Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center's Tim Graham continued his tilting at fact-checking windmills in an Aug. 8 post:
Matt Palumbo at Bongino.com took issue with the extremely biased nature of PolitiFact's "Truth-O-Meter" in assessing "facts." The controversy? This week, President Trump signed an executive order to prevent illegal immigrants from being counted for the purposes of re-apportioning congressional districts after the 2020 census.
PolitiFact's Tom Kertscher decided to warn America that the following claim was "Mostly False."
“California has six extra” congressional representatives “because illegals are counted” in the census.
After noting that PolitiFact contacted an expert in demography who noted that the state has, at best, two to four extra seats due to undocumented immigrants -- whom Graham dismissed as biased because he has "been a repetitive small donor to the Democratic National Committee," though he didn't explain how such small donations equals lying about demographics to PolitiFact -- Graham huffed:
This takes us back to the obvious point we have to make over and over again when it comes to these "fact checkers." They are taking exception to an estimate, which is not a hard fact. To disagree on an estimate on this scale should not rise to the level of "false news and misinformation."
Except that the Bongino item and the Facebook post it's based on said nothing about the number being an estimate; it was stated as "hard fact" and claimed to be based on the 2010 Census and "the number of people illegally there."
Graham then serves up his usual whine about purported bias of PolitiFact: "A search of 'Bongino' at PolitiFact locates four 'fact checks' in the last year or so....all of them Mostly False or worse."Well, it's not like Graham or the MRC would ever be moved to fact-check Bongino, right? Their job is to ampllify right-wingers, not fact-check them.
