The PolitiFact team recently visited Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the third annual Global Summit on Fact-checking. I’ll be posting more on this soon, but in the meantime here is a photo of some of us with street art in the city.
Here’s my op-ed for PolitiFact and the Tampa Bay Times, summing up PolitiFact’s 2016 visit to Iowa to cover the presidential candidates.
DES MOINES — The art and craft of political fact-checking is not much to look at, usually. We sit at desks and read transcripts. We watch politicians on TV. We read documents and reports. On lively days, we talk with national experts on the phone. Every now and then, we might have a heated conversation with a press secretary.
So when PolitiFact decided to send a small team to Iowa, I jumped at the chance: Fact-checkers unbound from their desks! READ MORE.
Our team went to Iowa recently to cover the caucuses; we snapped this selfie quickly on our way to a campaign rally. From left to right, it’s me, reporter Lauren Carroll and deputy editor Katie Sanders.
It started snowing en route to John Wayne's birthplace, where we'll see Donald Trump this morning. pic.twitter.com/5s0JrN6vWd
— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) January 19, 2016
I wrote an op-ed for the New York Times. It starts:
Washington — I’m a political fact-checker, which is usually an automatic conversation starter at parties. These days, I get two questions repeatedly: “Is it worse than it’s ever been?” and “What’s up with Donald Trump?”
I’ve been fact-checking since 2007, when The Tampa Bay Times founded PolitiFact as a new way to cover elections. We don’t check absolutely everything a candidate says, but focus on what catches our eye as significant, newsworthy or potentially influential. Our ratings are also not intended to be statistically representative but to show trends over time.
Donald J. Trump’s record on truth and accuracy is astonishingly poor. READ MORE.
I discussed PolitiFact’s work fact-checking the presidential primary debates on PBS’s “Washington Week.” It was also the day of the Paris terror attacks.
I spoke with Erik Wemple of the Washington Post about how we plan PolitiFact’s coverage of presidential candidates like Donald Trump. The accurate headline made me laugh: “PolitiFact editor: ‘I don’t want to turn the whole site into the Donald Trump channel.’ ” Read Erik’s piece here.
I talked about fact-checking Donald Trump recently on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stelter.
It warmed my librarians’ heart that PolitiFact’s first Kickstarter included annotating political rhetoric. My own definition of annotation is adding a note to an existing work to perform one or more of the following tasks:
PolitiFact partnered with Genius on the project, using the Genius software that provides what I would describe as either in-line or off-set annotation. (See it here.)
I love reading endnotes in books. Robert Caro’s endnotes for his biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson come to mind as particularly marvelous. One of my favorite novels, Infinite Jest, is famous for its copious footnotes.
One of the things I think about a lot at PolitiFact is how to fact-check and how to improve fact-checking processes. The distillation of a lot of that thinking is in a column we posted this week, “7 steps to better fact-checking.” It’s a rundown of the how I approach research when I fact-check, and it’s heavily influenced by librarianship’s comprehensive approach to search.
In June, I attended the Global Fact-Checking Summit in London. About 50 fact-checkers from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America and Australia attended. The conference was hosted by the Poynter Institute, organized by Duke University’s Bill Adair (PolitiFact’s founding editor), and funded by the Omidyar Network, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Ford Foundation, craigconnects, the Duke Reporters’ Lab and Full Fact.
The conference was fantastic, and seeing London for the first time was a real treat. Here are a few photos and comments from my trip. Click on the first photo to launch the gallery.
