Facebook Twitter Tumblr Close Skip to main content
A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Ethics Attack Misses Mark

Ethics increasingly has become an issue in the final weeks of the hotly contested special election in the 12th congressional district in Pennsylvania. Republican candidate Tim Burns has been running a television ad saying Democrat Mark Critz “was investigated …

Mis-Tweets on Twitter

Mis-tweet
v. To use Twitter to mislead your followers.
For providing false and misleading information, a 30-second TV spot crafted by a seasoned media consultant is still king. But there’s another medium this campaign year that makes …

More Malarkey About Health Care

We’ve seldom seen a piece of legislation so widely misrepresented, and misunderstood, as the new health care law. We stopped counting the number of articles and items we turned out on the subject after the total reached 100. Some of that is understandable. The debate went on for more than …

California Dreaming

Steve Poizner, who’s running in California’s GOP gubernatorial primary, has launched an attack on front-runner Meg Whitman, accusing her of not being sufficiently Republican. But several of his claims are off the mark. Whitman has never voiced support for “amnesty” for illegal aliens, however the term is defined …

A False Tax Attack

A new Democratic attack ad accuses a Republican House candidate in Hawaii of signing a pledge protecting tax breaks for sending jobs overseas. It could be a prototype of future attack ads against any number of other Republican House members and candidates, most of whom have signed …

A Final Weekend of Whoppers?

With the House preparing for a final vote on the Senate health care legislation, with revisions, Sunday afternoon, we thought we’d give our readers a wrap-up of the top falsehoods of late. The debate over this bill has stretched on about as long as a presidential campaign, and we suspect this weekend will be filled …

Health Care Summit Squabbles

We tuned in to watch the president’s health care summit at Blair House today — all six-plus hours of it. And we weren’t surprised to hear some factual missteps in the discussion: Sen. Lamar Alexander said premiums will go up for “millions” under the Senate bill and president’s plan, while President Barack Obama said families …

Still on the Table?

So, what about those Republican health care plans? Contrary to claims made by some Democratic detractors, detailed GOP proposals, and a bipartisan bill with several GOP cosponsors, do exist. And they’re scheduled to get attention at a half-day, televised “summit” meeting at Blair House on Feb. 25, with …

Dick Cheney vs. Joe Biden

Vice President Biden and former V.P. Cheney have been slugging it out publicly over the proper way to prosecute suspected terrorists. Biden went so far as to accuse Cheney of being “factually, substantively wrong.” So we took a look, and found both men have been straining the facts …

Tea Party Fact-Checking

Sarah Palin made a splash over the weekend as the keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party convention, and she followed up with an interview on Fox News Sunday. But she didn’t always stick to the facts. Palin implied that the Nigerian would-be Christmas Day bomber stopped talking after he was read his Miranda rights. He did, but …