Well, naturally.

This was bound to happen: some impartial body would begin judging objective truth, and conservatives would start going ape. Because, after all, as Stephen Colbert once so aptly put it, “Everyone knows the truth has a liberal bias.”

And here’s Fox News actually claiming that, in their fashion:

But others who follow media bias note that even the media watchdogs – let alone the sites used by the Google researchers like Wikipedia – are often biased.

“They’re very good at debunking myths if they upset liberals, but if it’s a liberal or left-wing falsehood, the fact-checkers don’t seem as excited about debunking it,” Rich Noyes, research director at the Media Research Center, told FoxNews.com.

He cited a 2013 study by George Mason University researchers, which found that fact-checking site Politifact declared 52% of Republican claims it looked at to be false, but did the same to just 24% of Democratic claims.

Yes. Because it is inconceivable that Republican claims are actually false twice as much as Democratic claims are.

What’s really laughable here is that sites like Politifact and FactCheck are usually guilty of the reverse: going after fewer conservative falsehoods and more liberal falsehoods in a facile attempt to appear “less biased,” because giving a more accurate measurement of such things would produce a much more lopsided tally, resulting in even more cries of “bias” because false equivalency is not applied. This is referred to as “working the refs,” a sports term in which complaining harshly that the referees are biased against you will cause them to judge more favorably towards you in the future. Conservatives do this with incredible ferocity, and it works: fact-checking organizations fear nothing more than reporting the true balance of bullshit, knowing it will make them ripe for cries of bias. As a result, they let conservatives off lightly.

For example, when Obama and Romney had a debate FactCheck listed five “false claims” by both candidates as if to make it seem like they were telling truth and falsehoods equally—though Obama’s were grouped higher on the list, making him seem a bit more dishonest. Not only that, they had to stretch the definition of “false claims” for at least one or two of Obama’s statements to bring his tally up to five.

What they did not mention was the fact that at least a dozen more whoppers by Romney were left entirely off the list.

PolitiFact did the same thing, ignoring most of Romney’s fabrications, while going out of their way to make Obama seem untruthful. Among the examples I found at the time: Obama’s statement that Romney was proposing a $5 trillion tax cut. Politifact called this “half true,” because Obama did not take into account the fact that Romney intended to offset the tax cut with closing loopholes (which were never specified), even though Obama expressly mentioned that exact fact. Obama’s statement was fully true, but Politifact dinged him on it.

Meanwhile, Romney was rated as fully “true” for criticizing Obama on not halving the deficit in half in four years as he had pledged. Politifact ignored the criticism and only checked the plain fact of the original statement; they did not take into account or even note that any deficit cutting attempted by Obama was fully obstructed by Republicans. To choose this statement to rate as “true” is along the lines of giving Romney credit for telling the truth because he pronounced Obama’s name correctly. In the meantime, Romney was making substantive claims about Obama doubling the deficit, a clearly bald-faced lie—but PolitiFact could not be bothered to focus on that claim.

Conservatives do not want some organization to have an automated system of fact-checking, because you can’t “work” a robotic referee.

And that would screw up their entire game plan.