Monthly Archive: January 2018
Bryan W. White
January 25, 2018
As part of a critical assessement of a PolitiFact fact check, we sent an email to PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan and PolitiFact Executive Director Aaron Sharockman. If you wonder why I write to you less frequently these days, it is because trying to communicate errors to PolitiFact via email counts as one of the least transparent processes one could…
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Bryan W. White
January 25, 2018
We reached out to the Congressional Budget Office to try to get clarification on its report on the 10-year budgetary effect of CHIP reauthorization. A PolitiFact fact check brought to my attention an apparent discrepancy in CBO’s report on the budget effects of extending the CHIP program for 10 years. The text of the report says CHIP saves money because services…
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Bryan W. White
January 16, 2018
The Big Takeaway from the Knight-Gallup media survey On Jan. 16, 2018 I ran across a tweet from Derek Thompson, a writer for the respected magazine The Atlantic. 1/ Very short thread on the new Knight-Gallup media report. The big takeaway is that Fox News is a uniquely successful—and, I would say, uniquely detrimental—force in the news media ecosystem.https://t.co/Z67IeJc7WS —…
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Bryan W. White
January 9, 2018
On Jan 9, 2017 the Daily Caller broke a story about Google’s search engine providing media information apparently slanted against conservative websites. Conservative websites like The Daily Wire and Newsbusters quickly echoed the Daily Caller’s story. Mediaite also joined in. Here’s how Mediaite’s Joseph A. Wulfsohn described the situation: When searching individual websites that have a blatant political slant, two…
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Bryan W. White
January 5, 2018
Email correspondence between Zebra Fact Check and the Raw Story corrections team on January 3, 2017 : Dear RawStory corrections team, Headline: Trump supporters far more likely to read and share ‘fake news’ on social media: study Story (bold emphasis added): They’re still measuring the degree to which fake news impacted the 2016 election, however, this study only measured how…
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Bryan W. White
January 4, 2018
Thanks to problems with appearances after a theme update, we are changing to a different one. The prime consideration was finding a theme that preserved most of the old site’s features while making quoted material stand out from the rest of the text. We were very happy with the way the old theme accomplished that, with the caveat that it…
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Bryan W. White
January 4, 2018
Well, the latest update of our layout template went awry. We’re disabling the landing page partly for that reason and partly because it was making the site load slowly. Zebra Fact Check may stick with the blog appearance for the foreseeable future. The tabs remain functional, enabling users to look at only one category at a time, such as fact…
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Bryan W. White
January 3, 2018
One of the most obvious signs of bias in mainstream news stems from the failure of a story to back its headline. Often in such cases the headline supports a media narrative but flies in the face of the reported facts. Raw Story produced a good example of this with a Jan. 2, 2018 story reporting on research from Dartmouth…
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