Or, it could just be that Trump is that bad - a bigger liar than Clinton. He makes Clinton look like George Washington.
From Wiki:
Reception
PolitiFact.com was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009 for "its fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters".
[24]
A
Wall Street Journal editorial in December 2010 called PolitiFact "part of a larger journalistic trend that seeks to recast all political debates as matters of lies, misinformation and 'facts,' rather than differences of world view or principles".
[25]
Mark Hemingway of
The Weekly Standard criticized all fact-checking projects by news organizations, including PolitiFact, the
Associated Press and the
Washington Post, writing that they "aren’t about checking facts so much as they are about a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths out of the conversation".
[26]
In December 2011,
Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy wrote in the
Huffington Post that the problem with fact-checking projects was "there are only a finite number of statements that can be subjected to thumbs-up/thumbs-down fact-checking".
[27]
Matt Welch, in the February 2013 issue of
Reason magazine, criticized PolitiFact and other media fact-checkers for focusing much more on statements by politicians about their opponents, rather than statements by politicians and government officials about their own policies, thus serving as "a check on the exercise of rhetoric" but not "a check on the exercise of power".
[28]
Analysis of PolitiFact's ratings
University of Minnesota political science professor Eric Ostermeier did an analysis of 511 selected PolitiFact stories issued from January 2010 through January 2011, stating that "PolitiFact has generally devoted an equal amount of time analyzing Republicans (191 statements, 50.4 percent) as they have Democrats (179 stories, 47.2 percent)". Republican officeholders were considered by Politifact to have made substantially more "false" or "pants on fire" statements than their Democratic counterparts. Of 98 statements PolitiFact judged "false" or "pants on fire" from partisan political figures, 74 came from Republicans (76 percent) compared to 22 from Democrats (22 percent) during the selected period reviewed. Ostermeier concluded "By levying 23 Pants on Fire ratings to Republicans over the past year compared to just 4 to Democrats, it appears the sport of choice is game hunting — and the game is elephants."
[29] The study was criticized by PolitiFact editor Bill Adair and the
MinnPost, with Adair responding, "Eric Ostermeier's study is particularly timely because we've heard a lot of charges this week that we are biased—from liberals […] So we're accustomed to hearing strong reactions from people on both ends of the political spectrum. We are a news organization and we choose which facts to check based on news judgment."
[30]
A writer with the left-leaning magazine
The Nation argued that findings like this are a reflection of "fact-checkers simply doing their job […] Republicans today just happen to be more egregiously wrong".
[31] A writer with the right-leaning
Human Events claimed that after looking at Politifact's work on a case-by-case basis a pattern emerged whereby Politifact critiqued
straw man claims; that is, "dismissed the speaker’s claim, made up a different claim and checked that instead". The conservative magazine noted Politifact's use of language such as "[although the speaker] used [a specific] phrase […] in his claim, [it] could fairly be interpreted to mean [something more general that is false]".
Human Events cited Bryan White's PolitiFactBias blog to state that "from the end of that partnership [with the
Congressional Quarterly] to the end of 2011, the national PolitiFact operation has issued 119 Pants on Fire ratings for Republican or conservative claims, and only 13 for liberal or Democratic claims".
[32]