Bill Adair is the founder of the Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact and Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, where he specializes in journalism and new media, with an emphasis on structured journalism and fact-checking. [1] [2] He is a former adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla. and a contributing editor at PolitiFact. [3]
Adair earned a Bachelor of Science from Arizona State University in 1985., after which he spent his career in journalism with the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times), where he served as a reporter and editor. [2] In 1997 he was assigned to the Washington bureau where he covered Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, national politics and aviation safety. [1]
In 2004 he was appointed Washington Bureau Chief, a position he held until his transition into academia in 2013. [2] In 2002, Adair's experience in covering aviation safety led him to author and publish "The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation," a behind-the-scenes account of a National Transportation Safety Board investigation of the crash of a US Air Boeing 737 near Pittsburgh. [1] In writing the book, Adair was granted access to the five-year inquiry by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).
In 2007, Adair launched PolitiFact as a pilot project of the Tampa Bay Times, a national fact-checking site that has expanded to include 10 state-level sites and has served as a model for the proliferation of fact-checking sites across the globe. [2] PolitiFact is known for its "Truth-O-Meter", which rates officials' public statements on a scale ranging from "True" to "Pants On Fire.” [3] In 2009 the PolitiFact team was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. [3] Thanks to support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Adair was also able to create the "Settle It! PolitiFact's Argument Ender” mobile app and conduct research on fact-checking as a faculty member at Duke University. [3]
Upon his retirement from PolitiFact, Adair said in October 2024 that Republicans lied far more than Democrats, by a margin of 55% to 31% for fact checks conducted between 2016 and 2021. He added that the disparity was not caused by Republicans being checked more often or more critically. Adair said, "Republicans see their work as part of this epic battle and in that, it is such an important cause to them that they really believe that lying is justified in that epic battle." [4] [5]
Adair is a former adjunct faculty member at the Poynter Institute, [1] and in 2013 was appointed Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University, one of 25 Knight Chairs at universities around the country. [6] The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is an American private, non-profit foundation dedicated to supporting "transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts.”
"Bill is a digital journalist with the courage to set audacious goals and take big risks," said Eric Newton, senior adviser to the president at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, "He understands the urgent need to try new things, learn, and try again." [3] According to Duke University, “The Knight Chair at Duke was established in 1990 by a gift from the Knight Foundation, which has established two dozen endowed chairs in journalism at top universities nationwide to teach innovative classes, create experimental projects and new programs and help lead journalism excellence in the digital age.” [3]
In 2013 Adair replaced Sarah Cohen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter, as the director the Duke Reporters’ Lab, described by Duke as “an online forum for journalism innovation.” [3] Under Adair's leadership, The Duke Reporters’ Lab has shifted its focus to structured journalism and fact-checking. Adair has said he would “like to continue experimenting with things that really take the power of the web and mobile devices in presenting information in new ways." [3]
The Tampa Bay Times, called the St. Petersburg Times until 2011, is an American newspaper published in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. It is published by the Times Publishing Company, which is owned by The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school directly adjacent to the University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus.
William C. Gaines was an American journalist and professor of journalism. Gaines was a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune. He retired from the paper in 2001 and taught in the Department of Journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign until his retirement and designation as an emeritus faculty member in 2007. He died on July 20, 2016, at the age of 82.
The Poynter Institute for Media Studies is a non-profit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida, United States. The school is the owner of the Tampa Bay Times newspaper and the International Fact-Checking Network. It also operates PolitiFact.
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Bill Adair (journalist)