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Viral Spiral
FactCheck Mailbag
FactCheck Mailbag, Week of March 19-25.
See letters from previous weeks“ Criticizing the Democrats for citing the only available study on gun purchases for its age seems wide of the target. ” -
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2012 Players Guide
Truth Invaders
If you’re like us, you just can’t live without 1) fact-checking and 2) ’80s arcade games. So you can imagine how psyched we were to find Truth Invaders, which lets us use our mad Space Invaders skills to shoot down some of our favorite false claims. And there’s a special …
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Obama’s Citizenship and the Survival of the Fittest
Yesterday we posted something about the evolution of rumors. Here’s a postscript: Sometimes in addition to developing new eyespots or camouflage, they actually engage in a little adaptive development — rumors that aren’t working mutate into slightly altered versions that haven’t been debunked yet. A case in point: First there …
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More Health Care Exaggerations
Planned Parenthood is distributing a mailer in Ohio that criticizes Sen. John McCain’s health care plan. But it uses a bogus figure on what McCain’s plan would do to Ohioans’ taxes. The mailer says, “I see struggling patients every day. That’s why I was so horrified when I read about …
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Posted in The FactCheck Wire
Tagged direct mail, health care, John McCain, Planned Parenthood, TV ad, UAW
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Life Cycle of a Rumor
One thing we’ve noticed at FactCheck is that e-mail rumors tend to circulate, get debunked (ideally), go dormant for a while, and then flare up again. Think of it as a horde of zombies — they come at you, you kill them, you breathe a sigh of relief, and then …
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More Robo-Calls
Yesterday we wrote about a robo-call attack from the McCain campaign making much of Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers. Today, we’ll look at another robo-call (posted by Talking Points Memo late last week) that’s covering well-trodden ground. The subject is Obama’s record on born-alive legislation, which we’ve written about twice …
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Posted in The FactCheck Wire
Tagged abortion, Bill Ayers, John McCain, robo-calls, robocalls
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We Rebut American Progress Action Fund’s Rebuttal
We posted the following update to our Oct. 20 article, “Obama’s False Medicare Claim” Update, Oct. 21: The Center for American Progress Action Fund issued a rebuttal to this article, claiming our analysis is “flawed,” that this article “relies solely on the denials of McCain senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin” …
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FactCheck’s Most Wanted
Enthusiastic truth-seekers (and angry partisans) have been inundating us with questions this election cycle. We’re thrilled to be your go-to guys, but sometimes the rumors take a long time to untangle — the truth is rarely straightforward enough to fit neatly into an ad, a sound bite or a chain e-mail. …
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