The week in fact-checking: Don’t mess with Abe, fracking facts, job posting in Nepal

The American Press Institute presents a roundup from the world of fact checking, debunking and truth telling — just in case you haven’t been paying as much attention as we do.

Quote of the week

“This is going to be a long and bitter campaign to determine who will become our next president. To remain informed and astute, voters will need to regularly check out the candidates’ assertions. After all, just because politicians move their lips doesn’t mean we have to believe them.” — George E .Curry,  editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association and BlackPressUSA.com.

Fact-checking Election 2016
What happens when Hillary Clinton finally talks to the news media? Fact- checking.When Clinton finally spoke to reporters this week after a spell of radio silence, she had a fuzzy fact or two. Read it.

Behind the fact check

Staffers for PolitiFact and PunditFact at the Tampa Bay Times are winners in the nation’s oldest journalism contest, the Green Eyeshade Awards. They were honored for their fact-checking reporting on Ebola and for online public service. Read it. 

Beware the faux check 
Oh, those fracking fact checks. Writing a headline that says “fact check” doesn’t make it a fact check. It’s still just marketing, Marcellus Shale Coalition.  Read it.

Extreme fact-checking
The fatal Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia resulted in many statements and much speculation about train speed, mechanical issues and other possible causes. PolitiFact and PunditFact tackled some of those statements and not surprisingly, they weren’t entirely true. Read it.

Fact check of the week
Presidential candidates, when speaking to audiences in the heart of America, do NOT mess up your Abraham Lincoln history. Ben Carson, running for the Republican nomination for president and speaking in Iowa, made a misstatement about Lincoln’s career. This resulted in a fast fact-check by The Des Moines Register. Read it.

Fact-checking under fire
The famed New Yorker reporter and writer Joseph Mitchell sometimes wrote three stories a day, admitted to taking quite a bit of Valium, and shifted between authoring factual articles and fictional stories. It would not be surprising, then, if things got a little mixed up. “By current standards, which favor fact-checkability over storytelling…Joseph Mitchell would likely be denounced as a fabricator,” says Ruth Franklin, writing for the Atlantic. But is that a bad thing for literature? Read it.

Fact-checking around the world 
A new fact-checking organization promises to “strengthen accountability in politics and journalism in Nepal and across South Asia as an effective way to consolidate democracy” — and they’re hiring. So what does it take to be a fact-checker in a country with press freedom that scores only 58 on a 100-point scale? See Panos South Asia’s job posting here.

Fact-checking for good 
A mom in Pennsylvania shares the five tips she gave her children when they became avid users of the internet. Among them: The difference between an anecdote and actual data; and why sharks do not swim in city streets. Read it. 

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