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After failing to obtain comment from two earlier inquiries to the Poynter Institute, Zebra Fact Check reached out to Poynter’s editor Ren LaForme. LaForme holds the post occupied by Julie Moos when Poynter dealt with a controversy in 2011 over Jim Romenesko’s method of attribution.
Zebra Fact Check emailed the Poynter Institute on July 6, 2020 as part of a continued effort to obtain comment about an unclear attribution in the “Factually” newsletter Poynter publishes jointly with the American Press Institute.
Zebra Fact Check emailed Senior Vice President and Chair of Craig Newmark Center for Ethics and Leadership Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute to ask about an attribution problem with the “Factually” newsletter.
After noticing an 20-word verbatim quotation without quotation marks in the “Factually” newsletter jointly published by the American Press Institute and the Poynter Institute, we emailed Susan Benkelman, the API co-author of the July 2, 2020 edition of the newsletter, to find the explanation for not clarifying the attribution and/or adding quotation marks. Benkelman directs API’s accountability journalism program. We…
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Things have come full circle at the Poynter Institute in the past 10 years. Jim Romenesko ran a popular journalism blog for the Poynter Institute journalism school until 2011. Romenesko’s blog highlighted stories relating to the field of journalism. But eventually assistant editor Erika Fry of Columbia Journalism Review noticed that Romenesko was using verbatim quotations in his summary blurbs…
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After warning the Washington Post about misinformation in its analysis of the allegation of antifa violence at Black Lives Matter protests and seeing no attempt to correct that misinformation, Zebra Fact Check sent a formal complaint to the International Fact-Checking Network.
A Washington Post Fact Checker analysis from June 22, 2020 misreported information from an ABC News report it cited. Zebra Fact Check formally requested a correction after using Twitter to alert the Post and Post fact checker Glenn Kessler about the problem.
Zebra Fact Check documented the International Fact-Checking Network’s 2019 failure to hold its stable of “verified” fact-checking organizations to account. PolitiFact, which shares ownership with the IFCN, was notable in escaping scrutiny. The IFCN has yet to explain those failures, but coincidentally or otherwise it revised its Code of Principles in December 2019 along with its methods for verifying compliance…
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On June 17, 2020 Zebra Fact Check submitted a formal complaint to the International Fact-Checking Network about PolitiFact. The complaint noted that two PolitiFact stories published in 2015 dealing with intraracial crime omitted mention of the high rate of black intraracial murder. The complaint alleged that PolitiFact’s failure transgressed an IFCN principle calling for fairness. The complaint noted that PolitiFact…
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For years, Zebra Fact Check has noted persistent failures in PolitiFact’s observance of its policies on corrections and updates. On June 8, 2020, Zebra Fact Check submitted to the International Fact-Checking Network the results of research in the year 2020 on PolitiFact’s compliance with its own policies on corrections and clarifications. To summarize: PolitiFact divides its online content into at…
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