Category: Fact-Checking News
Fact-Checking News
A Viewer’s Guide to the N.C. Senate Debates
A preview of the upcoming NC Senate debate between Senator Kay Hagan and Speaker Thom Tillis
By Kyra Noonan - October 7, 2014
Political debates aren’t scripted, but the candidates usually come armed with some familiar talking points.
To help you sort out the truth in the talking points in this week’s debates for the U.S. Senate seat from North Carolina, the Duke Reporters’ Lab has compiled a viewer’s guide from fact-checking done in the past year by WRAL-TV, PolitiFact, the Washington Post FactChecker, FactCheck.org and McClatchy.
The debates are being held tonight and Thursday, with Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis tonight and Libertarian Sean Haugh joining them Thursday.
ABC’s George Stephanopoulos will moderate tonight’s one-hour debate, which starts at 7 p.m. on TV and radio stations throughout the state. It will be streamed live at http://abcnews.go.com/live. On Thursday, the debate will also be held at 7 p.m. and broadcast on TV stations around the state.
Below are some of the lines and subjects you might hear, with links to the fact-checks. We’ve also posted a full list of all the fact-checks in the race so you can browse and search them.
ISIS/Terrorism
In the past few weeks, the candidates have attacked each other about the rise of the terrorist group known variously as ISIS, ISIL or the Islamic State. Hagan has said Tillis has dodged questions about how he’d respond to the group, while Tillis has said Hagan is out of touch on the issue because she missed so many meetings of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In one Tillis ad, the narrator says, “In January, President Obama refers to the Islamic State as a ‘JV team.’ Days later the Armed Services Committee holds a hearing on new global threats. Sen. Kay Hagan? Absent. In fact, Hagan’s missed half the Armed Services Committee hearings this year.”
PolitiFact checked Hagan’s attendance and found that Hagan had attended nine of 22 public meetings. It was not possible to determine if she attended the closed hearings, so PolitiFact rated Tillis’ claim Mostly True.
Education
The biggest state issue in the campaign has been education, with Hagan and teacher groups attacking Tillis about teacher pay, while Tillis has claimed that he’s boosted education funding.
A TV ad from Women Vote, an arm of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that supports Democratic womenwho favor of abortion rights, said that Tillis “cut almost $500 million from education, causing crowded classrooms and forcing teachers to pay out-of-pocket for school supplies, while Tillis protected tax breaks for yachts and jets.”
PolitiFact checked the claim about the $500 million education cut and rated it Half True. The Washington Post’s FactChecker gave the claim a rating of “2 Pinocchios” and said that EMILY’s List “exaggerates the extent and impact of reductions in state funding for education last year – while ignoring the fact that the education budget is being bolstered this year”.
Obamacare/Health care
Denying Coverage – One of the largest issues both nationally and in the North Carolina Senate Race has been Obamacare. Tillis has claimed there would be a loss of jobs due to the Affordable Care Act, while Hagan and pro-Democratic groups have said that Tillis supports a plan which would make it difficult to obtain health care.
An ad by Patriot Majority USA, a pro-Democratic social welfare group, said in an ad that Tillis “sides with health insurance companies. He’d let them deny coverage for pre-existing conditions and raise rates for women needing mammograms. Tillis supports a plan that would end Medicare as we know it and force seniors to spend up to $1,700 more for prescriptions. Thom Tillis, he’s with the special interests, hurting North Carolina families.”
PolitiFact checked the claim that tillis would allow health insurance companies to “deny coverage for preexisting conditions” and rated it Mostly True. WRAL Fact Check gave this claim a “provisional yellow light”, as Tillis has yet to “fully articulate” his position on health care.
As for the claim that Tillis supports Paul Ryan’s plan that would “end Medicare as we know it”, PolitiFact rated it Mostly False on its Truth-O-Meter. PolitiFact said that “while Tillis has acknowledged supporting aspects of Ryan’s budget plan, he hasn’t specifically said whether or not he supports the original Medicare provision that would have made significant and mandatory changes to the program.”
Lost Jobs – In response to Hagan’s support of Obamacare, Tillis has repeated a Republican talking point in an ad that the “Congressional Budget Office estimates 2 million lost jobs due to Obamacare.”
Fact-checkers have found that to be wrong. The Washington Post Fact Checker reviewed the report by the CBO and found that the “loss of jobs” was not stated, and could not have been given a numeric value, earning the claim a rating of “Three Pinocchios”. FactCheck.org also checked the claim and found that while “it has been a popular Republican talking point, it’s innacurate”. The CBO said more than 2 million people will “decide not to work, or will decide to work less, due to the law.”
Taxes
To portray Tillis as out of touch with ordinary North Carolina voters, liberal groups have made a fuss about tax breaks for yachts and “private jets.”
The Senate Majority PAC ran an ad against Tillis that said, ”Speaker Tillis gave tax cuts to the wealthy and big corporations, even kept breaks for private yachts. He raised taxes on 80 percent of North Carolina.”
The Washington Post FactChecker reviewed the claim and gave it 3 Pinocchios finding that, “35 percent of the people appear to face a tax increase, including some of the wealthiest people in the state–not 80 percent, all at the bottom.”WRAL Fact Check checked the claim and gave it a “red light”. Politifact rated the claim by the Senate Majority PAC as “False”. And FactCheck, org writes that “…the ads’ central claim — that Tillis passed a whopping tax increase that hit 80 percent of North Carolinians” — is wrong.'”
A similar claim that said Tillis “gives tax breaks to yacht and jet owners” earned a False from PolitiFact, which said the group suggests Tillis created the tax breaks, but the law had been around for 23 years and Tillis just left it unchanged.
Hagan’s voting record
As the general election nears, candidates have tried to position themselves as moderates who can appeal to voters from both parties, with Hagan claiming that she is “the most moderate senator in the nation.”
WRAL Fact Check found this claim to be true backed by a National Journal report, and gave it a “Green Light”. McClatchy said, “”In February, the National Journal did rank her as the Senate’s ‘most moderate’ member’” but noted that “critics argue that the rankings are subjective, determined by the votes the Journal chooses to analyze.”
Tillis, meanwhile, has countered that in 2013, “Hagan voted with Obama 96 percent of the time.”
McClatchy found Tillis’ statement to be true and wrote “In 2013, the most recent year analyzed, Hagan voted in line with Obama’s preference 96 percent of the time.” WRAL gave this claim a “green light.”
Coverage of Global Fact-Checking Summit
Fact checkers from around the world convene in London
By Bill Adair - June 25, 2014
The Duke Reporters’ Lab was one of the co-sponsors of the Poynter Institute’s inaugural Global Fact-Checking Summit, held at the London School of Economics June 9-10. It attracted about 50 fact-checkers and academics from countries ranging from India to Chile. Here’s some of the coverage received:
Washington Post, The global boom in political fact-checking
ABC Australia, Fact checking around the world: Pioneers Bill Adair and Glenn Kessler speak to ABC Fact Check
Africa Check Director Peter Cunliffe-Jones: Why fact-checking matters
Duke professor Bill Adair: Lessons from the Poynter global fact-checking summit
Tampa Bay Times Editor Neil Brown: 5 essential understandings of the fact-checking movement
Poynter: Fact-checkers plan international organization
Lessons from the Poynter Global Fact-Checking Summit
Fact checkers from around the world came together to discuss their craft
By Bill Adair - June 17, 2014
The Reporters’ Lab was one of the co-sponsors of the Poynter Institute’s Global Fact-Checking Summit, which was held at the London School of Economics June 9-10, 2014. Here are some reflections on the conference and what’s ahead for the world’s fact-checkers.
Poynter’s inaugural Global Fact-Checking Summit attracted a diverse group of journalists to a London classroom this week.
Two Italians explained their creative ideas for earning money from their work. An energetic editor from Argentina talked about how she uses crowdsourcing to help her reporters. And two young journalists from Ukraine showed how they’ve used digital tools to find manipulated photographs in the Russian media.
The journalists shared something big in common: a passion for fact-checking.
As international conferences go, the Global Fact-Checking Summit was a small one — about 40 fact-checkers, a half-dozen academics who study this growing new form of journalism, plus a handful of representatives from the foundations that paid for the conference. But what it lacked it size, it made up in spirit.
They came from across the globe — India, South Africa, Serbia, Poland, Italy, France, the United States and Chile. Russell Skelton, the head of the ABC Fact Check in Australia, endured a 22-hour flight from Sydney and won the conference prize for the longest trip — a kitschy Barack Obama snow globe.
The two-day conference at the London School of Economics showed fact-checkers are a unique breed. They’re smart and can do sophisticated reporting. They’ve disrupted the status quo by challenging the accuracy of their political leaders. And they’ve developed thick skin to withstand frequent criticism. They are eagle-eyed and even caught a mistake in their Poynter certificates, which said the conference was held in July.
The big news from the meeting was the unanimous decision to form an international association that will hold future conferences, promote fact-checking and help the journalists exchange best practices.
As the organizer of the conference, my big takeaway was the realization that in some countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, impartial fact-checking can’t be done by newspapers and television networks because they are often controlled by the government or political parties. In those countries, it is being done by “media NGOs” — independent groups that play the role of the non-partisan media.
The meeting allowed the fact-checkers to exchange ideas and tips. Italians Alberto Puoti and Alexios Mantzarlis showed a glitzy TV fact-checking segment that reminded many of us of Dancing with the Stars. Paata Gaprindashvili of the GRASS FactCheck in Georgia played a video that used a wonderfully simple animation to explain a complicated subject.
But for all the great highlight-reel moments, there were plenty of reminders about some big challenges facing the London attendees:
- Although fact-checking is flourishing in the United States and Europe, there are only a few sites in Africa and South America.
- In many countries, fact-checking can be difficult because of the lack of reliable government data.
- No one has found a sustainable business model for fact-checking.
That looms as the biggest challenge. Fact-checking sites don’t typically draw enough traffic to be commercially successful, so they have to get substantial support from large news organizations and foundations.
One of the most popular panels at the London conference was about finding new revenue sources. It began with gloomy comments from editors saying they were facing big funding cuts in the near future. But the conversation turned hopeful as the panelists offered some creative ideas to raise money.
Chequeado, a site in Argentina, hosts a big fund-raiser called “The Night of Chequeado.” FactCheck.org in the United States raises about $80,000 a year from individual donations. Pagella Politica, a site in Italy, is exploring offering a variety of services that could bring in revenue, including selling its data and writing background briefs for television hosts about the fact-check records of politicians.
Mantzarlis, co-creator of Pagella Politica, said fact-checking takes a lot of time and effort, which means “there is definitely value in it.” So why not try to recoup some of that value?
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the fact-checkers is changing their mindset, something the new association is likely to address. They are not just journalists any more, they are managers and entrepreneurs who must find a way to keep their ventures sustainable.
Laura Zommer, the executive director of Chequeado, said fundraising required a big change in her approach.
“The most important thing,” she said, “is not to be shy.”
Duke Study Finds Fact-Checking Growing Around the World
Our Spring 2014 tally of global fact-checkers finds 59 sites that have been active in the past few years
By Bill Adair - April 4, 2014
With sites such as Faktomat in Germany, Chequeado in Argentina and Les Decodeurs in France, political fact-checking is expanding rapidly around the globe, according to a new analysis by the Duke University Reporters’ Lab.
The study found 59 sites that have done fact-checking in the last few years, including 44 currently active.
More than two-thirds use rating systems such as the Truth-O-Meter, El Poligrafo or Pinocchios. The ratings typically include a true to false scale, although some use terms as such “Rubbish,” “Deceitful” and “Insane Whopper.”
The Reporters’ Lab analysis, which was done in advance of a Poynter Institute conference to be held in London in June, is believed to be the first study to examine the growth of fact-checking around the world. The second phase of the study, to be conducted by University of Wisconsin journalism professor Lucas Graves, will be a qualitative analysis of global fact-checking that will be presented at the conference.
The Duke study found that about half the sites are affiliated with newspapers, television networks or other legacy media organizations. The other half are run by startup companies or not-for-profit groups.
Much of the growth has come in the last two years, with 27 new sites since January 2012. But some sites were temporary and were suspended after elections.
The largest number of fact-checking sites are clustered in Europe (21 active) and North America (15 active). The analysis found two active sites in South America and one in Africa.
The study counted organizations with dedicated fact-checking operations of one or more people. It does not include news organizations whose reporters do fact-checking as part of their day-to-day work.
— Shannon Beckham contributed research assistance for this article.