Jon Stewart‘s fiery debate with Chris Wallace on Fox News last Sunday is still generating fodder for the Daily Show, especially now that PolitiFact, the non-partisan correction organization, called Stewart’s statement that Fox News viewers were “consistently misinformed” false. But instead of merely apologizing humbly and moving on, Stewart spent most of the segment highlighting false claims made by Fox News over the years.

The Truth-O-Meter has rendered its verdict, and Jon Stewart‘s come up short. PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize winning fact-checking site, has evaluated Stewart’s statement in an interview on Fox News where he asked, “who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart said to Fox’s Chris Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

The ongoing feud between Rachel Maddow and PolitiFact has already caused migraines for some, and don’t expect relief anytime soon. PolitiFact’s editor Bill Adair appeared on Reliable Sources this morning to defend his website’s original assertion that Maddow’s statements on the Wisconsin budget were untrue, and also to address Maddow’s request for a correction.

On Thursday night’s Rachel Maddow Show, eponymous anchor Rachel Maddow tore into Pulitzer-winner Politifact for the site’s takedown of her claims about Wisconsin’s budget. This immediately horrified me, as I have referenced Politifact’s take several times this week. Upon further review, though, I think I’m in the clear, and somehow, both Maddow and Politifact are wrong. Stay with me here.

Rachel Maddow‘s corrections segment, “Debunction Junction,” just corrected a correction. Maddow was accused of spreading false information by watchdog site Politifact recently when she claimed “Wisconsin is just fine” and on the road to a surplus, and the site attacked her for omitting information about the state’s budget shortfalls. Tonight, she took down the claim with video evidence and then some, saving some time to defend Shepard Smith and address personal attacks on her for being gay.

Rachel Maddow weighed in on the Wisconsin union protests and suggested that Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was stripping unions of power primarily to weaken the Democratic party in future elections. Any crisis related to the budget, Maddow believed, was either fabricated, or only true as a result of Walker’s own tax giveaways to business. The nonpartisan website PolitiFact declared such assertions to be “false.”

When asked by David Letterman about network bias, Rachel Maddow responded that “I of course think [MSNBC] is much more true than Fox is true,” pointing out that Fox News had reported, multiple times, that “the New Black Panther Party decided the election for Barack Obama.”

A bold claim. So bold, in fact, that it prompted PolitiFact – “a project of the St. Petersburg Times to help you find the truth in politics” – to investigate her claim.

There are a lot of lies told each calendar year, and more so during election years. So as 2010 comes to an end, PolitiFact looked back and determined which one they thought should be their Lie of the Year. And the winner (or loser?) is: “A government takeover of health care,” a phrase they say was instrumental in stopping “President Barack Obama‘s ambitious plan to overhaul America’s health insurance system.”

This will no doubt come as a total shock to anyone who’s been paying attention to this year’s crop of (frequently bizarre) campaign ads. Politifact — the non-partisan fact-checking group Jake Tapper charged with reviewing his This Week panels earlier this year — has reviewed candidates claims this year and concluded they are “barely true.”

Remember Michele Bachmann? Before the appearance of Christine O’Donnell she appeared to be the GOP member most energetically gunning to be Sarah Palin‘s heir apparent. She has sort of disappeared out of the newscycle of late, but she returns today courtesy of Politifact

In a long, detailed post on Monday, Arianna Huffington decided to revisit both the facts of a month-old “dust up” between herself and Liz Cheney on This Week as well as PolitiFact’s subsequent reporting on the exchange. In particular, Huffington took issue with PolitiFact’s “Half True” ruling on her assertions to Cheney that Halliburton had defrauded American taxpayers of “hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq”.

Stephen Colbert turned the attention of Colbert Nation to This Week interim host Jake Tapper‘s recent changes to the show – specifically the new fact-check (and David Gregory‘s rejection of the idea).

The ABC anchor was in studio for an interview, and to defend Sunday shows in general.

While many people were yawning their way through the news networks’ coverage of the White House’s Health Care Summit, a government transparency advocacy group turned the event on its head and used social media and streaming technology to possibly become the next C-SPAN, PolitiFact or Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight.com.

Earlier this week Sarah Palin was handed the ignominious ‘lie of the year’ award by non-partisan political fact checkers Politifact.com for her “death panel” explanation of parts of the health care bill earlier this past summer. Last night on Countdown Lawrence O’Donnell wondered how Palin would ever recover from the shame of such an award, to which we said: ha! Now Palin has responded via Facebook.

Now that 2009 is slowly, finally coming to an end, Sarah Palin is getting her comeuppance in the inevitable end-of-year lists. Sort of. Yesterday Politifact.com, a fact-checking website, selected “death panels” as its number one lie of the year: “Of all the falsehoods and distortions in the political discourse this year, one stood out from the rest.” Last night Lawrence O’Donnell tried his best to create and entirely new catchphrase for Palin: Palinocchio.