An independent experimental fact-checking site, exploring and advocating ways to make fact-checking better.
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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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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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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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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