Snapshot of fact-checking around the world, July 2015
Fact-checking continues to grow, with 20 new sites since last summer
By Bill Adair - July 19, 2015
Fact-checking continues to grow around the world.
As we convene the second annual Global Summit of Fact-Checking in London this week, there are now 64 active sites, up from 44 a year ago.
Here’s a snapshot of the latest numbers from the Duke Reporters’ Lab database. Last year’s numbers are in parentheses.
- Active fact-checking sites: 64 (44)
- Total sites that have been active in past few years*: 102 (59)
- Sites that are affiliated with news organizations: 63 percent
- Percentage of sites that use rating systems such as meters or labels: 80 (70)
- Number of active sites that track politicians’ campaign promises: 21 of 64
*Some sites have been active only for elections or have been suspended because of lack of funding. We still include the dormant sites in our database because they often resume operation.
Week 6 of Structured Stories: Could we do this from a warehouse in Durham?
Students on the team explore whether they could actually work from a remote location far from the city they're covering.
By Natalie Ritchie and Rachel Chason - July 14, 2015
Field notes by the Structured Stories NYC team: Ishan Thakore, Natalie Ritchie and Rachel Chason.
When Bill visited our New York office last week, we talked about how the project was going and, more specifically, the utility of original reporting. The lesson from last week’s blog post was that attending meetings isn’t really critical for Structured Stories. At one point, Bill asked, “Could we operate Structured Stories NYC from a warehouse in Durham?”
Our quick reply — probably so.
As we mulled it over, we all agreed. We could have done this anywhere.
Because so many resources are available online, from court documents to live videos of committee hearings, remote reporting is both feasible and efficient.
Traditional reporters still need the immediate access to sources, the details of a scene and the off-hand remarks that can only be caught in person. But for us, the situation is different.
While most news organizations focus more on breaking news, we have preferred in-depth, historical research that provides background and context to recent events. And the archived news articles, historical records and statistics that we need to describe those events and stories can all be found online.
Granted, if we weren’t in New York, Ishan might not have developed his relationships with WNYC reporters, Natalie wouldn’t have talked to Josh Mohrer and Rachel wouldn’t have met police brutality protesters in Union Square.
At the end of the day, however, we all would’ve been able to create the same number of events whether in New York or in a warehouse in Durham. Remote reporting is uniquely feasible in this Structured Stories project.
But being disconnected from the stories we’re covering has been something of a downside to the project.
For three budding journalists who enjoy getting out and talking to people, Structured Stories NYC has not been quite what we expected. Inputting events has at times felt tedious, and we’re largely cloistered in our office all day. While some people might find this work rewarding, we doubt traditional journalists would if they had to do it full-time.
But we think there might be a good balance in this scenario: a beat reporter who spends most of the day covering the news in a traditional way and concludes with an hour or two structuring stories.
That would give the reporter a more well-rounded job experience and provide Structured Stories with the expertise of a skilled journalist.
Week 5 of Structured Stories NYC: The pros and cons of leaving the office
Can you do structured journalism without covering meetings? The reporters on Structured Stories NYC discuss the pros and cons.
By Ishan Thakore and Natalie Ritchie - July 6, 2015
Field notes from the Structured Stories NYC staff: Ishan Thakore, Natalie Ritchie and Rachel Chason.
Ishan:
A few weeks ago I stopped by a City Council meeting for some context on New York City’s housing issues.
Several housing issues were coming to a head, brought on by a slew of press attention and the end of Albany’s legislative term. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) had recently released a plan to reduce its budget shortfall, but Council members were skeptical. The council’s chairman of the public housing committee, Ritchie Torres, sparred with NYCHA administrators during the meeting, questioning their estimates and decision-making. Moments like these were exciting, and helped me understand the real-world repercussions of NYCHA’s plan.
But weeks later, that’s still the only meeting I’ve been to. I continue to spend most of my days at my desk, combing through articles, picking out events and then structuring them for our website. Research, Input, Repeat.
As students working on a journalism project overseen by a journalism professor, we’ve been strongly encouraged to leave our cushy chairs and cover the news in-person. Our professor’s words went something like, “Get out of the office! Cover things!”
Why haven’t I left the office more? For one, reading older articles provides context to what’s going on in the news. To understand NYCHA’s current budget woes, I had to first read about how the agency began in the 1930s and evolved as new legislation restructured it. Reading articles is generally more productive too; I can spend an afternoon publishing dozens of events for our structured journalism site, as opposed to only a handful after a multiple-hour hearing.
But staying in the office removes a human element from Structured Stories, and makes the work more rote than I enjoy. My eyes are glued to a monitor for most of the day, and I feel a step removed from the events on the ground.
Finding a balance between original reporting versus comprehensive research is tricky. As we build out the site, I feel like the latter is more important, although that may shift as stories become developed and are up-to-date.
Natalie:
At my first City Council hearing on bail reform, I took dutiful notes for two hours only to realize that not a single “event” had really taken place other than: “[a character] held [a meeting].”
My second hearing, on capping Uber’s growth, was far more contentious and exciting –– for a City Council meeting. Taxi drivers would periodically cheer in the balcony while Uber employees shook their heads at Council members’ statements. I ducked out after a couple of hours to check out a protest on the front steps of City Hall, arriving just in time to hear Josh Mohrer, Uber’s NYC general manager, proclaim the imminent “end of Uber as you know it.”
Having been properly warned of the urban transit apocalypse, I approached Mohrer afterwards and asked him about a few of the stories I’d been covering over the last few weeks. It was fun to do real reporting after being cooped up in the office so much lately. But I have to agree with Ishan that there are limits to the usefulness of original reporting when it comes to Structured Stories.
For example, in a traditional story, catching Josh Mohrer in a lie could have been the hook — the splashy headline that made being there in person so valuable. But in the structured story, his false claim was just another small event alongside the two dozen or so from the day.
Was that single event worth the hours at City Hall? Or should I have spent a fraction of that time gleaning events from other sources’ accounts, even if it meant missing Mohrer’s misstatement?
The tension between efficiency and in-person reporting is by no means unique to our project. Still, the calculation is different when the end product is not an article, but chains of events.
Rachel:
If efficiency is measured in the number of events I write for Structured Stories, then my hour and a half at the Citizen’s Union meeting was more or less wasted.
At the annual meeting of the civic watchdog group, I watched the characters I had read about earlier that day — including Manhattan’s District Attorney and Brooklyn’s president — engage in heated discussion about subjects such as discriminatory police stops and how best to prosecute police implicated in the killing of civilians.
I realized the meeting had the right components — including colorful characters, conflict and compelling statistics — to make a lively news story.
If I had been writing a traditional article, I would have begun with the story of the main speaker, Brooklyn’s president Eric Adams, a fierce NYPD reform advocate who was a member of the department for 22 years.
A line from his speech would have made a strong lead quote: “When you love something you want to make it as good as it can be. I am not against Quality-of-Life policing. I am against the abusive policing that is too common today.”
I would have then shifted to the statistics highlighted during the meeting — noting that in 2014, 55 percent of New Yorkers stopped by the NYPD were black, and 29 percent were Latino, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Next I would’ve highlighted conflict during the meeting, focusing in particular on sparring between a victims’ rights advocate and Manhattan’s District Attorney Cyrus Vance over whether a special prosecutor should be appointed when police are involved in civilian deaths.
But in the unique format of a Structured Story, the entire scene would have been boiled down to just one Structured Stories “event,” accompanied by a bullet point and two or three sentences in a summary.
Such a format is powerful in that it would connect this event a to a permanent, sourceable web of stories on police brutality dating back to the 1990s. It’s limited, though, in that it would fail to capture the lively dialogue and atmosphere in the room.
Covering a meeting like Citizens Union revealed how important traditional reporting remains, even with this new platform. In the future, reporters could feasibly use structured journalism to complement their original reporting, writing a traditional article and then inputting events in a database.
Week 4 of Structured Stories NYC: Thinking like “structured journalists”
Halfway through our New York experiment, we're focusing on clear writing that is "structurable" rather than flashy leads.
By Rachel Chason - June 29, 2015
At the halfway mark in our eight-week Structured Stories project on Friday, Natalie, Ishan and I decided to measure our performance.
By the numbers, we’ve made substantial progress — we’ve created 182 new events in 15 stories, all of which are now live on the Structured Stories website.
The more events and stories that we input, the more we find that our thinking about narrative stories changes. Increasingly, we notice ourselves deconstructing the news as we read it, breaking down articles into a series of finite events, and dicing those events into their primary nouns and verbs.
We’ve learned not to worry about engaging leads or colorful language. Instead, we focus on crafting clear, concise and specific events that are easily “structurable,” to use a term recently coined by David.
We are, in other words, finally beginning to think like structured journalists.
But a number of questions remain. In fact, sometimes it feels like the more progress we make, the more questions — big and small, technical and editorial — we have.
We’re helping David make improvements to the content management system. As we input events for our four main topics — policing, bail reform, housing and Uber — we’ve found more than 25 bugs. The list of unresolved editorial issues currently stands at 56 — a number indicative of how much we’ve learned, but daunting nonetheless.
One of our most persistent struggles remains translating events we intuitively understand in language to structured events.
In a traditional article, for example, it makes sense to say that airports have started ticketing Uber drivers. In a structured story, however, this statement would have to be attached to a specific event — with a specific authority, time and place.
We’ve tackled issues like these in hours of daily check-in Skype sessions with David, countless messages to David on Slack and near-constant discussion among ourselves.
David has patiently reassured us that this question-filled dialogue is not only natural, but also helpful in the long term. He’s reminded us that we’ve used language for tens of thousands of years, but that this data-driven approach to narrative is still nascent.
“Finding an alternative to using language in writing is a pretty audacious goal,” he noted. “It makes sense if it feels a little weird, a little unnatural at first.”
Week 3 of Structured Stories NYC: Getting the hang of it
We've found that explaining Structured Stories isn't easy. But as we begin loading events into the CMS, we're figuring it out.
By Natalie Ritchie - June 22, 2015
There’s a particular anxiety that hits me whenever someone asks me to explain what I’m doing this summer.
I fumble through an answer with phrases like “news database” and “knowledge graphs” and “combinatorial explosion” only to face blank stares and quietly confused nods. In the end, I always wind up telling people to just wait and see, promising it will all be clear(er) once our work began appearing on the site.
We finally reached that point on Wednesday when Ishan, Rachel, and I started publishing our stories online.
As Ishan explained last week, our stories are made up of events—hundreds of them so far. Each requires the creation of an “event frame,” such as “[A Character] passed [A Law]” or “[A Character] published [An Object] about [A Topic].” To then make an event, we simply put information in the brackets and tag each one with a date, location, and primary sources. The final touches are the bullet points and summaries that the reader will see.
The process strips events to their core, leaving no room for color or flowery language. In David’s words, “It’s like old school reporting from the 50’s—just the facts, just ‘who/what/when/where.’”
Interestingly enough, the most challenging part was the creation of seemingly-simple event frames. Our first efforts were markedly “off,” but through lots of trial and error––and David’s infinite patience––we’ve started to get the hang of it.
Making the event frames means wrestling with that fine line between specificity and simplicity. We find ourselves debating whether “presenting a plan” requires a “communication” or “submitting a document” frame. It’s a small distinction, but it is key to the bigger issue: translating language to structure.
As we continue to add frames, events, and stories to the website, the list of “bugs” and “issues” gets longer and longer. But far from being discouraging, this document is in many ways the most valuable output of all in our experiment this summer––”the gold mine,” as David called it.
With every little question or problem we’re coming closer to understanding Structured Stories and what it could become—and closer to having an answer when people ask just what it is we’re doing this summer.
Week 2 of Structured Stories NYC: Nouns, verbs and learning to write again
In the second week, the Reporters' Lab team gets more familiar with the Structured Stories platform and begins some original reporting.
By Ishan Thakore - June 15, 2015
We hit the ground running last week, eager to begin constructing structured stories on our topics.
I Googled everything I could about “NYC Housing” and was quickly overwhelmed. For some context, I stopped by City Hall for a hearing on the New York City Housing Authority’s plan to erase its deficit. Rachel researched Mayor de Blasio’s relationship with the police, and pieced together the myriad of events that soured their bond. Natalie tracked Uber’s meteoric rise and the subsequent PR nightmares that engulfed the ride-sharing company.
We hit our stride after a few days and marched through a routine: research, input an event in a structured story, repeat. It was slow work, especially if we had to verify conflicting accounts by checking primary sources.
“There’s something noble about making sure everything is correct,” said Natalie, alluding to our satisfaction once we solved something and could (finally) move on. Every day, we managed to finish dozens of “events,” the individual units that form the backbone of Structured Stories.
But, in a testament to how different this work is from traditional journalism, we are still having difficulty adapting to the unique writing requirements.
A structured story is different than “regular” writing because it’s all about breaking the news into data.
The data comes in two flavors: verbs and nouns. Verbs can be linked back to the FrameNet database, an expansive project that tracks meaning. Amazingly, the FrameNet database can be read by both humans and computers. It translates complex human meaning into data.
Nouns come from Freebase, a sprawling database owned by Google. Freebase assigns items unique identifiers, and we use these IDs to track characters or topics over time. De Blasio, for instance, is known in the database as /m/0gjsd3.
In Structured Stories, combining verbs and nouns creates a data-rich event. And that data can be manipulated, allowing readers to see links between stories or track events over time. That’s the power of structure.
David Caswell, the creator of Structured Stories, told us our confusion was natural. A structured story in its raw verb/noun form is not meant to be read by a human. In fact, most readers won’t see the structured view when they visit the Structured Stories platform. They’ll read the bullet-points or summaries, which Rachel, Natalie and I write after we have structured an event. Bullet-points and summaries are the “normal” human sentence behind an event. Underlying that sentence, though, is a web of connections and malleable data that will provide readers with new information they have never been able to get before.
This project makes me feel like I’m learning to write again. I’m paying extra attention to nouns and verbs and stripping events to their core meaning. There seems to be a constant tug of war between language and structure when writing these events, with the ideal falling somewhere in the middle.
For now, we’re still searching for that happy medium.
Week 1 of Structured Stories NYC: Unlocking the atoms of news
In the first week of our New York experiment, the Duke team learns about the promise and challenges of structured journalism. Also, we visit the Daily Show.
By Bill Adair - June 8, 2015
On Wednesday, as our Structured Stories NYC team debated whether to use “text object” or “information artifact” to describe a field in our database, I realized we were in new journalistic territory.
The debate illustrated the unique approach of our summer experiment. Instead of publishing traditional news stories with headlines and text, two Duke students (Natalie Ritchie and Rachel Chason) and one recent Duke grad (Ishan Thakore) are segmenting the news into chunks. That approach has been tried before by Circa and a few others, but Structured Stories goes far deeper, structuring the basic elements of nouns and verb phrases to reveal new truths about the news.
That structure enables us to link the elements in a myriad of valuable new ways. For example, “The taxicab commission held a public hearing on new regulations about for-hire vehicles” can be linked with characters and entities such as Mayor Bill De Blasio, Uber drivers and the taxicab commission. That structure will empower readers in many different ways. They can easily find the latest developments in a long-running story (“Uber drivers held a protest against new regulations”) and they can interact with the “events” to reveal new patterns and relationships.
There were a few moments during the week when I got a feeling that our project will be groundbreaking. David Caswell, the creator of the Structured Stories platform and our partner in the project, began the week with an excellent PowerPoint that explained how the students’ work will be published. Structured journalism is often known as “atomizing” the news.
A couple of times, I got the sense that we were like scientists who were about to unlock the atom of news. I summarized the first day by saying, “Mind blown.”
But there also were times where I wondered if we have too much structure in our approach and that we’ll end up creating a giant database with hundreds of humdrum entries on municipal government. We need to make sure that even though we’re using a unique approach we are still creating valuable, interesting journalism.
Our discussions during the week reflected our unique perspectives. David is a computer scientist with a really cool idea; I’m a journalist with an interest in new story forms and some old-fashioned values. There were some moments where our differences were quite clear. At one point during a discussion about story structure in the database, David told the students, “Your audience is actually a machine.”
I nearly had a heart attack. But then I realized he meant that the “story structure” the students are creating are not intended for public consumption. They’re designed to work behind the scenes so readers can get the information they want.
This is the genius of David’s approach (and also the part that scares me a little). With lots of structure inside the machine, readers will be able to get information in new ways.
David and I recognize this is very much an experiment. We both believe in the promise of structured journalism. But we also recognize that this is a very different way of covering the news and that sometime experiments fail. On Tuesday I tweeted:
Our approach on Structured Stories NYC is inspired by the philosopher Ms. Frizzle: “Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!”
Structured Stories NYC: an experiment in local news
Duke students will be covering New York City Hall using a structured journalism platform developed by former Yahoo! product manager David Caswell.
By Bill Adair - May 26, 2015
This summer in New York City, we are going to reimagine how to cover local news.
Our project, Structured Stories NYC, will slice and dice local news into chunks that readers can combine and display in different ways. It will make it easier to follow long-running stories or track how city officials are involved in different issues. Our goal is to break away from the old way of presenting the news by giving readers the ingredients of the news and putting them in charge.
Three student journalists from the Duke Reporters’ Lab — Ishan Thakore, Natalie Ritchie and Rachel Chason — will be covering City Hall the same way as other reporters. They’ll be going to meetings and news conferences and talking with city officials.
But they will write the news in bite-sized morsels that can be displayed in several different ways. For example, readers will be able to display bulletpoints, an article, a timeline, or a visual approach known as “cards.”
Our project is the brainchild of David Caswell, a former Yahoo! product manager with a fresh approach to journalism. He invented Structured Stories, a publishing platform that “atomizes” the news, enabling readers to see patterns and linkages they wouldn’t see in ordinary coverage. (To get a taste of David’s approach, check out his fun demo for the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which can be displayed as bullet points, a timeline or cards.)
The New York project is funded by a grant from the Online News Association Challenge Fund and is a partnership with WNYC, New York’s flagship public radio station. WNYC journalists will advise us on the biggest news stories of the summer and help us make sense of the city’s massive government.
This is very much an experiment. Although we have a framework for our project, there are many details to figure out. David has drafted a booklet of editorial guidelines that is more of a discussion document than an owner’s manual. At last count it had 67 questions that we still need to answer.
Using structured journalism for local coverage is still very new. It’s been tried by Homicide Watch, the local crime news site created by Laura and Chris Amico, as well as PolitiFact, the fact-checking website I started at the Tampa Bay Times.
PolitiFact developed campaign promise meters to track the promises of elected officials such as the Buck-O-Meter, which follows the achievements of Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn. A typical campaign promise item has two or three updates. But Structured Stories will be deeper and more complex, showing the intricate connections between people and events.
As David wrote in the editorial guidelines, “Sprawl is our friend. Story branches, details and interconnections are kinda the point.”
I was thrilled to partner with David because I’m a big believer in new forms of journalism. I gave a TED talk in 2012 that said we should blow up the news story and create new story forms.
That’s what we’re doing with Structured Stories NYC.
If you’re interested in following our work, we’ll be posting it on StructuredStories.com. You can also check here on the Reporters’ Lab site for updates about how we’re doing. And I hope that by the next time you check, we’ve answered at least some of the 67 questions!
Africa Check’s Julian Rademeyer: A career of digging
The fact-checking site has become so well-known that people now ask, "Have you been Africa-Checked lately?"
By Ishan Thakore - May 17, 2015
Julian Rademeyer first saw the claim in a BBC news article.
Traditional healers “remain the first point of contact for physical and psychological ailments for about 80% of black South Africans according to authorities,” it said.
His Africa Check team began to research it and quickly discovered the BBC wasn’t the first outlet to publish the claim. It also had been published by the South African Medical Journal and even the World Health Organization. That gave the claim a stamp of credibility even though the number seemed high.
So Rademeyer’s team kept digging to find out if the claim was true.
* * *
Three years ago, few people had heard of Africa Check. It was a new fact-checking organization styled after the U.S. site PolitiFact and Full Fact, a British group. But today, Africa Check is better known and its work is often cited by media organizations around the world.
“We’re hitting the tipping point now where we’re becoming a credible source,” says Rademeyer, Africa Check’s editor, who visited Duke in April as part of the Reporters’ Lab’s Visiting Fact-Checker Program. “It’s kind of cool because it shows that people are looking at our work.”
Africa Check has been featured in the Economist, the New York Times, and a host of South African papers that receive free syndicated material from Africa Check. Larger recognition means that organizations now turn to Africa Check to debunk claims. GroundUp, a South African community journalism project, contacted Rademeyer and his team to investigate the traditional healer “fact.”
* * *
Fact-checking is an ideal line of work for Rademeyer, who has been a skeptical journalist since he was a teenager.
In the 1980s, police death squads, mass protests and a civil society reckoning with the end of the apartheid rocked South Africa. For the teenage Rademeyer, investigative writers and photojournalists offered him a world out of reach to the average white South African.
“These guys were documenting this and getting incredible stories, showing a side of things that was beyond people’s comfort zones,” said Rademeyer.
While other teenagers were immersed in sports or television (his family didn’t own one until the ‘90s), Rademeyer spent his time reading. His father, a history teacher at his high school, kept a steady supply of National Geographic magazines in the house to satisfy Rademeyer’s growing fondness for good writing.
With the help of an inspirational high school English teacher (cue comparisons to Dead Poets Society), Rademeyer and his friends started an edgy newsmagazine, The Interview. Not your average school paper, it included interviews with recently freed African National Congress leaders and features on scientology, painstakingly laid out by hand on A4 paper.
After high school, he knocked on the door of a reporter he admired and asked for a job.
“I guess maybe I was persistent enough, and maybe he was just bored, but he kind of kept me around, and paid me some pathetic sum of money to pack files in his office.” He took some college classes while he worked.
Rademeyer eventually found a stringing job for Reuters and then worked his way to the Sunday Times and Media24. He carved a niche doing investigative work around corruption and organized crime.
While at Media24, Rademeyer came across a puzzling link between a smuggled rifle and a farmer. He tracked this lead all the way from game hunting permits to Thai sex workers, and then from political assassinations to the Angolan Bush War. His two-year odyssey culminated in his South African best-selling book, Killing for Profit, which exposed the complexities of the illegal rhino horn trade.
“You get one link, and another link and it just keeps going. South Africa’s history is so interesting for me and multi-layered. Every story you start digging has all these layers to it,” said Rademeyer.
* * *
Fact-checking requires that same kind of digging, but it often doesn’t result in the same certainty as investigative reporting.
Africa Check conclusions are often qualified and tempered with explanations. That speaks to the trouble of first obtaining and then sifting through government data, which may be inaccurate, in old formats that are hard to analyze, or not even exist. He said some agencies flout Promotion of Access to Information Act (POIA) requests, which mandate the release of government information.
“It can be incredibly frustrating because the data isn’t readily available, and quite a number [of agencies] are very obstructive when it comes time to check information,” said Rademeyer. “Anything in-depth takes everything from a couple of days to weeks” to research.
When Africa Check launched an inquiry into a claim from South Africa’s Department of Basic Education that it was building a school a week, Rademeyer’s team found serious discrepancies in scheduling. Although 11 schools were built, it took a year instead of 11 weeks. The department refused to comment at first, and then lashed out in press releases.
Other government agencies and political parties have been more receptive. The main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, now responds to Africa Check queries by listing its sources. Other government officials have told Rademeyer they believe Africa Check is quite fair.
Rademeyer sees this as a sign of progress.
“Instead of ‘how dare you fact-check us,’ we’re seeing a slow movement around this. [Africa Check] will be part of the process.”
Fact-checking can be important in Africa, where rumors can have serious consequences. For example, Africa Check has debunked claims about “quack cures” of HIV/AIDS that circulate among the relatively large number of people who have the disease.
Africa Check has also debunked fabricated massacre reports on the militant group Boko Haram.
“When there’s real evidence of Boko Haram atrocities, what do you believe? How do you know that its genuine and true? It’s a mess,” says Rademeyer.
Like its Western counterparts, South African papers are struggling with less advertising revenue, which has led to staff cuts. That means fewer reporters to cover more topics, leaving less time for detailed fact checks. Government agencies can leak false information, knowing it’s bound to undergo less scrutiny before it’s published.
“The spin doctors have become very good with exploiting reporters,” said Rademeyer.
But the politicians and their parties are realizing that fact-checking is now part of the journalistic landscape. Rademeyer recounts a conversation an Africa Check employee had with a political researcher, who now cautions his colleagues:
“Have you been Africa-Checked lately?”
* * *
As they dug into the claim about traditional healers. Rademeyer’s team discovered it had appeared in various World Health Organization reports, which all referred to a 1983 book by Robert Bannerman called Traditional Medicine and Healthcare Coverage.
Ultimately, the fact-checkers tracked down a copy. The book said traditional healers offer their services to the 80 percent of the world’s population that lacks permanent healthcare services. No attribution or sources were listed.
In the 30 years since that was published, the claim was warped and repeated. Sometimes the claim said the statistic was for South Africa; other times it referred to all of Africa.
In Africa Check’s article, Rademeyer cited a 2013 South African household survey which found only 0.1% of households regularly consult healers, and most use public health facilities.
The claim was unequivocally false.
Canadian Press fact-checkers find politicians full of baloney
The wire service uses the first sausage-based rating system to fact-check politicians from No Baloney to Full of Baloney.
By Shaker Samman - April 29, 2015
While many fact-checkers around the world rate the accuracy of statements on a true-to-false scale, the team at the Canadian Press rates them by their value in meat.
The Canadian Press Baloney Meter is the world’s only sausage-based rating system, a lighthearted scale that goes from No Baloney (true) to Full of Baloney (false). The scale is inspired by the old saying about someone telling a lie.
“It’s kind of a throwback,” said Canadian Press Ottawa Bureau Chief Heather Scoffield, but the ratings don’t mean the work is frivolous. The Canadian Press fact-checks explore important topics and are backed by thorough research.
The Baloney Meter can be “silly, but the piece itself is the furthest thing from being silly,” Scoffield said.
Scoffield launched the fact-checking service last spring after months of deliberation. The fact-checks started just in time for Ontario’s general election last June.
The provincial race was something of a practice round for the Canadian federal election this fall. Scoffield said she plans to increase the number of fact-checks as the election nears.
“There’s enough baloney out there that we could ramp up,” she said.
Currently, most Baloney Meter fact-checks examine statements by officials in the federal government, but Scoffield said the focus will shift to political parties during the election.
Unlike most fact-checking efforts, the Baloney Meter has no dedicated staff or website. The checks are done by reporters for the wire service and the content is sent to subscribing news organizations for them to use in print and online. While readers can’t directly search for every meter ranking at a centralized location, the broad reach of the wire service gives the fact-checks wide exposure.
The biggest challenge for the Canadian fact-checkers has been the difficulty getting public data.
“This government is not known for being open,” Scoffield said. “It places a limitation on us for what we can actually fact check. We choose our topics accordingly.”
When fact-checkers determine there is inadequate information, they use Baloney Meter’s “Some baloney” rating. Scoffield said the Baloney Meter has earned a good reputation in the Canadian government. She said that politicians like the attention to the substance of the policy rather than the theatrics surrounding it.
“Even if they [politicians] don’t come out looking great, they appreciate that we’re talking about the substance of it,” Scoffield said.
With that kind of impact comes a great deal of responsibility. Scoffield said she knows that even the slightest slip up could lead to criticism.
“You have to do it well, or you lose your credibility,” Scoffield said. “We absolutely can’t take sides. We have to deal strictly with the facts.”