Crooks and Liars has been running since 2004, and what shows up on the front page is a progressive political news and commentary operation built around news pieces, analysis, and a steady flow of critique aimed at conservative politicians and right-leaning media. Fox News coverage is a recurring target, dissected clip by clip. There is video under the CLTV banner, political cartoons and illustrations, interview segments, and roundups pulling from other blogs. It reads like a working commentary shop with a clear point of view, not a wire service pretending to be neutral.
Editorial stance and bias ratings
The editorial slant is not hidden, and that honesty about its own position is worth stating up front. Crooks and Liars writes for a liberal audience that already shares its priors and wants the day's political fights narrated from the left. Independent evaluators put numbers on that lean. Ad Fontes Media files it under "Hyper-Partisan Left" and flags its reliability as problematic; Media Bias/Fact Check calls it "Strongly Left Biased" while rating the actual reporting "Mostly Factual"; Biasly lands softer at "Medium Left." Read those together and a picture emerges: opinionated framing, but not a site that fabricates the underlying facts wholesale. A reader who wants that framing will find it useful, and one who wants a middle-of-the-road summary should look elsewhere.
Blue America activism arm
One section stands apart from the daily commentary grind. "Blue America" is the site's political-activism arm, used for candidate endorsements and organizing rather than just talking about races from the sidelines. That gives Crooks and Liars a foot in campaign work, which is a different function than critiquing a cable segment. Whether that appeals depends entirely on where a reader sits politically, and Crooks and Liars makes no attempt to pretend otherwise.
Site operations and newsletter
On the mechanics of running the thing, it behaves like a maintained publication instead of an abandoned blog. There is a daily email newsletter open to signups, comment sections open under articles, and user accounts tied to subscribers. Crooks and Liars sells an ad-free paid tier, which is a straightforward pitch: pay and the ads go away. Social distribution is spread across Bluesky, Facebook, Twitter, and Flipboard, so the content travels beyond the domain. The presence of a corrections page in the footer is more telling than any of that, because a site willing to log its own mistakes is at least gesturing at accountability, however partisan the copy above it runs.
Contact methods and accessibility
Contact runs through a /contactus page linked from the site, with social links up in the header as well. That page is easy enough to reach. No phone number and no physical address show on the main page, and while the newsletter signup is there, no direct email is printed anywhere. For a commentary site this is fairly normal, and a missing public email is not really a gap when the form covers the same ground. The lack of any address or phone is worth noting anyway, since it means anyone hoping to reach a named desk goes through the form and waits.
Distinguishing the news site from other businesses
A word of caution on outside ratings, because the search results are a trap here. Several consumer-review scores float around under this name: a SmartCustomer page at 2.0 out of 5 from nineteen reviews, a PissedConsumer listing near 1.6 from a handful, plus hits on Yelp, Amazon, and Tripadvisor. None of those appear to be about the news website. They point at other things that happen to share the name, a San Francisco business, a clothing or dress retailer, an Amazon product. Attributing those low marks to the political site would be flatly wrong, and they are best set aside. The genuine assessments of Crooks and Liars come from the media-bias analysts, who judge it as a publication rather than a storefront, and those are the ones a reader should weigh.
Comparing the publication to its track record
So the honest measure of Crooks and Liars is not a star average from shoppers but its own body of work and the bias trackers' read on it. The offering is substantial for what it is: years of archived commentary, an active publishing cadence, video, activism through Blue America, and a subscription model that keeps the lights on. The catch is the one every evaluator names, which is that the content is written to persuade a left audience and should be read with that firmly in mind. Cross-check anything load-bearing against a straighter source.
What readers should expect
Sharp, opinionated coverage of the right with no pretense of balance is exactly what Crooks and Liars delivers day after day. The corrections page sits quietly in the footer, and the ad-free tier is the only thing the site asks money for.
