An independent experimental fact-checking site, exploring and advocating ways to make fact-checking better.
A critical review of Lying in Politics: Evidence from the US, a working paper by Alessandro Bucciol and Luca Zarri Researchers Alessandro Bucciol (assistant professor of econometrics) and Luca Zarri (associate professor of economics), both of the University of Verona, wanted to examine the tendency of politicians to lie. But they were confronted the problem of objectively assessing whether and…
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How PolitiFact’s 2013 “Lie of the Year” selection was even worse than you thought It was Nov. 4, 2013, and insurance companies had already started to send cancellation notices to customers whose policies failed to meet the administration’s “essential benefits” standards under the Affordable Care Act. The media recognized the failure of the president’s pledge that Americans could keep the…
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Goodbye, 2013. Hello 2014. It’s time to review Zebra Fact Check’s first full year. We produced 57 fact checks in 2013, or just over one per week. Seventeen of those were fact checks of other mainstream fact checkers, such as FactCheck.org or PolitiFact. We also checked one claim from Consumer Reports and another from the partisan Media Matters for America….
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A critical review of Michelle A. Amazeen’s review of fact checking in 2012 October of 2013 provided us with more than one research paper on fact checking from the New America Foundation. “Making a Difference?: A Critical Assessment of Fact-checking in 2012” [Updated URL, Aug. 23, 2019] by Michelle A. Amazeen proves at the same time less ambitious and more…
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Fact checker “PolitiFact” spins its fact check failures on health care reform The media have rightly joined the public in criticizing President Obama’s veracity in claiming Americans could keep their health care plans if they liked them. And many have rightly criticized PolitiFact for turning a more-or-less blind eye on the president’s preposterous sales job. But PolitiFact isn’t taking this…
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A critical review of Jordan Humphreys’ “When Lies Matter: The Effect of Media Coverage of Misinformation on Public Opinion in the Health Care Reform Debate” Zebra Fact Check started in part to help express my concern about the state of high-quality information. The sources normally deemed worthy of trust, like journalists and academia, tend to have liberals in control. …
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A skeptical treatment of Nyhan and Reifler’s latest study Readers should be aware I’ve referred to Brendan Nyhan as a “truth-hustler” in earlier writings. The team of Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler created yet another stir recently with their latest study of media effects, “The Effects of Fact Checking Threat.” Brendan Nyhan holds a post at Dartmouth College as assistant…
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Last week, we published a fact check of a new Organizing For Action campaign designed to expose Republican “climate change deniers” in Congress. One of the features of OFA’s attack ad was its claim of a 97 percent consensus among scientists on climate change. We noticed a few problems with the support typically offered with that and similar claims, and…
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On July 19, 2013 the Washington Post Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, published a fact check of President Obama’s claim that the ACA’s medical loss ratio rules saved consumers $3.4 billion. That interested us, for we fact checked a version of the same claim coming from Consumer Reports. Finding other fact checkers investigating similar claims provides an opportunity to see how…
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A May 28 press release announcing a new study of PolitiFact pushed the issue of selection bias in fact checking to the political front burner this week. The response from PolitiFact’s founder and editor, Bill Adair, provides a perfect avenue for highlighting some of the worst aspects of that fact check operation. The study, from the Center for Media and…
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