Fact-Checking Census Archives - Page 2 of 2

How We Identify Fact-Checkers

Published June 22, 2016 by Bill Adair and Mark Stencel

Updated: July 9, 2020

The database of global fact-checking sites is a project of the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy.

The database and related map is managed by Mark Stencel, a journalism faculty member at Duke and co-director of the Lab, and Joel Luther, a researcher who also works on technology projects that extend the reach and impact of fact-checkers around the world. PolitiFact founder Bill Adair started the database in 2014 in his role as Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke, where he also is director of the university’s journalism program.

The fact-checking database tracks several hundred non-partisan organizations around the world. These projects regularly publish articles, videos or audio reports that:

verify the accuracy of claims made by prominent public figures and institutions;
debunk rumors, hoaxes and other forms of misinformation that spread online;
or review the status of political promises made by candidates and political parties

The Lab considers many attributes in determining which organizations to include, such as whether the site:

reviews statements by all parties and sides;
examines discrete claims and reaches conclusions;
transparently identifies its sources and explains its methods;
discloses its funding and affiliations.

We also consider whether the project’s primary mission is news and information. That’s clear when fact-checking projects are run by professional journalists, produced by news media organizations, or affiliated academic journalism education programs. Other fact-checkers are typically associated with independent, non-governmental groups and think tanks that conduct non-partisan research and reporting focused on issues such as civic engagement, government transparency and public accountability.

The Reporters’ Lab criteria is similar to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. But IFCN also has a slightly different mission from the Lab. Verified signatories of IFCN’s code are typically the underlying organizations that produce fact-checks. That’s true even when those organizations produce multiple projects for different audiences. IFCN also deploys independent assessors to verify that each signatory rigorously adheres to the principles, in part to help identify the organizations that meet the highest editorial and ethical standards.

The Reporters’ Lab casts a wider net. We identify individual fact-checking outlets, websites and programs — places where the public can find reliable fact-checking reports, even when those reports have distinctive brands, names or URLs. Examples include PolitiFact’s state-and-locally media partnerships across the United States, as well as the country-specific pages and projects produced by multinational fact-checking organizations, such as Africa Check and Agence France-Presse, among others. While the Reporters’ Lab counts each major satellite, IFCN’s signatory list generally counts the overarching organization.

With the growth of collaborative fact-checking projects around the world, the Reporters’ Lab also aims to identify the contributing organizations that individually produce substantial fact-checking collections of their own.

We sometimes include projects that present content in multiple languages, but mainly when there is original and distinctive content in each language (not just translations).

Our database is regularly updated throughout the year and includes both active and inactive projects, which are noted and counted separately. We also try to update the status of organizations that do periodic fact-checking during key news events, such as an election or a legislative session. Projects that mainly do fact-checks during elections remain “active” in our database if they have track-records of consistently doing this kind of reporting over multiple election cycles.

If you have additions, edits, updates or questions, please contact Mark Stencel or Joel Luther.

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Global fact-checking up 50% in past year

Global fact-checking up 50% in past year

Published February 16, 2016 by Mark Stencel

The high volume of political truth-twisting is driving demand for political fact-checkers around the world, with the number of fact-checking sites up 50 percent since last year.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab annual census of international fact-checking currently counts 96 active projects in 37 countries. That’s up from 64 active fact-checkers in the 2015 count. (Map and List)

Active Fact-checkers 2016 A bumper crop of new fact-checkers across the Western Hemisphere helped increase the ranks of journalists and government watchdogs who verify the accuracy of public statements and track political promises. The new sites include 14 in the United States, two in Canada as well as seven additional fact-checkers in Latin America.There also were new projects in 10 other countries, from North Africa to Central Europe to East Asia.

With this dramatic growth, politicians in at least nine countries will have their statements scrutinized before their voters go to the polls for national elections this year. (In 2015, fact-checkers were on the beat for national elections in 11 countries.)

Active fact-checkers by continent in our latest tally:
Africa: 5
Asia: 7
Australia: 2
Europe: 27
North America: 47
South America: 8

More than a third of the currently active fact-checkers (33 of 96) launched in 2015 or even in the first weeks of 2016.

The Reporters’ Lab also keeps tabs on inactive fact-checking ventures, which currently number 47. Some of them assure us they are in suspended animation between election cycles — a regular pattern that keeps the fact-checking tally in continuous flux. At least a few inactive fact-checkers in the United States have been “seasonal” projects in past elections. The Reporters’ Lab regularly updates the database, so the tallies reported here are all as of Feb. 15, 2016.

Growing Competition

U.S. fact-checkers dominate the Reporters’ Lab list, with 41 active projects. Of these, three-quarters (30 of 41) are focused on the statements of candidates and government officials working at the state and local level. And 15 of those are among the local media organizations that have joined an expanding network of state affiliates of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning venture started nine years ago by the Tampa Bay Times in St. Petersburg, Florida.

(Editor’s Note: PolitiFact founder Bill Adair is a Duke professor who oversees the Reporters’ Lab work. The Lab is part of the the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy.)

In the past year, PolitiFact’s newspaper and local broadcast partners have launched new regional sites in six states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri and Nevada) and reactivated a dormant one in a seventh state (Ohio).

In some cases, those new fact-checkers are entering competitive markets. So far this election year, at least seven U.S. states have more than one regional fact-checker and in California there are three.

With the presidential campaign underway, competition also is increasing at the national level, where longstanding fact-checkers such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact Checker now regularly square off with at least eight teams of journalists who are systematically scrutinizing the the candidates’ words. And with more and more newsrooms joining in, especially on debate nights, we will be adding to that list before the pixels dry on this blog post.

Competition is on the rise around the world, too. In 10 other countries, voters have more than one active fact-checker to consult.

The tally by country:
U.S.: 41
France: 5
U.K.: 4
Brazil: 3
Canada: 3
South Korea: 3
Spain: 3
Argentina: 2
Australia: 2
Tunisia: 2*
Ukraine: 2

* One organization in Tunisia maintains two sites that track political promises (a third site operated by the same group is inactive).

The growing numbers have even spawned a new global association, the International Fact-Checking Network hosted by the Poynter Institute, a media training center in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Promises, Promises

Some of the growth has come in the form of promise-tracking. Since January 2015, fact-checkers launched six sites in five countries devoted to tracking the status of pledges candidates and party leaders made in political campaigns. In Tunisia, there are two new sites dedicated to promise-tracking — one devoted to the country’s president and the other to its prime minister.

There are another 20 active fact-checkers elsewhere that track promises, either as their primary mission or as part of a broader portfolio of political verification. Added together, more than a quarter of the active fact-checkers (26 of 96, including nine in the United States) do some form of promise-tracking.

The Media Is the Mainstream — Especially in the U.S.

Nearly two-thirds of the active fact-checkers (61 of 96, or 64 percent) are directly affiliated with a new organization. However this breakdown reflects the dominant business structure in the United States, where 90 percent of fact-checkers are part of a news organization. That includes nine of 11 national projects and 28 of 30 state/local fact-checkers

Media Affiliations of 41 Active U.S. Fact-Checkers
Newspaper: 18
TV: 10
TV + Newspaper: 1
Radio: 3
Digital: 3
Student Newspaper: 1
Not Affiliated: 4

The story is different outside the United States, where less than half of the active fact-checking projects (24 of 55, or 44 percent) are affiliated with news organizations.

The other fact-checkers are typically associated with non-governmental, non-profit and activist groups focused on civic engagement, government transparency and accountability. A handful are partisan, especially in conflict zones and in countries where the lines between independent media, activists and opposition parties are often blurry and where those groups are aligned against state-controlled media or other governmental and partisan entities.

Many of the fact-checkers that are not affiliated with news organizations have journalists on their staff or partner with professional news outlets to distribute their content.

All About Ratings

More than three out of four active U.S. fact-checkers (33 of 41, or 81 percent) use rating systems, including scales that range from true to false or rating devices, such as the Washington Post’s “Pinocchios.” That pattern is consistent globally, where 76 of 96, or 79 percent, use ratings.

This report is based on research compiled in part by Reporters’ Lab student researchers Jillian Apel, Julia Donheiser and Shaker Samman. Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (and a former managing editor of the Italian fact-checking Pagella Politica) also contributed to this report, as did Reporters’ Lab director Bill Adair, Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University (and founder of PolitiFact).

Please send updates and additions to Reporters’ Lab co-director Mark Stencel (mark.stencel@duke.edu).

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Fact-Checking Census finds continued growth around the world

Published January 19, 2015 by Bill Adair and Ishan Thakore

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 Truth or False Poll in South Korea enlists readers to help with fact-checking.

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

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Tag: Fact-Checking Census

How We Identify Fact-Checkers

Global fact-checking up 50% in past year

Fact-Checking Census finds continued growth around the world