Author Archives: Jess Henig

The Viral Spiral of 2010

There’s a reason they call chain e-mails “viral” — their transmission is swift, extensive and very hard to stop. They tend to contain indignant, outraged messages that are nearly always false and often malicious. We can’t say exactly …
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Sunday Replay

Surprisingly – considering that the topic du jour was taxes, which means numbers – the flubs and fibs on the Dec. 12 talk shows were few, and relatively minor. Not So Out-of-Context On "Meet the Press," the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Austan Goolsbee, claimed host …
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Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Just Argue

The Dec. 5 edition of ABC’s “This Week” played host to a heated discussion about the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation. Claims pinged back and forth regarding the recent Pentagon investigation of troop attitudes toward the law. But we caught several people putting the wrong figures with the …
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The 2010 FactCheck Awards

As usual in this election, we’ve focused on what was true or false in the flood of campaign advertising. And as usual, we found plenty of twisted claims and distortions of reality, and occasionally some pure fabrication. We kept …
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Whoppers of Campaign 2010

Midterm elections are an embarrassment of riches for fact-checkers — this year more than others. With Democrats fighting desperately to keep control of the House and Senate, and a torrent of money from corporations and other undisclosed …
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Kirk, Giannoulias Misstate Facts in Debate

The Illinois Senate candidates strayed from the facts on Sunday’s "Meet the Press," which featured a debate between Republican Mark Kirk, a House member, and Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, the state treasurer. Bridge Claims Go Nowhere Kirk exaggerated his role in combating the "bridge to nowhere," a name given interchangeably to …
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Angle’s Shocking – and Misleading – Viagra Claim

A new ad from Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle says that Angle’s opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, "voted to use taxpayer dollars to pay for Viagra for convicted child molesters and sex offenders." That sensational claim hasn’t gotten any more true since the first time we addressed it, …
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Sunday Replay

On this week’s Sunday talk shows, we found false claims on the debt, discretionary spending, foreign-funded attack ads and polling data. Wrong on Debt On ABC’s "This Week," Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell made a false claim about the federal debt — a claim that we debunked in January, when …
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Sunday Replay

The talk shows’ factual failures included misinformation from Karl Rove (about write-in ballots in Alaska), from a former president (about college graduation rates and health in the U.S.) and from a current one (of Iran, about several topics). Rove’s Spelling Lesson Republican strategist Karl Rove overstated a legal barrier confronting …
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Bachmann Decries Rumors, Then Spreads Them

At Friday’s conservative Values Voter Summit, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke out against "falsehoods and rumors" about the tea party movement. We applaud any call to combat misinformation — but Bachmann would do well to guard against falsehoods and rumors herself. In the same speech, she complained about "Speaker Pelosi, …
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