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Columbia Journalism Review content tagged Fact Checking

1. August 17, 2012 03:43 PM

   A laurel to The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta

   For calling on reporters to repeat the truth as often as needed, and showing how to do it

   By Greg Marx

   This week’s laurel goes to Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic, whose astute web piece “What to Do With Political Lies,” offered some simple, useful advice for how journalists can better respond to misleading and unsubstantiated attacks on the campaign trail. Franke-Ruta starts with the premise—shared by The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis, whose frustrated post about inadequate coverage of some...

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2. September 14, 2012 05:50 PM

   A laurel to FlackCheck.org

   For its new guide to video factchecking on air and online

   By Greg Marx

   The recent journalistic debate about factchecking has prompted some compelling discussion about different strategies, different methods, and what works (e.g., here and here.) But much of that discussion—and we’re as guilty of this as anyone—has focused on factchecking in print, even as most political messaging and a substantial share of news consumption occurs over the airwaves. So we’re bestowing...

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3. September 7, 2012 06:50 AM

   Audit Notes: Journal Register, Clinton and ‘can’t find workers,’ AP flop

   The bankrupt company's owner isn't doing well itself

   By Ryan Chittum

   Read Martin Langeveld's super-sharp take for the Nieman Lab on what the Journal Register bankruptcy means and what might be behind it: But it’s now clear that the “stacking of digital dimes” to replace digital dollars hasn’t happened fast enough. And if there actually was an Alden-led strategy at Digital First to truly capitalize on the combination’s clout through new...

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4. January 27, 2011 11:08 AM

   Fact Checking the Fact Checkers

   PolitiFact is half right on two State of the Union truth-o-meters

   By Ryan Chittum

   Commenter James asked me to take a look at a couple of verdicts from PolitiFact on the State of the Union and the Republican response. He disagrees with their verdicts. Let's take a look. PolitiFact gave Representative Paul Ryan, who delivered the Republican response, a full "True" rating for his statement that "The debt will soon eclipse our entire economy."...

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5. October 23, 2012 06:50 AM

   Fact-checking at The New Yorker

   An excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines

   By Peter Canby

   Last month, Columbia Journalism Review Books and Columbia University Press released The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, an anthology of insights and reminiscences from top magazine editors. The book is based on talks given to students as part of the Delacorte Lecture Series at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism....

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6. October 23, 2012 06:50 AM

   Fact-checking at The New Yorker

   An excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines

   By Peter Canby

   Last month, Columbia Journalism Review Books and Columbia University Press released The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry, an anthology of insights and reminiscences from top magazine editors. The book is based on talks given to students as part of the Delacorte Lecture Series at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism....

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7. March 20, 2012 11:08 AM

   Ira Glass’s Casablanca Moment with Mike Daisey

   A classy confession doesn’t negate the crime

   By Lawrence Pintak

   Over the weekend, as just about anyone with electricity knows by now, the public radio program This American Life fell on its sword over its bad Apple episode. The gesture was a noble one. As CJR’s Ryan Chittum put it: With the stunning news that This American Life is retracting its episode on Apple and Foxconn after finding that Mike...

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8. July 27, 2012 03:10 PM

   Laurels to the Las Vegas Sun and News & Record

   For a strong ad factcheck, and for grappling with campaigns' message control

   By Liz Cox Barrett and Greg Marx

   Jay Jones has already heaped praise this week upon the Las Vegas Sun’s Anjeanette Damon, but we’ll go ahead and give her a laurel for her takedown of a Mitt Romney campaign ad that ripped President Obama’s now-infamous “build that” line out of context. Damon’s short, to-the-point factcheck item didn’t mince any words, calling the ad “a classic example...

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9. December 23, 2011 02:07 PM

   Letters Man

   Why the letters-to-the-editor section shouldn’t become a forum for flacks

   By John Stoehr

   In May 2011, the alt-weekly New Haven Advocate, which I edit, ran a story about the rising cost of rent in Connecticut and the challenges facing workers earning the minimum wage. Soon thereafter, we received a letter to the editor from a man named Michael Saltsman, who presented himself as a scholarly researcher at something called the Employment Policies Institute....

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10. September 11, 2012 07:10 AM

    Medicare ‘bankruptcy’: CNN gets it right

    The network fact-checks a frequent talking point, and does it well

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Hooray for CNN.com, for fact checking the often-heard claim of Medicare’s “impending” bankruptcy. CNN’s contribution sets a high bar, and the network also distinguishes itself from the over-the-top fact checking that has cropped up lately, as pointed out recently by my colleague Brendan Nyhan. The “bankruptcy” language comes up a lot. In his convention speech last week, for example, former...

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11. March 16, 2012 03:45 PM

    Nine Lives of a Disputed Fact

    A Politico op-ed fails the fact-checking test

    By Trudy Lieberman

    The other day, Politico published an opinion piece arguing that Americans should be “extremely anxious about the outcome” of the Supreme Court’s decision on the health reform law. The op-ed, by Scott Atlas, the chief of neuroradiology at the Stanford University Medical Center and a fellow at the Hoover Institution, warned “the entire U.S. health care system as we know...

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12. August 12, 2011 12:39 PM

    Schmidle in Secret

    New Yorker keeps mum on fact-checking process for bin Laden piece

    By Craig Silverman

    Amid the discussion and debate about the sourcing and accuracy of Nicholas Schmidle’s lengthy retelling of the Bin Laden raid in The New Yorker, we’ve failed to hear from one important group of people. They have the detailed information about the sourcing of the article, and spoke to Schmidle’s sources to confirm the details long before it was published. I’m...

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13. April 13, 2011 01:59 PM

    The AP Falls For a Bogus Press Release

    No excuse for that silly mistake but points for cleaning up the mess

    By Ryan Chittum

    Henry Blodget wants to know if we're going to blast the Associated Press for falling for a hoax press release falsely purporting to be from General Electric. Not quite. It's a journalist's worst nightmare to fall for an impostor source, and this one's embarrassing. But that's mitigated by the fact that AP quickly and forthrightly owned up to it. An...

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14. November 10, 2011 05:33 PM

    The Big Lie of the Crisis, Called Out By the Press

    The false "banks didn't do it" meme takes hold on the right, as Romney showed last night

    By Ryan Chittum

    At CNBC's GOP debate last night, Mitt Romney showed that he, like Michael Bloomberg, buys into the Big Lie of the financial crisis, one that's unfortunately become conventional wisdom on the right: That the private sector only made hundreds of billions of dollars worth of toxic loans (and then made more than a hundred billion dollars worth of fake toxic...

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15. January 6, 2012 01:48 PM

    The Bloodying of PolitiFact

    What is Medicare, anyway?

    By Trudy Lieberman

    Now it’s my turn to weigh in on the “Lie of the Year,” the gimmick PolitiFact uses to highlight the most egregious misstatements of the past year. This time, though, the fact-checking service stumbled into a fusillade of criticism from such unlikely bedfellows as New York Times liberal columnist Paul Krugman and the conservative Wall Street Journal’s online opinion page....

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16. October 8, 2012 03:00 PM

    The debate: Some healthcare ‘facts’ that
    shouldn’t stand

    Reporters did good fact checking, but also left falsehoods on the table

    By Trudy Lieberman

    There was no shortage of media fact checking after last week’s presidential debate, much of it focused on healthcare, much of it good. Still, reporters left a lot of healthcare “facts” on the table, unexamined, too. Let’s take a look. The New York Times devoted seven graphs to accurately explaining why Obamacare is not, despite Mitt Romney’s assertions, a...

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17. March 19, 2012 05:26 PM

    The Facts of the Mike Daisey Matter

    And why they matter

    By Christopher Solomon

    It’s been a tough winter for facts, and for those of us who wrangle them for a living. On Friday, March 16, monologist Mike Daisey admitted he’d invented details in his stage show about working conditions in Chinese factories that manufacture Apple products. A version of this show aired on the public radio program This American Life, and has since...

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18. December 2, 2011 01:13 PM

    The Truth about Public Untruths

    Are journalists and others equipped to beat back the lies?

    By Craig Silverman

    What’s to be done with lying liars and the lies they tell journalists and the public? This is a topic of serious discussion in journalism circles, perhaps now more than ever. I say that with the knowledge that two years ago I wrote a column that declared, “We are in the midst of a blossoming of new forms of fact...

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19. January 18, 2012 02:37 PM

    Will Fact-Checking Go the Way of Blogs?

    By Felix Salmon

    Lucas Graves has by far the best and most sophisticated response to NYT ombudsman Arthur Brisbane’s silly question about “truth vigilantes”. Graves makes the important point that Brisbane’s “objective and fair” formulation is itself problematic: as one of Brisbane’s commenters wrote, if a certain politician is objectively less truthful, less forthcoming, and less believable than others, then objectivity demands that...

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