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

PolitiFact

U.S. center-left

Owned byPoynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school based in St. Petersburg, Florida (which also owns the Tampa Bay Times)
FundingMix of online advertising, reader donations and memberships, content-licensing fees paid by media partners, and grants from foundations including Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Democracy Fund, and the MacArthur Foundation; lost its paid Meta fact-checking partnership in January 2025
On the administrationbroadly critical

Background

PolitiFact was founded in August 2007 by journalist Bill Adair and news technologist Matthew Waite as a project of the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times), aimed at rating the accuracy of political statements using a 'Truth-O-Meter' scale. In 2009 it won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for its coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign, which boosted its national profile and led to licensing deals with dozens of state and local news outlets. For its first decade it was funded primarily through the Tampa Bay Times and website advertising. In February 2018 the Poynter Institute — which also owns the Tampa Bay Times through a complex nonprofit structure — took direct ownership of PolitiFact, giving it formal nonprofit status and broadening its reliance on foundation grants and reader donations. Critics on the right have long contended that PolitiFact targets Republican figures more aggressively than Democrats; independent tracking sites document persistent disparities in negative ratings by party. In January 2025, Meta ended an eight-year paid partnership with PolitiFact, with Mark Zuckerberg publicly citing political bias as the reason. PolitiFact's own statistics for 2025 showed Republicans receiving 'Mostly False' or worse ratings in roughly 85 percent of checks, compared to about 35 percent for Democrats — a gap the outlet attributes to the volume and severity of false claims by the subjects it chose to check, while critics argue it reflects selective topic selection.

Sources

  1. PolitiFact — Wikipedia
  2. Who Pays For PolitiFact? | PolitiFact
  3. PolitiFact gains nonprofit status with move to the Poynter Institute | PolitiFact
  4. Poynter Expands Fact-Checking Franchise by Acquiring PolitiFact.com | Poynter
  5. Major Funders — Poynter
  6. PolitiFact Media Bias | AllSides
  7. PolitiFact — Bias and Credibility | Media Bias/Fact Check
  8. PolitiFact Bias: Ten Years of Bias 2016–2025
  9. PolitiFact — Ballotpedia
  10. Poynter Institute — Influence Watch

Profile compiled 2026-07-16; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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