Monthly Archive: December 2016

Corrections to our critique of Aaron Huertas and the Poynter Institute

After we posted our critique of Aaron Huertas’ evidence backing his claim about a Florida government gag order on discussion of climate change, Huertas contacted us to let us know he annotated the article on the Genius website. Though Huertas’ response failed in answering the meat of our criticism, he found two mistakes that we hasten to correct. Moreover, reviewing…
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Poynter: A Florida gag order on climate change?

Note (Dec. 29, 2016): We have updated this item in response to a critique from Aaron Huertas, the main target of our criticism. Find a description of the changes as well as the original version of the article here. Did Florida’s state government issue a gag order stopping state employees from discussing climate change? A Dec. 22, 2016 article published…
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PolitiFact California walks back its ‘conversion therapy’ ruling

On July 29, 2016, we fact checked PolitiFact California’s ruling finding it “True” that Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence once advocated diverting federal money from AIDS care efforts toward gay “conversion therapy.” On Dec. 2, 2016 PolitiFact California changed its ruling to “Half True.” As with Snopes.com’s “Mixture” rating of the claim about Pence and conversion therapy, we regard…
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Is context optional at PolitiFact?

If it’s about Trump it’s too good to check? Fact checkers in 2016 (not to mention 2015) showed a tendency to take vague statements from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and upgrade those statements via interpretation into relatively clear statements. On December 2, 2016  a new PolitiFact story led us indirectly to a great example of this tendency. Lauren Carroll’s…
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