PolitiFact itself encourages people to unquestioningly accept its truth ratings through their marketing strategy. When judging a given politician, PolitiFact aggregates its ratings in a way that encourages people to look not at the truth value within any individual article with a speaker’s claim, but at the “larger” picture of the speaker’s commitment to the truth.
This method assumes this or that article might have a problem, but you have to look at the “big picture” of dozens of fact-checks, which inevitably means glossing over the fact that biased details do not add up to an unbiased whole.
Whenever you see the “Republicans Lie More Than Democrats” headline, whether it is in The Atlantic, the New York Times, Politico, or Salon, you’ll find that the data to support this claim comes from PolitiFact’s aggregate truth metrics. Using collective data instead of individual cases lets PolitiFact gloss over individual articles that delivered a questionable rating, comparable situations for two speakers that PolitiFact treated differently, biased selection of facts, and instances in which PolitiFact made an editorial decision to check one speaker over another. – READ MORE
