40 Examples of Fake News in 2025 - Just Facts
By James D. Agresti
December 29, 2025
Credit: Ole.CNX/Shutterstock.com
For the purpose of media accountability, Just Facts has summarized 40 misleading claims spread by journalists, commentators, and so-called fact checkers during 2025.
Each example quotes a specific media outlet, but the vast bulk of these falsehoods and half-truths were spread by multiple news sources, and some were propagated by dozens.
1: Climate Change & Biodiversity Loss
An Associated Press article published by PBS in December claimed that “climate change” is making “biodiversity loss worse.”
In fact, a prestigious scholarly journal published a study in October that found “extinctions related to climate change have not significantly increased over the last approximately 200 years.” Just Facts documented similar facts more than a decade ago.
2: Food Stamps & Inflation
PolitiFact claimed that a Republican bill to reform Food Stamps “would bar increases to monthly SNAP benefits” for “inflation” and “in effect become cuts.”
In fact, the Republican bill barred presidents from increasing SNAP benefits above and beyond the rate of food inflation, like Biden did for the first time in the history of the program.
As detailed by the Government Accountability Office, the Biden administration raised SNAP benefits by “21 percent compared to the previous inflation-adjusted” amounts without adequate “economic analysis,” “disclosure,” or “documentation.”
3: Obamacare for Illegal Immigrants
CNN’s chief “fact checker,” Tom Foreman, claimed that Democrats didn’t demand Obamacare benefits for illegal immigrants in exchange for ending the government shutdown. The alleged evidence for this, he said, is that “the law itself says” that the “only people who could get” these benefits are “ ‘lawfully present in the United States’.”
In fact, the Democrat bill to reopen the government would have given about $91.4 billion of Obamacare benefits to illegal immigrants and other non-citizens over the next 10 years and multiples of that thereafter.
Like virtually every other major media outlet, CNN denied that reality by misportraying aliens who have been granted a temporary reprieve from deportation as legal immigrants. This included DACA recipients and millions of people that Biden illegally paroled into the country. The Biden administration even admitted that “DACA is not a form of lawful status” before making these illegal immigrants eligible for Obamacare benefits.
4: Violent Crime in Washington, D.C.
Reporting on President Trump’s takeover of the District of Columbia police force, ABC News claimed:
The president declaring an emergency, saying crime in D.C. is spiraling out of control, even though the district’s official figures showing violent crime recently hitting a 30-year low, down 26 percent since last year, numbers the president has baselessly called phony.
In fact, the “district’s official figures” aren’t a record of all violent crimes but exclude crimes not reported by the public to the police and crimes not reported by the police to the federal government. Thus, the FBI explicitly warns against “making any direct comparison” of such crime data over time because:
changes in police procedures, shifting attitudes toward crime and police, and other societal changes can affect the extent to which people report and law enforcement agencies record crime.
Murder is the best-measured and most violent crime, and FBI data show that the 2024 murder rate in D.C. was 83% higher than in 2012 and five times the average for all metropolitan areas in the nation.
5: Enhanced Obamacare Subsidies
ABC’s David Muir repeatedly claimed that health insurance premiums were going to “skyrocket” unless Republicans went along with Democrats’ plans to renew the enhanced Obamacare subsidies.
In fact, Obamacare recipients paid an average of $74 per month for health insurance during 2025, and when the enhanced subsidies expire in 2026, they will pay just $159. The reason this figure is so low is because the original Obamacare subsidies will remain. Under these, taxpayers bear 83% of the premium costs, while Obamacare recipients pay an average of just 17%.
The much larger premium payments showcased by media outlets are outliers who comprise less than 0.1% of the U.S. population, are nearly old enough to receive Medicare, and have incomes that exceed four times the federal poverty level.
6: Motive of the Minneapolis Child Killer
The New York Times claimed that the “motive” of the transgender shooter who murdered two children at a Catholic school in Minneapolis “is a mystery.”
In fact, the shooter wrote in his journal and on his gun messages that accord with the grievances and agendas of leftists, such as:
7: Motive of Charlie Kirk’s Assassin
CNN’s Kaitlin Collins claimed that “law enforcement hasn’t laid out a direct motive” for the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
In fact, the official charging document recorded that Tyler James Robinson “intentionally selected Charlie Kirk because” of his “belief or perception regarding Charlie Kirk’s political expression.”
Moreover, the charging document detailed the following facts which specify the precise nature of Robinson’s motive:
8: Shunning Democratic Values
The New York Times claimed that JD Vance “shocked attendees at the Munich Security Conference” by telling them to stop shunning “far-right parties.”
In fact, Vance told these European leaders to stop shunning “our shared democratic values” and learn from the “living memory of many of you in this room” that the Europeans who “censored dissidents,” “closed churches,” and “cancelled elections” were “not” the “good guys.” This refers to the Nazis and Soviets who killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century.
9: Nazis & Free Speech
Margaret Brennan of CBS News claimed that “free speech was weaponized” in Nazi Germany to “conduct a genocide.”
In fact, free speech was censored in Nazi Germany to conduct a genocide. In the words of Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, “National Socialism” (a.k.a Nazism) outlawed free speech to place itself “beyond the possibilities of criticism.”
To drive that point home, Goebbels added that “the right to criticize” can “be granted only to the wiser people over the more stupid ones and never the other way around.”
10: Global Warming
The New York Times claimed that the “burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating the planet.”
In fact, broad measures of human and environmental welfare related to global warming have remained stable or improved for the past 30–170 years, contrary to predictions that they would have radically degraded by now. These include but aren’t limited to:
11: Birthright Citizenship
ABC’s David Muir claimed:
Tonight, one of the president’s executive orders is on hold. A federal judge indefinitely blocking his attempt to end birthright citizenship, the judge ruling that the president’s executive order barring citizenship to children born to undocumented or temporary immigrants, quote, “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment.”
In fact, the 14th Amendment only grants birthright citizenship to the children of people who are “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” The U.S. Senator who created this language introduced it in the Senate by stating that it doesn’t include the children of “foreigners, aliens,” “ambassadors,” “an Indian belonging to a tribe,” and anyone not subject to the “full and complete jurisdiction” of the United States, “that is to say, the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now.”
12: Deportations Under Biden & Trump
BBC reporter Brandon Drenon claimed that “deportations under Biden” in the federal government’s 2024 fiscal year exceeded Trump’s “record” from his prior term.
In fact, Trump deported twice as many illegal immigrants in his record year than Biden in the 2024 fiscal year. Also, Trump’s deportations over his entire first term doubled Biden’s over his entire term:
The BBC, many other media outlets, and AI engines like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Grok all got this fact wrong because they used a false definition of “deportations” that inflated Biden’s figures by 5 times.
13: Social Security Benefits for Illegal Immigrants
New York Times Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker claimed that “immigrants here illegally do not collect Social Security.”
In fact, the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration estimated that 700,000 illegal immigrants worked in 2010 by using Social Security numbers obtained with “fraudulent birth certificates.” Unless this fraud is rooted out, such people are already collecting or will collect Social Security benefits.
14: Illegal Immigrant Tax Filings
Reporting on the Trump administration’s plan to use IRS data to enforce laws against illegal immigration, CNN claimed that “millions of undocumented immigrants register with the IRS and pay billions of dollars in federal taxes each year.”
In fact, nearly all “undocumented immigrants” who registered with the IRS did so to claim refundable child tax credits, a form of cash welfare. On net, these tax filers received at least $4.0 billion more in welfare than they paid in taxes during 2010.
15: Illegal Voting by Non-Citizens
Reporting on President Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote, NBC News claimed “there is no evidence” that non-citizens vote in “significant numbers.”
IN FACT, a rigorous study conducted by Just Facts found that roughly 1.0–2.7 million non-citizens illegally voted in 2024. Furthermore, repeated attempts to debunk the study epically failed, including those by NPR, the New York Times, the BBC, Snopes, and a cadre of scholars.
16: Illegal Immigrant Crime
The View’s Sunny Hostin claimed that “immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes in this country than actual American-born citizens.”
In fact, only legal immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, and that’s because they must pass a criminal background check in order to immigrate. Illegal immigrants avoid this vetting and are much more likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens. Yet, the media continually promotes studies that claim the opposite based on fatal flaws.
17: “Assigned at Birth”
The Washington Post claimed that “sex is widely understood to refer to a label assigned at birth based on one’s anatomy that may or may not match a person’s gender.”
In fact, sex isn’t “assigned at birth” but is genetically determined at fertilization except in rare cases of congenital disorders.
Before the word “gender” was appropriated by transgender activists, Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defined it as a “Syn.” (synonym) for “sex” that refers to “distinctions in grammar” between “males or females.”
18: Transgender Athlete Advantages
Reporting on males who compete in female sports, CNN claimed that they take “medication to keep testosterone at nearly undetectable levels in order to qualify.”
In fact, a study published by the journal Sports Medicine in 2020 found that “strength, lean body mass, muscle size and bone density are only trivially affected” by the testosterone suppression meds that males use to compete in female sports. Hence, this gives them a “major performance” advantage and also has “safety implications” for the females they compete against.
Likewise, a 2021 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that lean body mass and muscle area “in transwomen remain above those” of biological women “even after 36 months of hormone therapy.”
Summarizing such evidence, a 2024 paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports concluded that the Olympic Committee’s framework for transgender competitors “does not protect fairness for female athletes.”
19: Rights of Athletes
PBS White House reporter Laura Barrón-López claimed that President Trump’s Executive Order banning men from women’s sports is “targeting the rights of trans people.”
In fact, Trump’s order protects the rights of female athletes who have lost victories and scholarships to males, been forced to undress in front of them, and were exposed to male genitals in locker rooms. This “unwanted” exposure of “sexual body parts” meets the definition of “sexual violence” from a CDC study.
20: “Gender-Affirming Care”
PolitiFact claimed that a Republican budget bill blocks federal funds for “gender-affirming care,” while using that term 19 times in a single article.
In fact, “gender-affirming care” is a euphemism for castrations, mastectomies, and other actions that maim healthy organs, disrupt natural development, and have unknown-to-unfavorable impacts on physical and mental health.
21: Energy Prices
In August, Time magazine published a commentary by a former Biden Treasury advisor named Anisha Steephen headlined “Americans’ Energy Costs are Rising. You Can Blame Trump and Big Tech.”
In fact, when Time published the commentary, average energy prices had fallen by 3% since Trump entered office.
Although journalism standards give commentators “wide latitude” to express their views, this is not a license to butcher facts. In the words of New York Times deputy editorial page editor Trish Hall, “the facts in a piece must be supported and validated. You can have any opinion you would like, but you can’t say that a certain battle began on a certain day if it did not.”
22: Ponzi Schemes & Social Security
In response to Elon Musk calling Social Security the “biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” PolitiFact claimed that “Social Security’s structure, oversight and safeguards make it fundamentally different from a Ponzi scheme.”
In fact, if a private corporation operated a pension system structured like Social Security, it would be illegal under laws that prohibit Ponzi schemes.
23: Covid-19 Lessons Learned
In a commentary published by the New York Times about the Covid-19 pandemic, scientist Siddhartha Mukherjee claimed that the “collection and dissemination of facts during a pandemic” is “best controlled through validated, state-endorsed channels.”
In fact, such channels got the facts diametrically wrong on at least a dozen life-or-death aspects of the pandemic, including the:
24: Covid Vaccines
In a commentary published by the New York Times, nine former directors and acting directors of the CDC asserted that Covid vaccines “saved millions of lives.”
To support that last claim, they link to a thinly documented study based on a “computer model” from a group called the Commonwealth Fund. Left unstated by the study’s authors and these former CDC directors is that model-based studies:
Contrary to such fatally flawed studies, large gold-standard randomized controlled trials showed no evidence that the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines saved more people than they killed.
25: Childhood Covid Vaccination
Reporting on RFK Jr.’s announcement that the CDC is removing Covid-19 vaccines from the recommended immunization schedule for healthy children, CNN claimed that “experts say the shift will have devastating consequences….”
In fact, only 13% of children were given the latest Covid vaccine, and the Biden administration repeatedly violated the FDA’s safety and efficacy standards when approving them for young children. Moreover, they did this even though the clinical trials:
26: Record National Debt
The New York Times claimed that the national debt is “on track to overtake” its “record” share of the U.S. economy from “1945, after a world war and the Great Depression.”
In fact, the national debt broke that record in 2020 during the pandemic and is still higher than the 1945 level. The Times, however, excludes a major portion of the debt, a fact that it buries in a hyperlink under a chart in the article.
27: National Debt Drivers
PolitiFact claimed that “tax cuts were the biggest of four types of legislation that have added to the federal debt since 2001.”
In fact, PolitiFact used a study that puts all tax cuts into one bucket while splitting the added spending into three buckets. Placing the added spending into one bucket, the study shows that it accounts for 61% of the added debt.
Furthermore, most “tax cuts” are actually “tax evens” that correct for bracket creep, which consumes an ever-growing share of people’s incomes over time. That’s why despite the passage of numerous “tax cuts,” the portion of the U.S. economy consumed by federal taxes has been roughly level for eight decades, while the portion of the U.S. economy consumed by federal spending has grown from 3% in 1930 to 23% in 2023 — almost entirely due to social programs:
28: Positions of Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders
PolitiFact claimed it is “false” that Zohran Mamdani and Bernie Sanders are “communists.”
In fact, Sanders and Mamdani have embraced major elements of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, the Soviet Constitution, and the official Law of the Soviet State. For examples, either or both of them have expressed support for:
Mamdani and Sanders haven’t endorsed darker aspects of communism like “depriving the bourgeoisie” of the ability to vote, outlawing “freedom of speech” for “the foes of socialism,” and having “the exploiter classes in the country” “liquidated.”
However, the Law of the Soviet State explains that such policies are not “according to the plan” of communism and are “not a matter of the proletarian dictatorship in general” but things that “developed spontaneously during the course of the struggle.”
In other words, Mamdani Sanders favor utopian communism without the despots and gulags, although that is what communism has typically descended into throughout history.
29: Judge Hannah Dugan
Guardian columnist Moira Donegan claimed that the domestic violence proceedings against an illegal immigrant in the courtroom of Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan “had to be abruptly halted” because ICE attempted to arrest him, and therefore, “the victims, who were present in the courtroom, did not get their chance to see justice served.”
In fact, Dugan was fully responsible for that injustice. As documented in the criminal complaint against her:
In short, The Guardian blamed ICE for the actions of Dugan, who skipped the illegal immigrant’s hearing without notifying the state officials or the victims, wasting their time and depriving them of their day in court.
30: Warrants to Detain Illegal Immigrants
Moira Donegan of The Guardian also claimed that “Judge Dugan asked the ICE agents to leave, and pointed out that they did not have the correct warrants.”
In fact, ICE had the correct warrant. Federal law empowers ICE to apprehend and detain illegal aliens with administrative warrants, which is exactly what ICE had. Dugan demanded a judicial warrant, which was unnecessary to carry out the arrest.
31: “Black Lives Matter” Plaza
Reporting on the Trump administration’s decision to remove the massive “Black Lives Matter” mural from a street near the White House, USA Today claimed that BLM “protesters” were “forcibly removed from the area with smoke canisters” in 2020 so Trump could “pose for photographs at a nearby church.”
In fact, an investigation conducted by the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior found that the “protestors” were violent, their removal had nothing to do with Trump, and the tear gas was deployed by police who were under the authority of DC Mayor Muriel Bowser.
32: Manufacturing Jobs
NBC’s Kristen Welker claimed that the “economy” added “nearly half a million manufacturing jobs under former President Biden.”
In fact, population- and lockdown-adjusted manufacturing jobs fell by 2.8% during Biden’s presidency:
33: Crime Narratives
The New York Times claimed that “outrage over” the murder of Iryna Zarutska is “part of a pattern in which President Trump and his allies highlight horrific crimes to bolster their case that the country is plagued by ‘American carnage”.”
In fact, people of all political stripes highlight horrific crimes to bolster various narratives. The difference is that some crimes are common while others are rare, including about:
With disregard for those facts, the New York Times and other media outlets have consistently focused on and exaggerated the least common of these crimes while whitewashing and downplaying those that are widespread.
34: Capitol Security on J6
Uncritically quoting the spokesman of Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House during the J6 riot, CNN “fact checker” Daniel Dale claimed that the Speaker “is not in charge of the security of the Capitol Complex — on January 6th or any other day of the week.”
In fact, the official Capitol Police timeline of the J6 riot shows that the House Sergeant at Arms, who is under the authority of the Speaker and is responsible for Capitol security, “denied” a request for “authority to have National Guard to assist with security for the January 6, 2021 event.”
35: DOGE & Social Security
Reporting on the actions of DOGE, a New York Times headline claimed, “A Diminished Social Security Work Force, and Its Customers, Feel the Strain.”
In fact, the article underlying the headline focused on anecdotes while ignoring comprehensive measures of Social Security performance that improved under DOGE, including the number of claims processed, phone call answer rates and wait times, callbacks, disability determination processing times, and successful online transactions.
36: Doge Data Access Dangers
In an interview with PBS, a Yale professor and former Treasury worker named Natasha Sarin claimed that DOGE auditing the IRS taxpayer database raises “real concerns about this type of data being accessed by our adversaries and being used against us.”
In fact, Sarin:
37: Existence of Antifa
The View’s Whoopi Goldberg claimed, “No one has found antifa.”
In fact, The Nation — which is the “leading liberal magazine” in the U.S. — published a glowing profile of “antifa” that reported:
Organizers from anti-fascist research and news site Antifa NYC told The Nation: “Antifa combines radical left-wing and anarchist politics, revulsion at racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-Semites, and Islamophobes, with the international anti-fascist culture of taking the streets and physically confronting the brownshirts of white supremacy, whoever they may be.”
Using such rhetoric, antifa members repeatedly assaulted Trump supporters. For those reasons and others, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness classified antifa as a domestic terror threat in 2017.
38: Obamacare & Medicare
Dr. Vin Gupta of NBC News claimed that Obamacare “didn’t change anything more broadly about Medicare.”
In fact, Obamacare progressively cuts Medicare payment rates for many healthcare services over coming decades, thus shifting these costs onto other patients. Per Medicare’s Trustees, this will likely cause “withdrawal of providers from the Medicare market” and “severe problems with beneficiary access to care,” as is already the case with Medicaid.
39: Death Penalty Deterrence
PBS claimed that “data points” don’t “show a connection between capital punishment and safer communities.”
In fact, studies with large datasets show strong connections between the death penalty and murder deterrence. For example, studies in the American Law and Economics Review, Journal of Law and Economics, and Journal of Applied Economics have found that:
It is impossible to objectively prove whether the death penalty deters murder because association does not prove causation, but dose-dependent associations like those found in the studies above are strong but not foolproof evidence of cause-and-effect relationships.
40: NIH Drug Development
While skewering the Trump administration for cutting the budget of the National Institutes of Health, 60 Minutes’ Sharyn Alfonsi claimed that a “Journal of the American Medical Association study found that between 2010 and 2019, 99% of FDA-approved drugs had ties to research funded by the NIH.”
In fact, the study found that “NIH has made limited contributions” to the “clinical development” of FDA-approved drugs, amounting to 9.8% to 10.7% of “estimated industry” spending on clinical trials.
The study notes that most NIH funding of drug research occurs in the preclinical phase, but it doesn’t provide any facts about the efficacy of such research. However, a study published by the journal Nature in 2012 found that 89% of 53 prominent peer-reviewed preclinical studies on cancer drugs were not reproducible. The paper summarizes the implications of this finding by declaring:
Although hundreds of thousands of research papers are published annually, too few clinical successes have been produced given the public investment of significant financial resources.
Conclusion
Despite broadcasting an avalanche of fake news in 2025, media figures cast themselves as paragons of truthfulness. For example, CNN reporter Jim Acosta claimed that “journalists exist to seek the truth” and are the “defenders of the people.”
And when President Trump filed a defamation lawsuit against the New York Times, a spokesperson for the Times declared, “We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor.”
The actual record, rigorously documented above, shows otherwise.