An independent experimental fact-checking site, exploring and advocating ways to make fact-checking better.
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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“[Becky] Quick’s math is sound, based on what’s publicly known about Carson’s plan. Carson’s 15 percent flat tax would generate a $1.1 trillion hole. By his own math, his plan would create a $1 trillion hole.” —PolitiFact, from a Nov. 4, 2015 fact check of GOP presidential contender Ben Carson Overview PolitiFact’s omissions and misrepresentations leave behind a misleading…
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On July 24, 2015, PolitiFact Wisconsin published a fact check piggybacking on a recent BuzzFeed criticism of a political ad. On July 23, 2015 BuzzFeed published a story about a political ad aired by Restoration PAC in support of the re-election campaign of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). The BuzzFeed story, by Ilan Ben-Meir, focused in part on one 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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In recent months we’ve pored over a pair of scholarly works on the topic of fact-checking. One, Checking the Fact-checkers in 2008: Predicting Political Ad Scrutiny and Assessing Consistency by Michele A. Amazeen, we reviewed earlier this year. The second, a doctoral dissertation by former PolitiFact writer Lucas Graves, contains much material we’ll address in one way or another over…
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Trey Gowdy vs. PolitiFact “Gowdy has a point that he’s still waiting on quite a few documents, but it goes too far to say he hasn’t received a “single, solitary scrap of paper.” We rate his claim Mostly False.” —PolitiFact, from a May 21, 2015 fact check of Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.). Overview PolitiFact takes Rep. Gowdy out of…
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We gave too little thought to the math of “Equal Pay Day” in our criticism of the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, concluding in the third-to last paragraph that “Equal Pay Day” in 2014 implied a 27-cent gender pay gap. Performed correctly, the equation shows a gap of about 21 cents. To correct the item we deleted two grafs. We preserve…
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“(T)he Koch brothers, the second wealthiest family in America, are going to spend $900 million in the coming election cycle.” —Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on March 31, 2015, at an Austin, Texas town hall meeting Overview Multiple methods of exaggeration lead to a wildly overblown claim. The Facts On March 31, 2015, Sen. Bernie Sanders gave a speech at…
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“Sanders said that “in this last election in November, … 63 percent of the American people chose not to vote, … 80 percent of young people, (and) 75 percent of low-income workers chose not to vote.” … We rate the claim Half True.” —PolitiFact, from an April 2, 2015 fact check of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) Overview PolitiFact burns…
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