Politifact took a virtual thrashing after announcing early Tuesday morning that their “Lie of the Year” was the report out of Springfield, Ohio, that migrants were eating domesticated animals like dogs and cats.
The outlet shared the announcement in a post on X, attributing the “lie” to President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance.
“A lie marked a town and its residents in the name of campaign rage. It was absurd. It was consequential. Our Lie of the Year goes to Donald Trump and JD Vance for false claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pet dogs and cats,” the post read.
Politifact further defended the selection in a follow-up post, adding, “PolitiFact doesn’t use the word ‘lie’ lightly. We save it to describe the most egregious falsehood we’ve seen in a year’s worth of fact-checking.”
But, as some critics noted, there was no way to definitively fact-check the claims — which were raised by Springfield residents long before Trump or Vance mentioned the issue on the campaign trail — and no way to prove that migrants were not, in fact, eating cats or dogs.
One Springfield resident raised concerns at a city council meeting in late August, telling city officials, “Haitians are in the park grabbing ducks, cutting the heads off, and eating them.”
On X, most offered suggestions regarding what might constitute a better “Lie of the Year” — from President Joe Biden’s promise not to pardon his embattled son Hunter Biden to the Democratic Party’s insistence that Biden was “sharp as a tack” and fit to not only win the 2024 presidential election but also to serve a second four-year term in the White House.
“I’d have gone with ‘Joe Biden is perfectly fine and fit to serve as president again’ as my ‘Lie of the Year,’ but that’s just me,” The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross posted.
“Actually, the lie of the year was Biden saying he wouldn’t pardon Hunter and then pardoning Hunter,” another added.
“I feel like Biden’s ‘I’m not dropping out’ was more consequential but what do I know?” another suggested.
Others noted that the choice likely had more to do with political preferences than with any actual fact check.
“Here’s the fact that made us angriest this year,” Jim Treacher posted.
“You cannot hate the legacy media enough,” Kira Davis concluded.
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