The Professional Fact-Check Is Dead

By Becket Adams

Sunday, September 06, 2026

 

The dedicated “fact-check” outfit is dead; it just doesn’t know it yet.

 

The crisis of professional “fact-checking” is not new. For more than 15 years, observers have watched with alarm as the genre degraded itself to serve partisan politics.

 

Yet little has been written about the discipline in its present state. Its original raison d’être long discarded, it lingers now as a zombie, ambling aimlessly in pursuit of mindless satiation.

 

Take Snopes, that relic of the early web that once existed to dismantle viral myths and spare the public from conspiracies, humorous hoaxes, and harmful falsehoods. Recently, it sought to calm concerns that the late Dolly Parton might have done something nice for Jews.

 

“Did Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library donate books to children in Israel?” asked a Snopes headline. The subhead reassured readers: “PJ Library, which provides free books to Jewish children, was inspired by Parton’s organization. But the two have no formal relationship.”

 

Phew! That was close! (This episode is funnier when one discovers that the article’s author, Nur Ibrahim, “started her career as an associate producer with Al Jazeera English” — because of course she did.)

 

One might ask: “What’s the problem? There was an online rumor, and Snopes disproved it. Isn’t that its function?”

 

As my friend Noam Blum explained, “‘Dolly Parton donated books to Israel’ would only be a statement worth debunking if its untruth was somehow harmful. The framing of ‘don’t worry, folks, she didn’t do it, and you can keep loving her’ is the problem.”

 

No one would feel compelled to correct the assertion that Dolly Parton prefers spring over autumn. Fact-checkers, especially of the Snopes variety, usually address the wild, the fantastical, or the defamatory. But for the modern-day Snopes, the claim that Parton’s foundation might have benefited Jewish children occupies the same moral universe as allegations that Katy Perry has a “penchant for cannibalism.”

 

The point is: Modern fact-checking groups exist largely to peddle this sort of junk, addressing mostly institutional interests or personal bugaboos, but rarely serving the public good.

 

Snopes is hardly unique; examples abound.

 

PolitiFact, which has been a mess for years, awarded its “Pants on Fire” rating to the hypothesis that Covid-19 was “not from nature” but “a man-made virus created in the lab.” (It later retracted its rating.)

 

By contrast, the outfit declined to penalize either Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) or then–Senator Kamala Harris when both repeated the objective lie that a police officer “murdered” Michael Brown.

 

PolitiFact also published a piece asserting: “Joe Biden didn’t name Kamala Harris ‘border czar.’”

 

Is that so?

 

“He tasked her with addressing the issues driving migration from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,” the ruling explained. “U.S. Border security is the Homeland Security Secretary’s responsibility.”

 

Got it. Harris was not the “border czar”; she was merely tasked with overseeing the administration’s response to the immigration crisis.

 

By the way, it’s impossible not to notice that these fact-checks all point in one direction.

 

Speaking of which, FactCheck.org similarly insisted that the official overseeing the border situation was no “czar,” though she filled the role and commentators routinely applied the title until it turned politically toxic.

 

FactCheck.org likewise dismissed the Wuhan lab-leak theory as a “baseless conspiracy theory.”

 

Next, a personal favorite: The Washington Free Beacon reported in 2022 that the Biden administration was “set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance ‘racial equity.’” The reporting was accurate; a solid piece of shoe-leather journalism.

 

Yet FactCheck.org dismissed it as misinformation, presumably to spare the administration from embarrassment.

 

Then there are the in-house fact-checking divisions within major media outlets, which are somehow more inept than the standalone sites.

 

During and after the second 2024 presidential debate, fact-checkers dogpiled on Donald Trump for accusing Harris of supporting late-term abortion as well as taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries for detained immigrants.

 

On both counts, Trump was right; the fact-checkers were wrong.

 

Consider, too, when the Washington Post ran the headline: “Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren’t.”

 

The critique hinged entirely on the fact that only 29 of the 32 cities with the highest violent crime rates had Democratic leadership.

 

Consider also when USA Today rated “true” the claim that Trump campaign apparel featured an “imperial eagle, a Nazi symbol.” The newspaper later added a clarification noting that “the eagle is a longtime U.S. symbol, too,” before changing the rating to “inconclusive.”

 

Don’t forget when the press fact-checkers collectively agreed that secret government surveillance is not “spying.”

 

Finally, consider Trump’s State of the Union address this year when he declared: “The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended. It still continues because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American patriot, and our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder, and more glorious than ever before.”

 

Not so fast, countered an Associated Press fact-check: “The American Revolution started the previous year, on April 19, 1775. . . . The colonies declared independence in 1776. It ended Sept. 3, 1783.”

 

The recurring theme across these examples is clear: The modern fact-checker exists less to inform the public than to score political points and protect partisan interests.

 

Few incidents illustrate this better than an August 2024 episode involving Taylor Lorenz, then a Washington Post technology reporter specializing in online “disinformation.” Lorenz posted a photo labeling President Biden a “war criminal.” When screenshots circulated, she panicked and claimed they were digital counterfeits fabricated by nameless enemies. She admitted later the photo was genuine, but only after the internet collectively rejected her saboteur theory.

 

Despite Lorenz’s blatantly fabricating a falsehood and spreading — ahem — online “disinformation,” NBC News “disinformation” reporter Brandy Zadrozny rushed to her defense, insisting that the true villains were those who exposed the conduct.

 

Forget asking “who watches the watchers?” What purpose do these “watchers” even serve?

 

If it were not already clear that media fact-checking has descended into a sort of rent-a-cop “public safety” gimmick that serves only niche political interests, the Washington Post’s decision to shutter its presidential lie tracker just in time for the Biden presidency should have settled the matter. If it’s not going to maintain a lie tracker for the guy who implied cannibals ate his uncle during World War II, then what’s the point? And if the shuttering of the lie tracker didn’t sell you on the ineffectuality and one-sidedness of modern-day fact-checking, consider CNN’s keeping its Canadian fact-checker locked in a cabinet, releasing him only to scrutinize Trump speeches.

 

All of which goes to the main idea: By allowing itself to be turned into a partisan attack dog, mainstream fact-checking has surrendered its credibility, thus rendering itself obsolete. If the discipline is defunct in major newsrooms, independent operations such as Snopes are equally doomed, and the Dolly Parton piece is a particularly pitiful reminder.

 

What purpose do these institutions serve today, when public trust in the media has cratered? What good are they when platforms such as X and Facebook already operate Community Notes and similar fact-check functions? Professional fact-checking is not merely in crisis; it is a propped-up corpse, maintained only to settle internal partisan squabbles and advance self-serving agendas.

 

Fact-check: Zero Pinocchios.