FactCheck.org

Those of you who follow FactCheck.org via RSS may have noticed some temporary glitches with the feed last night. Indeed, several of our more observant readers wrote to us to let us know that our feed was apparently redirecting to a squatter site. We apologize for the mix up. The problem is corrected now. We’ll be continuing to do some maintenance throughout the day as we work out some of the kinks in our feed. Try not to be too alarmed if you see odd things happening once in a while. But if those odd things persist, drop us a line at Editor@FactCheck.org and tell... [Read more]

You might have noticed that things look a little different around here. We’ve given the site a bit of a makeover. Some of the effects are pretty obvious, like the rotating picture gallery on our homepage. That’s where we’ll feature our newest and most-talked-about content. You can click the picture or the article title to go to the full story. And don’t worry if you didn’t click fast enough. The content will cycle back around. Or if you’re impatient, you can use the arrows to find what you want. But not all the changes are cosmetic. We’re... [Read more]

We’re going to have to get a bigger trophy case. FactCheck.org’s 2008 election coverage has been selected by the Association for Women in Communications for one of its Clarion Awards. We’re both honored and pleased by this additional recognition, which comes on the heels of our third consecutive Webby "People’s Voice" Award for best political site on the Internet. The 2009 Clarion competition attracted nearly 500 entries in various categories. Our election coverage won in the category of "Online Publication" aimed at a public... [Read more]

You might have noticed that things look a little different around here. You’ve probably already noticed some of the cosmetic changes, like the rotating picture gallery on our homepage, where we’ll feature our newest and most-talked about content. But we’re just as excited about some of the things that you might not have noticed on first glance: All our content under one roof. No more having to leave the main site to find all our content on The FactCheck Wire. Now you’ll be able to see our latest articles, Wire posts and Ask FactCheck items right... [Read more]

We saw more aggressive fact-checking by journalists in this election than ever before. Unfortunately, as a post-election Annenberg Public Policy Center poll confirms, millions of voters were bamboozled anyway. More than half of U.S. adults (52 percent) said the claim that Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan would raise taxes on most small businesses is truthful, when in fact only a small percentage would see any increase. More than two in five (42.3 percent) found truth in the claim that Sen. John McCain planned to "cut more than 800 billion dollars in Medicare payments... [Read more]

I’ve noticed that chain e-mails, particularly those about politics, have a lot of things in common: urgent and frightening messages; spelling errors; a tendency to blame mainstream media for not telling the real story; and false, misleading, utterly bogus, and completely off-base claims. If there was ever a case where readers should apply a guilty-until-proven-innocent standard, this is it. We at FactCheck.org ask the public to be skeptical about politicians’ claims. With these e-mails, outright cynicism is justified. Assume all such messages are wrong, and... [Read more]

Have you heard about how Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet? What about how Iraq was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center? Or maybe the one about how George W. Bush has the lowest IQ of any U.S. president ever? Chances are pretty good that you might even believe one (or more) of these claims. And yet all three are false. At FactCheck.org our stock in trade is debunking these sorts of false or misleading political claims, so when the Washington Post told us that we might just be making things worse, it really made us stop and think. A Sept. 4... [Read more]

(This article was originally posted June 3, 2004. We are reissuing it now, updated only to fix bad links and such. Politicians still can lie legally, and the high volume of ads expected in 2008 campaigns makes it likely that voters will be exposed to more deception than ever. —B.J.) Here’s a fact that may surprise you: Candidates have a legal right to lie to voters just about as much as they want. That comes as a shock to many. After all, consumers have been protected for decades from false ads for commercial products. Shouldn’t there be "truth-in-advertising"... [Read more]

John Kerry has promised that, if elected, his economic policies will produce 10 million new jobs. Some FactCheck.org subscribers have asked us why we haven’t de-bunked that claim, given that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) counted only 8.4 million who were unemployed as of March. Most recently, "Rich" wrote us saying Kerry’s promise appears to be "irresponsible": Rich: Not only would the creation of 10 million jobs eliminate unemployment in the US, but Kerry would have to import workers from other countries . . . In either case, he... [Read more]

Since my first article on lying e-mails, I’ve gotten dozens of inquiries about a snarky little message blaming Democrats alone for all sorts of bad changes to Social Security. I’m calling it "Lying E-mail #2" because it is so full of laughably inaccurate claims. Who Taxed Benefits? The most glaring falsehood in this one is a claim that it was "the Democratic party" that "put a tax on Social Security." Lying E-mail #2: Social Security ⬐ Click to expand/collapse the full text ⬏ expand(document.getElementById('eet666087222'));expand(document.getElementById('eetlink666087222')) SOCIAL SECURITY Since... [Read more]