PunditFact, a related site that was also created by the Times' editors, is devoted to fact-checking claims made by political pundits.

PolitiFact increasingly relies on grants from several "nonpartisan" organizations, and in 2017 launched a membership campaign and began accepting donations from readers.

[5] PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its reporting during the 2008 United States presidential election,[6] and has been praised and criticized by independent observers, conservatives and liberals alike.

[13] In 2013, Adair was named Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, and stepped down as Bureau Chief at the Times and as editor at PolitiFact.com.

[14] The Tampa Bay Times' senior reporter, Alex Leary, succeeded Bill Adair as Bureau Chief on July 1, 2013,[14] and Angie Drobnic Holan was appointed editor of PolitiFact in October 2013.

[15] In 2014, The Plain Dealer ended its partnership with PolitiFact.com after they reduced their news staff and were unwilling to meet "the required several PolitiFact investigations per week".

[16] The organization was acquired in February 2018 by the Poynter Institute, a non-profit journalism education and news media research center that also owns the Tampa Bay Times.

[17][18] In March 2019, in preparation for the 2020 presidential elections, PolitiFact partnered with Noticias Telemundo for fact-checking of information given to the Spanish language audience.

[22] In December 2010, PolitiFact.com dubbed the Lie of the Year to be the contention among some opponents of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that it represented a "government takeover of healthcare".

[25] For 2012, PolitiFact chose the claim made by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney that President Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs.

[31] As evidence, PolitiFact cited analysts' estimate of 4 million cancellation letters sent to American health insurance consumers.

[43] The 2024 Lie of the Year was the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, which had been promoted by Donald Trump and JD Vance, the Republican ticket for the 2024 United States presidential election.

[45] A Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Joseph Rago in December 2010 called PolitiFact "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".

And despite the efforts of partisans to work the refs by complaining about various calls they've made in the past, they're generally doing a hard, important thing well.

However, after some scientists said they were "too quick to discount a possible link", the lab leak theory,[51] PolitiFact changed its evaluation of the claim to "unsupported by evidence and in dispute".

[54][55][56] Overall, right-leaning outlets get more negative results from fact-checkers than those on the left, including at PolitiFact, which some right-wing commentators have interpreted as evidence of bias.

"[57] In response, PolitiFact editor Bill Adair stated in MinnPost: "[...][W]e're accustomed to hearing strong reactions from people on both ends of the political spectrum.

[59] Upon his retirement from PolitiFact, founder Bill Adair said in October 2024 that Republicans lied far more than Democrats, by a margin of 55% to 31% for fact checks conducted between 2016 and 2021.

"[60][61] In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's eight-year partnership with PolitiFact, citing a shift in the political and social landscape.