he’s ahead in all the polls, when he’s ahead in most polls. But Dale sounds most exasperated when Trump blames Biden for his legal troubles. On April 18, Dale decried “his false conspiracy theory that essentially that Joe Biden is behind this case, which was brought by a locally elected district attorney.”
Dale can’t even disclose DA Alvin Bragg is a Democrat. He acknowledged Trump’s lead prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, was a Biden Justice Department official, and then joined Bragg’s team. A “conspiracy theory” between Democrat lawyers looks obvious here, and declaring it “false” is lame spin.
On May 7, Dale threw a penalty flag at Trump for saying Bragg is a “Soros-backed” prosecutor….and Trump didn’t say that in the remarks they’d just aired. Dale turned on the spin machine by saying Soros is “a frequent target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,” and then claimed “at best” the money was indirect: Soros donated to the Color of Change PAC, and then the PAC backed Bragg.
Again, Graham is playing the lazy-partisan card (never mind, of course, that Trump is very much on record directly tying Bragg to Soros). Just because his conspiracy theory “looks obvious” doesn’t mean it’s actually true — he might try some of that “media research” he claims to be in charge of to figure out the facts. Graham concluded by whining that “CNN deploys Dale not as a ‘fact checker as much as a spin spoiler” — by which he means that Dale keeps spoiling Graham’s right-wing spin.
Even more offenses
Graham spent a July 12 column trying to frame anyone who’s not a anti-abortion extremist like himself as an “extremist” on abortion rights:
Republicans and many independents do not believe in the term “independent fact-checkers” when it comes to federal elections. Fact-checkers predictably defend Democrats from GOP “misinformation” in election season. Democrat extremism on abortion is one topic where the fact “checkers” are the fact manglers.
Take Republican Senate candidate Tim Sheehy in Montana. On July 10, PolitiFact broke out the “False” flag for something Sheehy said in a June 9 debate: “Elective abortions up to and including the moment of birth. Healthy, 9-month-year-old baby killed at the moment of birth. That’s what Jon Tester and the Democrats have voted for.”
You can tell PolitiFact is politically motivated for Democrats in the tone of their headline: “GOP’s Tim Sheehy revives discredited abortion claims in pivotal Senate race.” Discredited?
Donald Trump was slammed in his last debate for saying what he often says — the Democrats favor abortion up until birth. The first proof of that is plain language in the 2020 Democrat party platform, which explicitly stated: “Democrats oppose and will fight to overturn federal and state laws that create barriers to reproductive health and rights. We will repeal the Hyde Amendment, and protect and codify the right to reproductive freedom.”
Fact: They are unequivocally opposed to any “barriers to reproductive rights” and will “codify the right to reproductive freedom.” Nothing in that language expresses any time limit on an abortion. The “right to choose” is absolute. That includes — if you repeal the Hyde Amendment — the “right” to force anti-abortion taxpayers to pay for abortions.
The first big clue that Graham doesn’t care about facts is his use of “Democrat party” instead of the correct name of the Democratic Party. He then dishonestly framed a call for fewer restrictions on abortion as a call to remove all restrictions, despite nothing he quoted making that exact claim. And just because Trump was “saying what he often says” doesn’t make the repetition any more accurate. He concluded by whining:
This is not about facts at all. It’s about maintaining the fiction that the Democrats don’t favor the most permissive, baby-killing extreme, the exact opposite of people who want to ban killing unborn babies. They would prefer the public be swindled into believing the myth that Republicans are extremists on abortion while the Democrats are somehow sensible centrists.
Meanwhile, Graham is trying to swindle people by insisting that the anti-abortion absolutism he clearly supports — which, at its logical endpoint,will result and the arrest and imprisonment (and likely execution) of every woman who has ever had an abortion — is somehow hot “extreme.”
Gratham spent an Aug. 27 post whining that PolitiFact found the Democratic National Convention was more factual than the Republican National Convention:
PBS and their “independent fact-checker” partners at PolitiFact can agree: the Democratic convention was much more factual than the Republican convention. So Democrats didn’t just corner the market on “joy” and “electricity,” but apparently on facticity.
PolitiFact editor-in-chief Katie Sanders appeared on Thursday’s News Hour before Kamala Harris had even spoken. She did not appear during the prime-time convention coverage to “referee” the proceedings, as she did during the GOP convention.
Graham rehashed his usual whining that PolitiFact “gave Republicans three times as many False ratings while giving Democrats three times as many True ratings” — while not proving that these numbers are in any way inaccurate.
As he likes to do, Graham spent a Sept. 3 post portraying a single false claim that wasn’t immediately fact-checked as an indictment of all fact-checkers:
NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker doesn’t have a page at PolitiFact. She’s apparently never mangled a fact that required checking. It’s because she’s in the liberal fold. By contrast, Tucker Carlson has18 fact checks during the Biden era, with seven “Pants On Fire” rulings, ten “False” and one “Mostly False.”
On Sunday, Welker unloaded a whopper as she rushed in to contradict Sen. Tom Cotton as he responded to the fake Arlington Cemetery scandal. He pointed out the perversity that the Democrat media is hounding Trump when Kamala Harris failed to come to Arlington to honor the 13 service members killed by a suicide bomber during the botched Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Welker falsely claimed Harris was present at Dover Air Force Base when the bodies arrived for a “dignified transfer.” That, too, was an occasion for fact-mangling, when the “fact checkers” tried to deny an undignified President Biden repeatedly looked at his watch as the bodies were transferred. They had to issue corrections.
Actually, there was nothing fake about the Arlington “scandal,” in which Trump violated cemetery protocol to film in an area of the cemetery where such filming is prohibited for partisan politcal purposes.
Graham was dishonest about the abortion issue again in his Sept. 13 column:
“Fact checking” is often an exercise in spin-spoiling. The most obvious example from the ABC debate was the Democrat position on abortion. It is, as plainly stated in the 2020 DNC platform, for the woman’s “right to choose” without exception. That is what congressional Democrats have pushed in legislation, to repeal every limitation states have imposed.
Donald Trump routinely turns to the 2019 comments of then-Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia on the radio as he discussed a bill by state legislator Kathy Tran to make third-trimester abortions easier. She admitted it was so extreme it would allow a baby to be killed as they were about to be born.
So Northam explained how a baby that was born could be “kept comfortable” while the parents decided if they wanted abortion. After this clip went viral, Northam’s team said he didn’t mean abortion. That’s not credible, but the spin spoilers will quote it like it’s rock-solid.
Given that Northam and his office quickly pointed out that he misspoke and that Trump and others were taking his words out of context, it’s quite credible. But Graham wants to pretend that the correction was never made. Still, he went on to play the :extreme” card again:
At the very least, the knee-jerk reflex to “fact check” should be suppressed. “Fact checkers” all over the media descended on Trump over his latest citation of Northam, as they have for years now. They spew in outraged protest that late-term abortions are “rare,” like that somehow makes the extreme Democrat stance untrue.
ABC had carefully prepared to pounce on this. After the debate, Linsey Davis admitted to Stephen Battaglio at the Los Angeles Times that the decision to attempt to correct the candidates was in response to the CNN debate between Trump and Joe Biden, “whose poor performance led to his exit from the race.“
They claimed to have researched the speeches of both candidates, and Davis said she fully anticipated that Trump’s “erroneous” abortion claim would come up when she questioned him. “That was an obvious thing to get on the record,” Davis said.
But there was no attempt, after all this apparent research on both candidates, to question anything Harris said to “get on the record.” Not one thing.
Graham didn’t concede that Trump makes it easy for fact-checkers to prepare for him by constantly repeating his lies — and he identified absolutely nothing from Harris that demanded fact-checking.
Graham’s Sept. 18 column was devoted yet again to complaining that a liar like Trump keeps getting fact-checked:
Kamala Harris consented to a puffball panel discussion with the National Association of Black Journalists on September 17, and it was announced that PolitiFact would engage in live “fact checking.” Their Twitter feed then displayed 14 checks on Kamala’s answers. The first one was labeled “False,” and all of the rest of them were “True,” “Accurate,” or basically okey-dokey.
On September 11, PolitiFact hit a new milestone in leftist aggression. Donald Trump was thumped with a “Pants on Fire” tag for the 200th time with “they’re eating the pets” in Springfield, Ohio. He’s been tagged with flaming pants 12 times since June 1.
Kamala Harris, by contrast, has zero. She was first elected statewide in California in 2010. Your two candidates this year, not exactly “neck and neck” at 200 to nothing.
Now compare this to national politicians since PolitiFact came on the scene in 2007. Joe Biden has seven “Pants On Fire” ratings, and only one as president. Barack Obama has nine, Hillary Clinton has nine, Bill Clinton has three, and Bernie Sanders has a perfect zero like Kamala.
Again, Graham refused to offer evidence that Trump deserved none of those ratings while the Democrats deserved more. He concluded with one more whine:
Trump has 1,051 fact checks, and 805 of them are “Mostly False” or worse – 76.6 percent wrong. Bernie Sanders has 176 fact checks, and 44 were on the false side – 25 percent. Bernie can call Trump a “fascist” and he’s all good.
Yet again, Graham failed to prove those evaluations were not deserved. As usual, he’s trying to distract from the fact that Trump is a habitual liar who cannot be trusted.
Graham huffed in an Oct. 5 post:
Near the end of the CBS vice-presidential debate, the moderators brought up Trump’s election denial and the January 6 riot, which the media then turned into the most noteworthy moment, because to them, January 6 is always the top issue. J.D. Vance wouldn’t denounce his running mate’s election denial, turning instead to how Democrats aren’t great on Democracy.
“You guys attack us for not believing in democracy,” said Vance. “The most sacred right under United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself has said there’s no first amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris — wants to use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That’s a threat to democracy there will long outlive this present moment.”
Vance shouldn’t have had to bring up Big Tech censorship on his own. CBS moderators should have.
Graham is certainly not going to call out Vance for changing the subject in order to avoid having to talk about Trump’s constant lying — that’s not the MRC is paying him to do.