Every Sunday on ABC's This Week there is a feature that names the U.S. servicemembers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the previous week. Christiane Amanpour is the new host of the show, and the segment continues. But her critics see something sinister at work.

This is how previous host Jake Tapper generally introduced the list:

This week, the Pentagon released the names of 16 soldiers and marines killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On Sunday, this is what Amanpour said:

We remember all of those who died in war this week, and the Pentagon released the names of 11 U.S. servicemembers killed in Afghanistan.

Washington Post critic Tom Shales, still apparently enraged that Amanpour got the job in the first place, slammed this performance:

Perhaps in keeping with the newly globalized program, the commendable "In Memoriam" segment ended with a tribute not to American men and women who died in combat during the preceding week but rather, said Amanpour in her narration, in remembrance of "all of those who died in war" in that period. Did she mean to suggest that our mourning extend to members of the Taliban?

That got a plug from NewsBusters, the blog affiliated with the right-wing Media Research Center. The MRC's Brent Baker had already weighed in, slamming Amanpour on Sunday for "phraseology which put the U.S. deaths second to all the wars around the world."

Meanwhile, back in reality, Amanpour's debut featured an interview with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that focused on the threat to the Afghanistan war effort posed by the WikiLeaks disclosures. In her other interview, Amanpour brandished a copy of the new issue of Time magazine and asked Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, "Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan again?"

And Amanpour tried to put the best spin  on the war:

What I think a lot of people maybe don't get is that the Afghan people still want the American forces there. In the latest ABC poll, it shows that 68 percent of the Afghan people actually want the American forces still there. Do you think that there has been an opportunity missed or should there be an opportunity seized by yourself, maybe by the president, to go out and speak to the American people more about Afghanistan, about the strategy, about why it's important?

Spoken like a true Taliban sympathizer.

Back in May FAIR wrote about the problems with a new factchecking project, where the PolitiFact website evaluates ABC's This Week. As we said then, this is theoretically a fine idea; the problem is that, in practice, what PolitiFact decides to analyze is almost as important as what is said on the show.  A completely uncontroversial comment from Bill Clinton, for instance, was determined to be "true," though no one would suggest that it wasn't. Defense Secretary Bob Gates' somewhat tendentious criticism of Wikileaks (for releasing a video of civilians being killed in Iraq by U.S. forces) was determined "Mostly True," though their reasoning was pretty unconvincing.

The right-wing Media Research Center has tallied up PolitiFact's scorecard so far, and they are pleased with the results:

After nearly three months, the results show far more Democrats and liberals earning a "False" rating, with most of the "True" ratings going to Republicans and conservatives. The discrepancy remains even if you take into account that about two-thirds of the evaluated statements came from Democrats in the first place.

From April 11 through June 20, PolitiFact has handed out seven "False" statements--six to Democrats/liberals, one to a Republican. During that same time, seven "True" labels were handed out--four for Republicans/conservatives, just two for Democrats (one, ironically, going to former President Bill Clinton). 

If I were a right-wing media critic, this couldn't be better news: According to a non-partisan study of one Sunday show, liberal and Democrats are more often telling whoppers.

Of course, this only points to the problems inherit in PolitiFact's approach. As FAIR noted in May, George Will has made claims that demand some sort of fact-checking--but the site, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to show much interest in evaluating the statements of one of the show's regular panelists.

As Arianna Huffington recently pointed out (7/5/10), during one of her This Week appearances  she declared that Halliburton had "defrauded the American taxpayer"--a comment that right-wing panelist Liz Cheney strongly (and unsurprisingly) found objectionable: "Arianna, I don't know what planet you live on, but it's not facts." PolitiFact decided that this was worth a look. After a relatively thorough accounting of Halliburton's problems with overbilling and underperforming on its military contracts, they determined that Huffington's statement was "Half True." The reason? Apparently Huffington was not fair to the company, which may have merely overcharged the government to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars due to "waste and inefficiency."

John K. Wilson (Obamapolitics, 10/16/09) on Rush Limbaugh and fake quotes:

When it came to people repeating false quotes about Limbaugh that Limbaugh himself had never bothered to deny, Limbaugh was outraged: "we are in the process behind the scenes working to get apologies and retractions with the force of legal action against every journalist who has published these entirely fabricated quotes about me, slavery, and James Earl Ray."

But when it came to his own false quotes, Limbaugh has been entirely indifferent to fake quotes.

In one of his books, Limbaugh claimed to be quoting James Madison: "We have staked the future upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God." The quote was a fake. Limbaugh admitted: "The quote is not Madison's. But the misattribution of this statement (an error, not 'a lie') has been made by many over the years."

Ah, so when Limbaugh was publishing fake quotes, it was "an error, not 'a lie,'" and it was excused because the mistake was made "by many over the years."

On April 27, 1995, Limbaugh read examples of "liberal hate speech" by Pacifica radio host Julianne Malveaux and CBS reporter Eric Engberg from the right-wing Media Research Center's newsletter, unaware that he was reading fake quotes from the April Fool's edition published almost a month earlier. The next day (4/28/95), Limbaugh admitted the quotes were false, but he heroically refused to apologize to the journalists he had falsely smeared: "Given some of the things liberals actually do say, it's not too tough to believe they would say the things Bozell makes up." Limbaugh's error was even more amazing because he had made the exact same mistake of reading the newsletter’s fake quotes as if they were real one year before (Extra!, 7-8/94).

News Corpse blogger Mark Howard goes deep into the belly of the beast (3/21/09) with a look at some revealing comments from Fox News Washington managing editor Brit Hume upon receiving the William F. Buckley Jr. Award for Media Excellence: "Thanks to Brent [Bozell] and the team at the Media Research Center...for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years." Hume's subsequent admission that "it was a daily buffet of material to work from, and we certainly made tremendous use of it" makes Howard think

it sounds like the MRC was Fox News' wire service. They saved Fox the trouble of having to go out and make up the news by themselves.... But this isn't the first time a Foxian has revealed that they are in the employ of rightist ideologues:

• Fox anchor Jon Scott was caught reading directly from a Republican press release as though it were news.
• Rupert Murdoch admitted that he tried to shape public opinion on the war in Iraq.
• Murdoch also boasted that his Fox Business Network would be a more “business-friendly” network....
• In a revealing bit of staff development, George Bush hired Fox anchor Tony Snow to be his press secretary.

And, as a bonus bit "just added" by The Most Biased Name in News, Howard tells us that on March 23, "in an interview with NPR, Fox News VP Bill Shine blurted out that Fox is the 'voice of opposition.'"