PolitiFact Bias, blog that focuses on “showing PolitiFact’s liberal slant, highlighted the Wall Street Journal’s James Rago’s editorial writing Pulitzer Prize because one of the columns he submitted included criticism of PolitiFact, the fact-checking organization.
Rago’s award was for a group of ten columns including “PolitiFiction,” which slammed PolitiFact’s 2010 “Lie of the Year” award. PolitiFact’s award went to the statement that “it is inaccurate to call the [new health care plan] a government takeover.”
As Rago stated in that December 2010 column,
“PolitiFact’s decree is 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. PolitiFact wants to define for everyone else what qualifies as a ‘fact,’ though in political debates the facts are often legitimately in dispute.”
That “Lie of the Year” award also led to a boycott of PolitiFact by one of its expert sources, Michael Cannon. Cannon publicly criticized PolitiFact’s awards and errors and stated he won’t be a source for PolitiFact’s fact checks “until they address these errors.”