An independent experimental fact-checking site, exploring and advocating ways to make fact-checking better.
Brooks Jackson, the founder of Annenberg Fact Check, published a review in December of his past nine years at FactCheck.org. Titled “Firefighters, Fact-Checking and American Journalism,” the review focuses largely on the role of the fact checker. Jackson deserves credit for steering what is and has been the best fact-checking organization. But his defense of mainstream fact checking does much…
Read more
Journalists who fact check tend to rely on experts. It makes sense. Journalists possess limited pools of knowledge, and that knowledge is mostly of a general character. Journalists know something about quite a few things rather than having a great deal of knowledge about one specific thing. Therein lies the dilemma for the fact checking journalist. Which expert is right…
Read more
Did fact checking fail in 2012? The New York Times‘ David Carr suggests it did: (A)s the campaign draws to a close, it’s clear that it was the truth that ended up as a smoldering wreck. Without getting into a long tick-tock of untruthfulness, a pattern emerged over the summer and fall: both candidates’ campaigns laid out a number…
Read more
I’ve blogged in the past that the recent trend for journalists to engage in political fact checking amounts to a type of power play. A guest column by Mike Deupree in Iowa’s The Register yesterday helped inspire me to sharpen the point. “At some point,” writes Deupree, “some journalists — probably frustrated because readers weren’t making the decisions the journalists…
Read more
Journalists trend ideologically left. That’s just a fact. In findings likely to fuel the raging debate over the issue of media bias, a new book concludes that the nation’s journalists have moved a bit to the right since the 1990s, but are still considerably more liberal than the general public. This political snapshot of the media comes from the…
Read more