An independent experimental fact-checking site, exploring and advocating ways to make fact-checking better.
How well do fact checkers fact check? Each of the “elite three” mainstream media fact checkers, PolitiFact, the Washington Post Fact Checker and FactCheck.org, has had the opportunity to weigh in on the effects of the GOP’s health care reform proposals. The “Affordable Care Act” passed under the administration of President Barack Obama applies a tax to individuals and families…
Read more
On Nov. 27, 2017, the Washington Post published a story about a woman who pitched to it a false allegation about Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore. The story associated the woman, identified as Jaime T. Phillips, to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. Project Veritas uses undercover sting operations to help expose liberal media bias. Who comes out ahead, the Post or…
Read more
“White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that immigrants coming to the United States through the diversity visa program are not vetted before their arrival.” —PolitiFact, from a Nov. 2, 2017 fact check of Sarah Huckabee Sanders Summary PolitiFact may have misled its readers about what Sanders was saying. Background facts After an immigrant acting in the name…
Read more
To what degree do GOP health care reform proposals kick people off health insurance? Is there a Democrat who has failed to repeat the talking point that one or another such bill will kick some millions off their insurance? The claim appears ubiquitous, yet fact checkers like the Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact have pretty much ignored the deceptive…
Read more
President Donald J. Trump has said illegal border crossings dipped 78 percent under his administration. Mainstream fact checkers have lumped that claim in with an associated claim, that immigration has gone up under other administrations. Their fact checks have tended to focus on this second claim instead of Trump’s claim of a 78 percent decrease. PolitiFact piqued our interest in…
Read more
America’s “elite three” fact checkers all bring an inconsistent approach to fact checks that address budget cuts. Specifically, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Washington Post Fact Checker each defended the Democrats’ Affordable Care Act against the charge it cut Medicare. But each made sure that the Republicans’ 2017 budget proposals for Medicaid were understood as clear budget cuts. The cases had…
Read more
Sent Jan. 21, 2017: Dear Jon Greenberg, Angie Drobnic Holan, The fact check you published on Jan. 15, 2017 giving Rand Paul a “Half True” for his claim about Medicaid’s share of ACA coverage contains a major mathematical flaw.The summary of the fact check pulls together the pieces, which do not fit together as your article suggests: Paul said the…
Read more
Does a partisan divide exist in attitudes toward political fact checkers? Bill Adair and Rebecca Iannucci of Duke University and the Duke Reporter’s Lab took up the question in a June 17, 2017 report, Heroes or hacks: The partisan divide over fact-checking, hereafter HOH. We will review HOH in two sections, first critiquing the report itself and second exploring the…
Read more
A look at the International Fact-Checking Network’s effort to enforce its code of principles In 2016 the mainstream media and its fact-checking brethren discovered the threat of “fake news” and started moving to protect people from the threat. Facebook acknowledged the problem by arranging for fact-checkers to flag intentionally false “news” stories. To help quell public concerns that biased fact-checkers…
Read more
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…
Read more