Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

PolitiFact

U.S. center-left (per independent bias raters); nonprofit fact-checker

Owned byOwned by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. Poynter acquired it in 2018. PolitiFact's editor-in-chief and executive director report to Poynter's president.
FundingMix of grants and philanthropy, content partnerships and licensing, online advertising, and donations. Reported funders include the Democracy Fund and the Craig Newmark Foundation. It relies on Poynter for administrative support but is otherwise largely self-sustaining.
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

PolitiFact launched in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times) and won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2009 for its 2008 election coverage. It is known for its Truth-O-Meter scale, which runs from True to Pants on Fire, and for its Lie of the Year designation. In 2018, ownership moved from the Times to the Poynter Institute, the nonprofit that also owns the Tampa Bay Times. PolitiFact is part of the International Fact-Checking Network, which Poynter hosts. Over the years, conservative critics have argued that it applies its ratings unevenly, and groups like NewsBusters have tallied that Republicans receive more fact-checks and harsher ratings than Democrats. Its defenders say these differences reflect what politicians actually said and which claims were checkable, and PolitiFact says it applies a consistent methodology. Critics on the left have sometimes faulted its ratings as too lenient or too narrow. In the second Trump term, it has continued to rate many administration claims as False or Pants on Fire, but it has also issued some favorable ratings, and it has rated claims by Democrats such as Bernie Sanders as false. Independent raters generally describe it as high in factual reporting with a modest center-left lean.

Sources

  1. PolitiFact - Wikipedia
  2. Politifact - Bias and Credibility - Media Bias/Fact Check
  3. PolitiFact Media Bias - AllSides
  4. The Principles of the Truth-O-Meter: PolitiFact's methodology
  5. PolitiFact - Ballotpedia
  6. NewsBusters: PolitiFact tilts dramatically against Trump and Republicans
  7. PolitiFact: Donald Trump

Profile compiled 2026-10-15; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

← Back to track record