Fact-Checking Census finds continued growth around the world
Our latest tally of fact-checking sites finds 30 new sites in places such as Turkey, Uruguay and South Korea.
By Bill Adair and Ishan Thakore - January 19, 2015
Fact-checking keeps growing around the world, with new sites in countries such as Turkey, Uruguay and South Korea.
The 2015 Fact-Checking Census from the Duke Reporters’ Lab found 89 that have been active in the past few years and 64 that are active today. That’s up from 59 total/44 active when we did our last count in May 2014. (We include inactive sites in our total count because sites come and go with election cycles. Some news organizations and journalism NGOs only fact-check during election years.)
Many of the additional sites have started in the last seven months, including UYCheck in Uruguay and Dogruluk Payi in Turkey. Others are sites that we didn’t find when we did our first count.
You can see the complete list on the fact-checking page of the Reporters’ Lab website, where you can browse by continent and country.
As with our last tally, the largest concentrations of fact-checking are in Europe and North America. We found 38 sites in Europe (including 27 active), 30 in North America (22 active) and seven in South America (five active). There are two new sites in South Korea.
The percentage of sites that use ratings continues to grow, up from about 70 percent in last year’s count to 80 percent today. Many rating systems use a true to false scale while others have devised more creative names. For example, ratings for the European site FactCheckEU include “Rather Daft” and “Insane Whopper.” Canada’s Baloney Meter rates statements from “No Baloney” to “Full of Baloney.”
We found that 56 of the 89 sites are affiliated with news organizations such as newspapers and television networks. The other 33 are sites that are dedicated to fact-checking such as FactCheck.org in the United States and Full Fact in Great Britain.
Almost one-third of the sites (29 of the 89) track the campaign promises of elected officials. Some, such as the Rouhani Meter for Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, only track campaign promises. Others, such as PolitiFact in the United States, do promise-tracking in addition to fact-checking.
For more information about the Reporters’ Lab database, contact Bill Adair at bill.adair@duke.edu
Soft opening
Our website has been redesigned to highlight our new focus on fact-checking and structured journalism
By Bill Adair - December 7, 2014
Welcome to the new website of the Duke Reporters’ Lab!
You’re getting a preview of our new site, which will have its official launch in January. With the help of the talented team at Cuberis, we’ve redesigned the site to highlight our new focus on fact-checking and structured journalism.
Please feel free to browse the site, particularly our database of fact-checking sites around the world. It’s an impressive list – particularly when you see it on the map. You can zoom in and out over the continents and click the pushpins to get details on each site.
We’re still fact-checking our map of fact-checkers, so if you see anything that needs to be changed, email us at bill.adair@duke.edu.
Fact-checking grows in Latin America
Inspired by Chequeado and El Poligrafo, new sites have sprung up in Colombia, Brazil and Uruguay
By Bill Adair - November 15, 2014
BUENOS AIRES — Fact-checking is booming in Latin America.
Inspired by the success of Chequeado in Argentina and El Poligrafo in Chile, fact-checking sites have sprung up in Brazil, Uruguay, Costa Rica and Colombia and new sites are planned in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru and Nicaragua.
The fact-checkers from Latin America gathered in Buenos Aires last weekend to discuss their work and exchange tips with colleagues from other countries. The Latam Chequea conference, organized by the staff of Chequeado, was the first regional event of the international group of fact-checkers that formed last June at the Poynter Global Fact Checking Summit in London.
At the Buenos Aires event, speakers from Chequaedo, FactCheck.org, Africa Check, PolitiFact and Fact Check EU talked about the challenges of their new form of accountability journalism and how it is empowering democracy.
Laura Zommer and her energetic team at Chequeado are leading the movement in Latin America, sharing tips and techniques with the new fact-checkers. The conference included “Chequeaton,” an event that allowed college students and people in the community to try fact-checking. (I was on a team that analyzed a statement by Uruguay’s president and rated it “Exagerado.” UYCheck later did a more thorough analysis and rated it “Inflado.”)
The new Latin American sites are really impressive. In Colombia, the political news website La Silla Vacia started “The Lie Detector”, which fact-checked candidates for the congressional and presidential elections this year.
UYCheck uses a scale from Verdadero to Ridiculo to rate statements by politicians in Uruguay.
There are two new sites in Brazil: Preto No Branco, a fact-checking blog of the newspaper O Globo, and Truco, a colorful site named after a card game that is run by Agencia Publica, a non-profit journalism organization.
Cristina Tardaguila Ferreira, who runs Preto No Branco, said they did 86 fact-checks in about three weeks, including live checking of presidential debates.
“We stayed up all night for many, many nights,” she said.
But Ferreira said she still found the experience exhilarating. “I feel renewed in this project.”
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.”
Why Digital Tools Stay in the Shed: ‘The Goat Must Be Fed’
Fueling the insatiable beast
By Mark Stencel - May 14, 2014
For all the talk about digital tools and a data reporting revolution in the news business, the hype doesn’t match the reality in most American newsrooms.
That’s what we heard when the Duke Reporters’ Lab set out to understand why so many news staffs have such a difficult time figuring out how to open these digital toolboxes — even when peers at other organizations have shown what even one data-savvy journalist on staff can accomplish.
The resulting report, published today, got its title from an answer we heard in an interview with Jim Farley, the recently retired news leader at WTOP-FM in Washington, D.C., one of the best-staffed and most successful radio news operations in the country.
“We’re live and local, 24/7, 365,” Farley told us. “The goat must be fed.”
It turns out the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation — one of the news industry’s primary funders for digital tools and training — has been asking similar questions. From the point of view of Alberto Ibargüen, Knight’s president and CEO, “the biggest failure we’ve had has been precisely at the point of adoption.”
Based on our interviews with senior editors and producers in more than 20 newsrooms, the Reporters’ Lab found that:
- Many U.S. newsrooms are not taking advantage of the emerging low-cost digital tools that enable journalists to report and present their work in innovative ways. Editors and producers cling to familiar methods and practices even when they know better, more engaging digital alternatives are available, often for free.
- Journalism awards and well-attended conferences create a sense that the adoption of data reporting and digital tools is broader than it really is. But there is a still significant gap between the industry’s digital haves and have-nots — particularly between big national organizations, which have been most willing to try data reporting and digital tools, and smaller local ones, which haven’t.
- Local news leaders often cite budget, time and people as their biggest constraints. But conversations with the editors and producers we spoke to also revealed deeper issues — part infrastructure, part culture. This includes a lack of technical understanding and ability and an unwillingness to break reporting habits that could create time and space to experiment.
- The local newsrooms that have made smart use of digital tools have leaders who are willing to make difficult trade-offs in their coverage. They prioritize stories that reveal the meaning and implications of the news over an overwhelming focus on chasing incremental developments. They also think of the work they can do with digital tools as ways to tell untold stories — not “bells and whistles.”
Many of the news leaders we spoke to said they and their staffs struggle with the trade-offs this work requires of them — especially when it means cutting back on what were once core elements of their routine news coverage. “We have to be really careful picking our spots — what we’re going to do and not going to do,” said Marty Kaiser, editor and senior vice president of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where he has made data reporting and digital tools a priority.
The report was written by digital journalist Mark Stencel; Bill Adair, the Knight Chair for Computational Journalism at Duke; and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, a student researcher in the Reporters’ Lab.
The full report is available at GoatMustBeFed.com.
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.
Creating new forms of journalism that put readers in charge
The creators of Homicide Watch, Connected China and PolitiFact met over pizza and agreed on a plan to promote structured journalism.
By Bill Adair - February 28, 2014
It’s been 20 years since the Internet began to disrupt journalism. It has turned our business upside down, but it’s also given us a new canvas to invent different ways of presenting information. It’s time to start reimagining the news story.
Last week, four of us gathered in a windowless conference room in New York to explore what we can do to nudge things along.
The participants were the creators of three projects that rely on new forms:
- Laura and Chris Amico, the founders of Homicide Watch, the highly acclaimed reporting venture that tracks homicide victims and suspects in Washington, Chicago and Trenton, N.J.
- Reg Chua, the guiding force behind Connected China, a remarkable Reuters project that tracks the country’s business and political leaders, and the editor of the (Re)Structuring Journalism blog.
- Me, the creator of PolitiFact, the fact-checking website of the Tampa Bay Times that is home to the Truth-O-Meter and the Obameter.
All three projects use a structured approach to present content in different ways. The animated diagrams of Connected China show you the family and government relationships that determine who has clout in that country; the lists and maps of Homicide Watch show who has been killed and where; the PolitiFact report cards reveal which politicians have earned the most Pants on Fires.
Homicide Watch, Connected China and PolitiFact are known as structured journalism because the articles contain fields of information that can be sorted and tallied. They provide readers with many ways to explore the content, both through individual articles and the data the articles create. Structured journalism puts the reader in charge.
“It’s a way of reporting that builds a comprehensive reporter’s notebook and then opens that notebook up to the public,” said Laura Amico. “There is no ‘old news’ in structured journalism, there is cumulative news. It is reporting that increases in value over time.”
There are a few other ventures that are experimenting with similar new forms, such as Circa, the app that atomizes the news into digestible chunks. But by and large, story forms are stuck in the past. We want more news organizations to experiment with structured journalism.
We began our New York meeting by trying to understand why media companies have largely failed to take advantage of the incredible power of the Web and mobile devices. We identified four forces that have stymied innovation:
- Content Management Systems. They are designed to convert old media into new media and they provide little flexibility to experiment with new journalistic forms.
- Newsroom culture. The rhythm in most newsrooms is based on a well-established work flow that produces predictable content. It’s not easy to suggest a wholesale change.
- Product managers on the business side. They’re accustomed to selling the old recipe and often seem perplexed by new approaches.
- Editors/news directors. They’ve got other priorities — such as having to choose people for another round of layoffs — and often don’t have the resources for a new venture.
Chua said editors need to get beyond the idea that “what’s new is what’s valuable. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s accumulated information and knowledge that is valuable.”
We then turned to the need for evangelism. What can the four of us do to get more news organizations to try innovative story forms?
We agreed to host a mini-conference in September before the Online News Association meeting in Chicago. It will allow us to demonstrate the promise of new story forms for industry leaders and innovators.
In the meantime, we’ll be writing and speaking about the new forms and encouraging organizations to do more experimentation. We invite you to join in these conversations by sharing your projects, ideas and hopes. #structuredjournalism
What’s next for the Reporters’ Lab
The sign should say "Under New Management." Our first task: figure out whether the apostrophe goes before or after the "s"
By Bill Adair - October 29, 2013
If journalism is in the doldrums, you wouldn’t know it from the Online News Association conference in Atlanta last weekend.
The sold-out conference offered a dizzying array of great panels and a midway that lived up to its name. Vendors ranging from Google to the Knight Foundation showcased a wide range of new digital tools for journalists. Matt Waite flew his drone.
The conference was a reminder that we’re at a moment of reinvention in journalism when we can radically improve how we tell stories and inform people. And that is our mission for the Reporters’ Lab.
I took over the lab when I became the Knight Chair at Duke a few months ago. It’s been dormant while I focused on teaching my fall classes, but now that the semester is well underway, I’ve got several projects underway. You’ll be hearing about them in the next few months.
I inherited the lab from my predecessor Sarah Cohen, a talented colleague I know from our days at the St. Petersburg Times. Sarah created the lab and used it to develop great tools for journalists.
I’ll be continuing that mission and broadening the focus. As the founder of PolitiFact, I’ve long been interested in developing new story forms. In a TED speech last year, I said it was time to blow up the news story and experiment with new forms.
We’ll be doing that in the Reporters’ Lab (although we will make sure the explosions don’t damage the Sanford building).
I’ve got some a veteran journalist and some talented students to help with our new mission:
Mark Stencel, a national leader in digital journalism who ran NPR’s website for the past four years. He’ll be writing occasional articles for our website as he explores what tools are available to journalists and what else they need.
Prashanth Kamalakanthan, a senior political science and film student at Duke who has written for the Nation, Alternet and the Duke Chronicle. Prashanth is researching digital tools and new story forms.
Aaron Krolik, a Duke electrical engineering student who has a talent for writing code and an interest in journalism. Aaron is developing our first digital project, which you’ll be hearing about very soon.
We’ll approach everything we do with a sense of curiosity and experimentation. We’ll try new things. Some will work. Some won’t. We welcome your feedback and suggestions. You can reach me at bill.adair@duke.edu.