Since Donald Trump won re-election, the fiercest Trump-bashers in the press have raged against any sign of media titans softening their approaches before the second term begins. Visits to Mar-a-lago? Outrageous! Donating to Trump’s inauguration? Unconscionable!

Then Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced his Meta sites would be abandoning the censorship of “fact checkers,” in place since 2015. NBC reporter Hallie Jackson stuck to fiction when she reported they would be abandoning the “independent nonpartisan fact checking they’ve had in place.”

Anyone claiming websites like PolitiFact are “independent” or “nonpartisan” should get the rating “Pants On Fire.” In the first nine months of 2024, PolitiFact was twice as likely to tag Republican officials as “Mostly False” or worse (82.2 percent) as they were for Democrat officials (41.3 percent). Put aside the percentages for the raw numbers, and there were 88 “false” tags for Republicans, 31 for Democrats -- almost three to one.

PolitiFact veterans like Angie Drobnic Holan tried to claim they were not engaged in censorship (but merely flagged articles for suppression!) and that they observed a Meta code of principles “requiring nonpartisanship and transparency.” This boilerplate is not credible.