As I have stated before, here and elsewhere on The Thinker:

Without good critical thinking skills, the public’s opinions on important issues are formed for them by others — by the media, by popularity and peer pressure, and by authority figures such as professors, politicians, and “the experts”. Critical thinking can enable everyday people to arm themselves against the persuasive powers of pundits, demagogues, and other propaganda artists.

This is why I’ve always been a big proponent of nonpartisan fact-checking sites like FactCheck.org. A neutral source of fact-checking against claims made by the media and by politicians can not only help people to defend themselves against the demagogues, but can also help them to become better critical thinkers by exposing them to unbiased analyses of claims they might otherwise accept uncritically.

But… as I also said here:

It’s difficult to expose political demagoguery and propaganda without also exposing one’s own political views somewhat, even though I recognize that valid critical thinking can lead others to quite different political views.

Which leads me to wonder just how neutral and nonpartisan FactCheck.org really is. Who’s checking the fact-checkers?

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. Billionaire philanthropist Walter Annenberg, whose foundation funds FactCheck.org, was a noted conservative and friend of Ronald Reagan. But in his later years he also funded some liberal causes, including a grant to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge that Barack Obama chaired (with William Ayers) for several years (see here).

A quick Google reveals many criticisms from both the left and the right of various FactCheck.org articles. I think it’s probably a fool’s game for me to try to extract any meaning from this; most of these criticisms seem to be sour grapes from some right- or left-wing cause. But some are legitimate criticisms, like these two (here and here) from QandO, wherein FactCheck.org was shown to be inaccurate and overly critical of the “swift boat” adds about (then-presidential candidate) John Kerry. I also discovered (via advanced Googling for articles with RNC or DNC in the titles) that FactCheck.org tends to call out misstatements by Republicans more often than those by Democrats (154 to 111).

Take all of this for what you will. The bottom line is that fact-checking sites such as FactCheck.org, for all their attempts to be neutral and unbiased, are staffed by real live human beings who suffer from the same cognitive biases, logical fallacies, and political worldviews as all other humans do. It seems to me they are correct and fair the majority of the time, but occasionally they may stray from neutrality just a bit.