Politifact: Liar of the Year?

What to do when a fact-checking organization repeatedly gets facts wrong?

PolitiFact falsely depicted Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, as suggesting that state law overrides federal law, erroneously attributing to him a radical claim that he never made (that states can forbid the federal government from setting up health insurance exchanges). Cannon merely observed that state law in 14 states forbids "state employees" to set up Obamacare health insurance exchanges, and he never said that federal employees could not set them up. (Under the Supreme Court's Printz decision, the federal government cannot conscript state officials to administer even perfectly constitutional federal laws.)

After falsely putting words into Cannon's mouth, PolitiFact then rated the claim he never made "false," and prominently attributed it to him. PolitiFact cheerfully ignored the fact that it had wrongly maligned Cannon, a legally knowledgeable expert on health care regulation, even after its error was brought to its attention by Jonathan Adler, a leading law professor at Case Western Reserve University.