It's All Journalism: Fact Checking Politics and Beyond
october 23, 2015 08:00 am
Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact editor (Photo by LARA CERRI)
It's All Journalism is a weekly conversation about the changing state of the media and the future of journalism.
It's early days in the 2016 presidential campaign, but things are already heating up at
PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-prize-winning, fact-checking arm of the
Tampa Bay Times.
PolitiFact journalists have already picked apart to recent Republican and Democratic debates and identified questionable quips from interviews and started running them through the
Truth-O-Meter to determine their veracity.
Some of the results:
- Donald Trump's claim that the CIA warned President George W. Bush about the impending 9-11 terrorist attacks proved to be "False".
- Hillary Clinton's assertion that Edward Snowden would've received all the protections of a government whistleblower was "Mostly False".
- Ben Carson's statement that Mahmoud Appas, Ali Khamenei and Vladimir Putin first met at college garnered the "Pants-On-Fire" designation.
On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, Producer Michael O'Connell interviews Editor
Angie Drobnic Holan about PolitiFact's mission, the steps the website's staff goes through to determine the truthfulness of candidate's claims and their approach to covering the 2016 presidential race. She also discusses how PolitiFact and other organizations, like the
American Press Institute, are bringing the fact-checking philosophy to newsrooms across the country, teaching journalists to use those skills to cover not just political campaigns, but the entire governmental process.
