PolitiFact.com has made a name for itself by fact-checking politicians’ statements and promises, an extremely valuable service that earned the site a 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Now, the St. Petersburg Times reports, the site is taking on the truth-distorting pundits of TV and talk radio—and not just the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys of the world; the site has also fact-checked statements made by lefty pundits Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow.

PolitiFact.com, which is a project of the St. Petersburg Times, rates the veracity of claims on its Truth-O-Meter—for example, Joe Scarborough’s recent statement that “President Obama has never received a paycheck from a profitmaking business in his entire life” landed firmly on the “false” end of the spectrum—and lists the arguments and sources involved in the researchers’ conclusions. 

The best part? Editors and reporters at the St. Petersburg Times do all this work so that you don’t have to. Just suggest a statement to check, and they’ll consider putting it to the Truth-O-Meter’s test.

(Thanks, Romenesko.)

Sources: PolitiFact.com, St. Petersburg Times

Image by futureatlas.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

The new Star Trek has unleashed a slew of inaccuracies about the franchise in newspapers across the country, and detail-oriented devotees aren’t letting them get away with it. Craig Silverman, editor of the fantastic newspaper-correction-spotter RegretTheError.com, tracks a series of Star Trek–related flubs—and subsequent corrections issued by editors bombarded with letters from Trekkies—in his most recent column for the Columbia Journalism Review:

The superfans deserve credit for being so diligent and outspoken. They seek out mistakes contained in the far reaches of every newspaper and set their emails to stun. And they’re on the hunt at all times…

Source: Columbia Journalism Review

Image by alfredituzz :B, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Democracy relies on the media to make its citizens well-informed and meaningful participants in civic life. This, of course, doesn’t always happen, especially when you're relying on TV news.

That’s when the fact-checkers come in. In the November/December issue of Utne Reader, Eric Kelsey and I wrote an article on the "fifth estate": journalists who devote themselves to checking other journalists’ facts.

The Columbia Journalism Review, a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award nominee, jumped into this fray once again with two new offerings. The publication first relaunched the Campaign Desk, which looks at the presidential race. Here’s CJR on the mission of the Campaign Desk:

We’ll look at who's doing interesting, original reporting and who's being taken in by spin; we’ll focus on how and why the narratives that come to define a candidate get started and relentlessly repeated, and if they are off base, we’ll try to set them straight. We’re on the lookout for misleading statistics, partial truths and oversimplifications, glittering generalities, and other language crimes that can infect the coverage.

Campaign Desk writers have covered topics as diverse as journalists demanding coffee from John Edwards at an all-night campaign stop during the Iowa caucus to giving the full story behind a scuffle between an AP reporter and Mitt Romney.

The second offering by CJR is The Observatory, which of rakes through the not-always-peer-reviewed muck of science journalism. The Observatory opened with an article about how new, collaborative web-technology is affecting science writing. With all the spin, inaccuracies, and half-truths bandied about in the media, these CJR projects will have their work cut out for them.

—Brendan Mackie

Image by Justin Henry licensed under Creative Commons.

The newspaper corrections page serves as a pointed reminder that those tree-killing bastions of traditional media do occasionally get things wrong. Regret the Error, a website dedicated to following the media’s mistakes, has cobbled together an amusing roundup of some of the best—or worst—errors of the year. Here’s what the site deemed Correction of the Year, from the UK’s Independent Saturday magazine:

Following the portrait of Tony and Cherie Blair published on 21 April in the Independent Saturday magazine, Ms Blair’s representatives have told us that she was friendly with but never had a relationship with Carole Caplin of the type suggested in the article. They want to make it clear, which we are happy to do, that Ms Blair “has never shared a shower with Ms Caplin, was not introduced to spirit guides or primal wrestling by Ms Caplin (or anyone else), and did not have her diary masterminded by Ms Caplin.”

Yowza! More of the gems include typos (the New York Times referred to Pakistan’s capital as Islambad rather than Islamabad), photos with dodgy captions (the Miami Herald identified the president of the Dominican Republic as a drug smuggler), and a clarification from Slate regarding how many lines of cocaine make up an eight ball.

—Brendan Mackie