Andrew Beaujon
June 4, 2013
11:51 am
PolitiFact Editor Bill Adair was careful to call a study that claimed his shop "
rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats" a "press release"
when I asked him for comment about it last week.
"The authors of this press release seem to have counted up a small number of our Truth-O-Meter ratings over a few months, and then drew their own conclusions,” Adair wrote. (Poynter owns the Tampa Bay Times, which owns PolitiFact.) I asked the spokesperson for George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs for a copy of the full study, about which I had indeed received a press release. In return, CMPA spokesperson Kathryn Davis sent me the following tables:
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Andrew Beaujon
May 29, 2013
9:35 am
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Andrew Beaujon
May 28, 2013
12:30 pm
Center for Media and Public Affairs
George Mason University's Center for Media and Public Affairs studied 100 PolitiFact fact-checks during President Obama's second term. The organization "
rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims," a press release says.
PolitiFact rated 32% of Republican claims as “false” or “pants on fire,” compared to 11% of Democratic claims – a 3 to 1 margin. Conversely, Politifact rated 22% of Democratic claims as “entirely true” compared to 11% of Republican claims – a 2 to 1 margin.
A majority of Democratic statements (54%) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18% of Republican statements. Conversely, a majority of Republican statements (52%) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to only 24% of Democratic statements. (more...)
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Eric Deggans
May 9, 2013
1:37 pm
The Tampa Bay Times’ fact-checking site PolitiFact has drawn another heated rebuke from MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow, who accuses it of “ruining fact checking” and being “truly terrible.”
But at the risk of looking like a homer — the Times … Read more
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Andrew Beaujon
May 6, 2013
1:11 pm
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Joshua Gillin
Apr. 8, 2013
11:34 am
CJR
Bill Adair says in an interview with
Brendan Nyhan for Columbia Journalism Review that while he is
leaving newspapers for academia, the lessons he learned from founding PolitiFact are worth sharing with all of journalism. Fact-checking, he said, is needed more than ever.
"The challenge is that news organizations are so strapped that they are looking for things to cut, not things to add such as factchecking," he said. "I’m hopeful they’ll realize that factchecking is a good investment — and one that readers love."
Verifying statements validates the role of journalists as guardians against misinformation, Adair said, a job that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
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Jeff Sonderman
Jan. 29, 2013
11:10 am
Truth Teller | Knight Foundation
Politicians lie.
Journalists try to point out those lies, but usually at some later time and in a different medium. That gap in time and distance is just enough to let the original lie take root in the public's mind before the truth catches up, if it ever does.
Closing that gap is the holy grail of professional fact checkers. PolitiFact
made some progress in last year's election with the
Settle It! mobile app that empowers users to look up fact-checks at the precise moment they need them. Dan Schultz at MIT has worked on a browser plugin called
Truth Goggles that highlights truths and falsehoods on whatever Web page you're currently reading.
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Andrew Beaujon
Jan. 25, 2013
12:52 pm
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Craig Silverman
Dec. 28, 2012
10:57 am
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Craig Silverman
Oct. 15, 2012
12:18 pm
Colorado is a key swing state in the 2012 election, and that means local airwaves are inundated with political advertisements from campaigns and third parties.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson has been watching the ads and the resulting coverage in Colorado … Read more
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