Tag: fact checkers

HELL FREEZES OVER: CBS News ‘Fact Checks’ Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass From Debate, Says Spencer Pratt Was Right 

Something has shifted in the race for mayor of Los Angeles after Spencer Pratt’s amazing performance in the debate earlier this week.

Even CBS News has done a ‘fact check’ on incumbent Democrat candidate Karen Bass, something that is usually reserved for Republican candidates. It’s extremely rare for the media to call out a Democrat candidate in this way.

The fact check had mostly to do with claims made about the wildfires, which are clearly going to play a much larger role in this race than Democrats were hoping.

John Nolte writes at Breitbart News:

Here is a partially edited transcript from the debate that’s relevant to the first CBS News fact check about the mayor’s epic mishandling of the 2025 Palisades Fire that destroyed nearly 7,000 structures and killed 12 people:

SPENCER PRATT: A lot of people talk about climate change and hurricane-force winds. The winds in the Pacific Palisades never reached higher than 40 mph. For those first six hours, they didn’t go above 27 miles per hour.

The whole point of this exchange is that Bass is running around blaming the fire on Climate Change.

KAREN BASS: He talked about the winds — that is just completely inaccurate. If that were accurate, then the planes would have been able to fly. And so if the winds reached close to 100 miles an hour and the planes were unable to fly.

PRATT: Yes, she mentioned me. So this is — she’s an incredible liar. Everyone on their phones, Google it. 40 weather stations in the Pacific Palisades. It never went above 40 miles per hour. She is referencing the Altadena fire.

BIASED LEFTIST MODERATOR: I have to interrupt you. No name-calling, please.

PRATT: Yeah, but no name calling? She just lied though… No more lying. We need the truth.

Here’s the CBS News fact check:

Weather modeling reviewed for my reporting shows winds in the Palisades during those first several hours of the fire were, in fact under 40 miles per hour. Planes could and did fly. Stronger winds intensified later in the evening. And that distinction matters because the earliest hours of a wildfire are often the most critical for containment.

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Former Iranian State Media Editor Now Works for ‘Nonpartisan’ US Media Bias Group That Rates Conservative Publishers as Untrustworthy Compared With ‘Reliable’ Liberal Outlets

A former paid scribe for an Iranian state-affiliated newspaper now works for a U.S. media watchdog group that produces a controversial “media bias” chart that consistently rates liberal outlets as more reliable than conservative ones, the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports. Universities like Cornell and journalism nonprofits like Poynter have cited and praised the media bias ratings of this organization, Ad Fontes Media, like it’s a neutral third party.

Meet Meisam Zamanabadi, an Ad Fontes Media analyst who was raised in Iran and served as an editor at Hamshahri, an Iranian newspaper owned and operated by Tehran’s municipal government that has been associated with hardline politicians and drew international condemnation after holding a Holocaust denial cartoon contest in 2006. Posts from his blog indicate that Zamanabadi worked at the paper in 2008 and 2009, when Iranian parliament speaker and chief regime negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf served as mayor of Tehran.

Zamanabadi now resides in California and works for Ad Fontes, the Colorado-based “public benefit corporation” behind the Media Bias Chart, which evaluates U.S. news outlets by political leaning and trustworthiness. The chart “consistently rates left-wing sources as more reliable and often less biased than their conservative counterparts,” writes Goodman. Socialist magazine Jacobin, for example, enjoys a higher “reliability” rating than long-established, edited publications such as National Review, the New York Post, and the Free Beacon. On television, the chart says Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters are less reliable than their MS Now counterparts Chris Hayes and Jen Psaki.

News of Zamanabadi’s work for Ad Fontes—which markets its “analysis” to schools as a tool for teaching media literacy and claims that its ratings are “non-partisan”—comes as the watchdog faces questions about its own objectivity and ethics. Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission requested records about Ad Fontes’s business practices as part of an investigation into “possible collusion” in a scheme to get advertisers to withdraw their support for conservative content, the New York Times reported. The Trump FTC says these spending pullbacks are illegal boycotts.

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US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit

The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets.

The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements.

We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud.

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Former WaPo ‘Fact-Checker’ Admits He ‘Screwed Up’ by Dismissing Lab Leak Theory 5 Years Later

Former Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler admitted Thursday that he was “completely wrong” to label the COVID lab leak theory as “doubtful” in 2020, conveniently coming clean five years later after recently leaving the publication.

During an interview with The Editors, Kessler’s 2020 Washington Post fact-check article entitled, “Was the new coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab? It’s doubtful,” was discussed.

“I screwed up… I was completely wrong,” Kessler told editor Ira Stoll. He expressed “infinite regret” and tried to brush it off by saying, “Everyone makes mistakes. No one is perfect.”

The problem is that when Kessler wrote this headline, the country was tearing itself apart with fear.

As President Donald Trump was rightfully blaming China for the Wuhan lab leak, others in the media were dismissing the president, while sowing doubt and blaming it on transmissions from bats to humans.

The nation lost valuable time by arguing over the origin of the virus, and it hobbled Trump’s ability to lead.

This allowed China to shirk its responsibility a bit longer and delayed Trump’s ability to place the blame where it rightfully belonged. It also took the focus off Dr. Anthony Fauci’s involvement.

That amounts to a huge mistake. It could even be argued it was done on purpose to sabotage Trump and avoid aggression toward Chinese interests. This isn’t something that can simply be apologized away.

Yet Kessler continued his contrition speech all the same.

“When you’ve got a title like ‘the fact checker,’ when you make a mistake, people notice,” he said. “So, you know, you’ve got to own it.”

He even had the gall to say his entire body of work outweighed the error, despite being previously accused of running a “propaganda mill” by the New York Post editorial board.

“I wrote or edited 3,000 fact-checks. Yes, there might be a dozen bad apples there,” Kessler added. “It’s easy and kind of facile to pick at a particular piece and say that defines a person.”

But we’re not talking about a mistake that can be fixed with an editor’s note, or a spelling error that can be tweaked with the click of a button.

This headline drove a narrative that resulted in real life consequences. It helped contribute to mass censorship against any dissenters.

The media drove the narrative on how America should tackle the virus, and what policies would work best, especially in the early weeks and months of the outbreak.

“One of the reporters on the piece came up to me the next day and said, ‘I think you made a real mistake by putting ‘it’s doubtful,’” Kessler confessed. “‘Because I’m uncertain where it stands, and you framed it in a way that made it seem more definitive than what we came up with.’”

He added, “That’s on me. I screwed up. She recently left The Washington Post to go to another place. In my goodbye remarks, I mentioned, this explains why you should always listen to Sarah, because she’s right, and I was completely wrong about this.”

He was referring to Sarah Cahlan, who co-authored the piece.

He admitted that he ignored advice from one of the reporters who wrote the article. And the headline still hasn’t been changed! One year later, a note was added to the 2020 article that still didn’t confirm COVID came from a lab.

Part of the note read, “A year later, the source of the coronavirus is still unknown. But in recent months new evidence has tipped the lab leak theory onto firmer ground.”

Why wasn’t Kessler suspended or punished for such a glaring error? Quite the opposite happened when Kessler was allowed to stay on, and took a buyout less than three weeks ago after working there for almost 30 years, according to the New York Post.

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Elon Musk’s X to Deploy AI to Write Community Notes, Speed Up Fact-Checking

In a major tech-driven update, Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter) has announced it will deploy AI technology to automatically write Community Notes and enhance the speed and accuracy of fact-checking. This move signals a deeper commitment to tackling misinformation, improving content transparency, and empowering users with context.

Let’s break down what this means, how it will work, and what impact it might have on the social media landscape.

Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) are a feature that allows users to collaboratively add context to potentially misleading or controversial tweets. The system relies on crowdsourced input from contributors who can write, rate, and approve notes that are visible to all users once they reach a certain level of consensus.

Until now, these notes were created manually by human contributors. But with the introduction of AI, the process is about to get a serious boost in efficiency and scale.

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Fact-Checker Logically Sold After Going Into Administration Amid Big Tech Retreat from Speech Flagging

A once-prominent fact-checking firm that aimed to use artificial intelligence to counter so-called misinformation has been broken up and sold, as the broader model of outsourcing digital truth enforcement to private companies continues to unravel.

Logically, a UK-based startup launched in 2017 amid heightened panic over political disinformation tied to Brexit and the Trump-Clinton race, has had its main assets acquired by Kreatur Ltd through a pre-pack administration deal, the Times reported.

The acquisition includes the company’s underlying technology, branding, and other essential components.

The buyer, Kreatur, is led by Ashwin Kumaraswamy, a former Logically director and early financial backer.

Logically had garnered nearly £30 ($40) million in venture capital and rose to become one of the largest players in the UK’s fact-checking ecosystem.

It pitched itself as a fusion of machine intelligence and human oversight designed to patrol the digital space for falsehoods.

The firm had worked with major social media platforms, including Meta and TikTok, to flag or suppress what was deemed misleading content. Both companies eventually severed ties with Logically.

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Politifact: You Can’t Call Mamdani A Communist Just Because He Said All These Communist Things

Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City, is a socialist. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which endorses him, and his platform is filled with socialist/communist ideas.

Mamdani envisions government-run grocery stores, free bus fares, free childcare, and government housing.

But PolitiFact, which fancies itself the nation’s ultimate fact checker, has produced two pieces declaring President Donald Trump’s social media post calling Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic,” false.

The first item, written by Ella Moore, Amy Sherman, and Caryn Baird, simply challenged Trump’s post. Notably, PolitiFact only investigated the communist claim. It did not challenge the claim that Mamdani is a lunatic.

“Mamdani’s platform calls for making transportation, housing and groceries more affordable, but experts say he hasn’t espoused key tenets of communism, such as government takeover of industry and private property,” the PolitiFact piece reads, and it stresses that “Mamdani does not call for getting rid of private ownership.”

But he doesn’t have to “call for” it for his policies to make it happen.

PolitiFact failed to mention Mamdani’s 2020 social media post in which he praised a communist mayor in India, saying this is the kind of mayor New York City needs. Politifact claimed, “We won’t dwell on the latter post because Mamdani’s point isn’t clear.”

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Florida Bans State Funds for Groups Accused of Speech Policing

Florida has moved to shield public funds from being used to support what many see as efforts to police speech under the guise of media bias monitoring.

Under the state’s new fiscal year 2026 budget, taxpayer dollars can no longer be spent on advertising or marketing firms that contract with groups like NewsGuard, Ad Fontes, or the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).

The measure was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis on Monday.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

A press release from the Independent Media Council emphasized that the restriction is aimed at blocking state agencies from doing business with companies that rely on “politically biased media monitoring services.”

The council stated, “These monitoring groups purport to be impartial, but consistently skew their ratings to target conservative and independent media from receiving advertising from major brands.”

NewsGuard, one of the most prominent organizations caught in the spotlight, has received federal backing in the form of a $750,000 grant from the Department of Defense.

This funding helped the group develop its “Misinformation Fingerprints” technology, which it now offers to social media platforms, artificial intelligence developers, and tech firms as a tool for tracking so-called misinformation.

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Mamdani and ‘fact checkers’ deny he is a Communist, but his own words say otherwise

Zohran Mamdani, the self-described “democratic socialist” and presumptive Democratic Party nominee to be mayor of New York City, has been supported by so-called “fact-checkers” and legacy media in denying that he is a Communist — but his oft-repeated past comments strongly contradict his denials. Mamdani is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), but he denies that he is a Communist.

An investigation by Just the News shows that in tweets, speeches, and affiliations, Mamdani, at his core, holds a strong affinity for straight-up Communism: praising and campaigning with a Marxist state senator in New York; declaring that NYC needed a mayor just like a famously young Indian mayor who was a member of an explicitly Marxist and Communist Party; praising the 1917 Russian Revolution which led to the overthrow of the Czar and, soon, the establishment of the Soviet Union at the cost of millions of lives; arguing about the need to “seize the means of production” in a reference to a core Marxist principle; praising famous radical Communist figures; and much more.

After the win by Mamdani on Tuesday, President Trump weighed in by declaring Mamdani “a 100% Communist Lunatic.”

“It’s finally happened, the Democrats have crossed the line. Zohran Mamdani, a 100% Communist Lunatic, has just won the Dem Primary, and is on his way to becoming Mayor,” Trump said on his Truth Social account. “We’ve had Radical Lefties before, but this is getting a little ridiculous. He looks TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, he’s not very smart, he’s got AOC+3, Dummies ALL, backing him, and even our Great Palestinian Senator, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, is groveling over him. Yes, this is a big moment in the History of our Country!”

Mamdani retorted last week in an interview with ABC News that “this is not the first time that President Trump is going to comment on myself, and I encourage him — just like I encourage every New Yorker — to learn about my actual policies to make the city affordable.”

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European Commission Launches €5.69M European Fact-Checking Funding Network to Advance “Democracy Shield” and Expand Censorship Infrastructure

The European Commission has launched a €5 million initiative presented as a fact-checking support program; but beneath the surface, it reads as yet another calculated step toward institutionalizing censorship across the European Union.

This call for proposals is marketed as a tool to “protect democracy” and combat “disinformation,” but the structure, goals, and affiliations of the program point clearly to the opposite: a top-down, publicly funded apparatus for narrative enforcement.

Slated to run until September 2, 2025, the project is open not only to EU Member States but also to candidate countries like Ukraine and Moldova; jurisdictions framed as highly vulnerable to “foreign interference,” especially pro-Kremlin disinformation.

This strategic framing serves a dual purpose: justifying increased surveillance of content and securing narrative dominance in geopolitically sensitive areas.

The program’s core deliverables; protecting fact-checkers from so-called “harassment,” creating a centralized repository of “fact-checks,” and building emergency “response capacity;” sound benign to some. But stripped of the euphemism, this is a blueprint for constructing a continent-wide content control grid.

The “protection scheme” offers legal and cyber assistance to fact-checkers, but more crucially it reinforces the narrative that opposition to these groups constitutes abuse rather than legitimate disagreement.

The “fact-check repository” enables centralized curation of what counts as “truth,” and the “emergency response” function gives the Commission a pretext to fast-track suppression efforts in politically sensitive moments.

Most telling is the program’s requirement that participating organizations be certified by either the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) or the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).

Many of their members, such as AFP and Full Fact, already work directly with major social media platforms like Meta under third-party moderation schemes. This effectively means the EC is reinforcing an exclusive gatekeeper class, already aligned with corporate censorship programs, now endowed with taxpayer funds and the backing of the European bureaucracy.

At least 60% of the funding will go to third parties, who must co-finance their participation.

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