An independent experimental fact-checking site, exploring and advocating ways to make fact-checking better.
A funny thing happened when the International Fact-Checking Network recognized The Weekly Standard Fact Check as a verified signatory of its statement of principles. Liberals such as economist/columnist Paul Krugman and Media Matters noticed that the IFCN does not stringently enforce its standards for compliance with its statement of principles. Krugman, from his Dec. 8, 2017 op-ed in The New…
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Our switch to WestHost servers was a tad bumpier than we hoped, but nearly all the issues have been resolved and we have finally added a security certificate (SSL). As a result, comment forms and the soon-to-return $upport button will have secure (encrypted) connections. The server issues, among other things, have sapped the amount of time we’ve been able to…
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Our hosting service very recently had an hours-long problem with our server, resulting in an extended down time. We apologize for the inconvenience to those who tried to visit the site during that time.
There’s a heretofore unexplained gap in the output at Zebra Fact Check running from July through October of 2015. I was hired by a non-profit, non-partisan organization to work on a new fact-checking project. Ballotpedia’s Verbatim project launched in October 2015 and we parted amicably shortly after that. I plan to write a review of Verbatim in 2016 as it…
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Maybe political scientist Brendan Nyhan is closing in on the truth. Nyhan, of Dartmouth College, was part of a New Hampshire Public Radio interview on Dec. 7, 2015. On the bad side, Nyhan still clings to his dubious fact-checking “backfire effect”: “My research suggests that it’s very hard to change peoples’ minds about these very controversial issues and political figures….
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Did Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina say Obama was planning to accept 250,000 Syrian refugees? On Nov. 26, 2015 international news agency Agence France-Presse published “Facts take a back seat in White House race,” an article providing supposed examples of campaign trail falsehoods. The story leads with four examples: Republican Donald Trump’s claim that Arab Americans cheered during the September…
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When The Associated Press ran a headline proclaiming a climate science fact check of presidential candidates, we smelled trouble. Journalists tend to struggle with science. One might expect fact check journalists to do a better job handling science. And maybe they do, but it still often looks like fish out of water. Case in point: At the request of The…
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Over the years, we’ve noticed that fact checkers tend not to target other mainstream media for fact checks even though those media are at times directly responsible for the misinformation. Apparently media outlets don’t want to show each other up and start the equivalent of an informational gas war (no pun intended). Because Zebra Fact Check breaks with that tradition,…
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Here’s a contact note we received in January: First off, get with the program and implement SSL. Why would I give my regular name and email to someone who won’t protect my identity to the most basic of security requirements. Having said that, please finish reading. You are doing good work. This stuff pisses people off because it is push…
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Early on Dec. 31, 2014 we published a critique of the way the three major mainstream fact checkers, FactCheck.org, the Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact, used a 2012 quotation from Romney campaign pollster Neil Newhouse. Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker, didn’t waste much time in responding. That’s one thing we absolutely love about the guy. On Twitter,…
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