Available in | English |
---|---|
Owner | Annenberg Public Policy Center |
URL | factcheck.org |
Commercial | No |
Launched | December 2003 |
FactCheck.org is a nonprofit [1] website that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics by providing original research on misinformation and hoaxes. [2] It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and is funded primarily by the Annenberg Foundation. [2]
Kathleen Hall Jamieson's 1993 book Dirty Politics, in which she criticized the presidential campaigns of George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in 1988, provided the idea for FactCheck.org. [3]
Most of its content consists of rebuttals on inaccurate, misleading, or false claims made by politicians. FactCheck.org has also targeted misinformation from various partisan groups. Other features include:
FactCheck.org was launched in December 2003 by Brooks Jackson, a former Associated Press, Wall Street Journal, and CNN reporter who had covered Washington and national politics since 1970. [8] As a special assignment correspondent at CNN during the 1992 political campaign season, Jackson became well known for his "Ad Police" reports, which monitored candidates' advertising and financing strategies throughout the campaign. [9] In 2003, Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center approached Jackson about forming FactCheck.org, [10] and the site was online in December of that year.
In 2007, UnSpun was published. This book was co-written by Brooks Jackson, the director emeritus of Factcheck.org and by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. It teaches readers how to be aware of the deceptions, or "spin", that is commonly used in media and by politicians. [11]
In January 2013, Jackson stepped down as director of FactCheck.org. He now holds the title of director emeritus. Eugene Kiely, a former reporter and editor at The Record (of Hackensack, New Jersey), The Philadelphia Inquirer and USA Today , is now the site's director. FactCheck.org employs a staff of four full-time journalists, and offers yearly fellowships to undergraduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. [12]
In 2019, Factcheck.org celebrated its 15th anniversary. [3]
FactCheck.org became a focus of political commentary following the 2004 vice-presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. Cheney cited the website, claiming that the independent site defended his actions while CEO of Halliburton. Cheney's claim was disputed by FactCheck.org as wrong, saying that "Edwards was mostly right" when talking about "Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles". [13]
Cheney's reference created some controversy because he incorrectly cited the web site's address as "FactCheck.com." At the time of the debate, factcheck.com was controlled by Frank Schilling's company Name Administration Inc., who quickly redirected the address to point to an anti-Bush website owned by Bush critic George Soros. [14]
FactCheck.org also became a focus of national attention in the summer of 2012, during the presidential race between incumbent Democrat Barack Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney. The Obama campaign ran a TV ad accusing Romney of involvement in the outsourcing of American jobs overseas by Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that he had founded in 1984. [15] FactCheck.org ruled this ad to be false, claiming that the acts of outsourcing occurred after Romney had left the company to head the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. [16] In response, the Obama campaign contested FactCheck.org's ruling in a six-page letter that was distributed to major news corporations, holding that Romney still retained responsibility for the company's actions. [17]
Since November 2014, FactCheck.org has published twenty-eight pages of articles checking the facts on the many 2016 presidential candidates. [18] As of April 2016, the five remaining candidates had dedicated archives to their fact-checked claims.
In 2016, FactCheck.org became a fact-checking partner of Facebook. [3] [19]
The findings of the fact checking process can be seen publicly and have been broken down. [20]
The site has gained recognition and won numerous awards for its contributions to political journalism. In 2004, Time magazine named FactCheck.org as one of the "50 best websites 2004". [21] In 2006, Time magazine named FactCheck.org one of the "25 Sites We Can't Live Without." [22] In 2008, PC Magazine called it one of the "20 Best Political Websites." [23] In 2009, the Association for Women in Communications awarded FactCheck.org the Clarion Awards. [3] In 2010, FactCheck.org won the Delta-Chi-Price of the Society of Professional Journalists. [3]
Between 2008 and 2012, the site won four Webby Awards in the Politics category, in 2008, 2010, 2011, and 2012; as well as four People's Voice Awards in Politics, in 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2012. [24] FactCheck.org also won a 2010 Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for reporting on deceptive claims made about the federal health care legislation. [25]
Halliburton Company is an American multinational corporation and the world's second largest oil service company which is responsible for most of the world's largest fracking operations. It employs approximately 55,000 people through its hundreds of subsidiaries, affiliates, branches, brands, and divisions in more than 70 countries. The company, though incorporated in the United States, has dual headquarters located in Houston and in Dubai.
The 2008 United States presidential election was the 56th quadrennial presidential election, held on November 4, 2008. The Democratic ticket of Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, and Joe Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, defeated the Republican ticket of John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, and Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska. Obama became the first African American to be elected to the presidency, as well as being only the third sitting United States senator elected president, joining Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy. Meanwhile, this was only the second successful all-senator ticket since the 1960 election and is the only election where both major party nominees were sitting senators. This was the first election since 1952 in which neither the incumbent president nor vice president was on the ballot.
Elizabeth Helen McCaughey, is an American politician who was the lieutenant governor of New York from 1995 to 1998, during the first term of Governor George Pataki. She unsuccessfully sought the Democratic Party nomination for governor after Pataki dropped her from his 1998 ticket, and she ended up on the ballot under the Liberal Party line. In August 2016 the Donald Trump presidential campaign announced that she had joined the campaign as an economic adviser.
Judicial Watch (JW) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit American conservative activist group that files Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to investigate claimed misconduct by government officials. Founded in 1994, JW has primarily targeted Democrats, in particular the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as well as Hillary Clinton's role in them. It was founded by attorney Larry Klayman, and has been led by Tom Fitton since 2003.
Richard Samuel Morris is an American political author and commentator who previously worked as a pollster, political campaign consultant, and general political consultant.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheck.org, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar, in which she argues that Russia very likely helped Donald J. Trump become the U.S. President in 2016.
The term swiftboating is a pejorative American neologism used to describe an unfair or untrue political attack. The term is derived from the name of the organization "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" because of their widely publicized—and later discredited—political smear campaign against 2004 U.S. presidential candidate John Kerry. Since the 2004 election, the term has come to commonly refer to a political attack that is dishonest, personal, and unfair.
Richard Bruce Cheney is an American politician and businessman who served as the 46th vice president of the United States from 2001 to 2009 under President George W. Bush. Often cited as the most powerful vice president in American history, Cheney previously served as White House Chief of Staff for President Gerald Ford, the U.S. representative for Wyoming's at-large congressional district from 1979 to 1989, and as the 17th United States secretary of defense in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. He is the oldest living former U.S. vice president, following the death of Walter Mondale in 2021.
Wayne Allyn Root is an American conservative television and radio host, author, activist, conservative political commentator and conspiracy theorist. He is the host of two new television shows, daily at 7 PM ET on Lindell TV network (FrankSpeech.com) and Saturdays at Noon ET "America's Top Ten Countdown with Wayne Allyn Root" on Real America's Voice TV Network. He is also the radio host of "Wayne Allyn Root: Raw & Unfiltered" on AM 670 in Las Vegas and nationally-syndicated on the USA Radio Network, and formerly on Newsmax TV. Root was an opinion columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His newspaper columns are currently nationally syndicated on Sundays by Creators Syndicate.
The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate, by author David Freddoso, is a bestselling book published in late 2008, providing a critical examination of the life and opinions of the then United States presidential candidate and Senator Barack Obama.
The 2012 United States presidential election was the 57th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Incumbent Democratic President Barack Obama and his running mate, incumbent Vice President Joe Biden, were re-elected to a second term. They defeated the Republican ticket of former Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts and Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
PolitiFact.com is an American nonprofit project operated by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, with offices there and in Washington, D.C. It began in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times, with reporters and editors from the newspaper and its affiliated news media partners reporting on the accuracy of statements made by elected officials, candidates, their staffs, lobbyists, interest groups and others involved in U.S. politics. Its journalists select original statements to evaluate and then publish their findings on the PolitiFact.com website, where each statement receives a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for statements the journalists deem as accurate to "Pants on Fire" for claims the journalists deem as "not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim".
A series of political debates were held prior to and during the 2012 Republican primaries, among candidates for the Republican presidential nomination in the national election of 2012. The first debate occurred on May 5, 2011, in Greenville, South Carolina, and was hosted by Fox News, while the last debate was held February 22, 2012, in Mesa, Arizona, and was hosted by CNN.
The 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney officially began on June 2, 2011, when former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney formally announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for President of the United States, at an event in Stratham, New Hampshire. Having previously run in the 2008 Republican primaries, this was Romney's second campaign for the presidency.
The bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) held four debates for the 2012 U.S. presidential general election, slated for various locations around the United States in October 2012 – three of them involving the major party presidential nominees; those being Democratic President Barack Obama from Illinois and Republican Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, and one involving the vice-presidential nominees, those being Vice President Joe Biden from Delaware and Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin.
Priorities USA Action is a progressive political action committee and is the largest Democratic Party super PAC. Founded in 2011, it supported Barack Obama's 2012 re-election campaign. It was the primary super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. It focuses mainly on high-dollar donors.
"You didn't build that" is a phrase from a 2012 election campaign speech delivered by United States President Barack Obama on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia. In the speech, Obama said: "Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business, you didn't build that."
Fake news websites target United States audiences by using disinformation to create or inflame controversial topics such as the 2016 election. Most fake news websites target readers by impersonating or pretending to be real news organizations, which can lead to legitimate news organizations further spreading their message. Most notable in the media are the many websites that made completely false claims about political candidates such as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as part of a larger campaign to gain viewers and ad revenue or spread disinformation. Additionally, satire websites have received criticism for not properly notifying readers that they are publishing false or satirical content, since many readers have been duped by seemingly legitimate articles.
The use of social media in political campaigning was made popular by Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential elections and the impact of social media in deciding the 2008 presidential elections was evident in the research and analysis produced. The 2008 elections and 2012 elections exist in different landscapes, during the 2008 elections Obama's campaign was considered "an experimental innovator" but by 2012 the merits of social media had been repeatedly proven.