The week in fact-checking: When candidates are high, and also low

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
The challenge in this election is “going beyond the fact-checks to understand how a candidate can rank so low on accuracy and so high in the polls. In this apparent paradox is a teachable moment.” Read former reporter Larry Margasak’s take on news illiteracy.

Fact check of the week
Sure, fact-checking the internet may be like raking water uphill into a bucket, but someone’s got to tackle the memes spawned from the 2016 elections. This week it’s a viral chart — likely appearing on a Facebook page near you — that “compares” Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Read PolitiFact’s investigation.

Fact-checking event of the week
The American Press Institute is in Los Angeles this week for the 2015 Online News Association conference. We’ll be presenting a Friday session on fact-checking for the 2016 elections, featuring an all-star panel: Linda Qiu of PolitiFact; D’Angelo Gore of FactCheck.org, and Lisa Halverstadt of Voice of San Diego. Hope to see you there.Here’s a little incentive.

Fact-checking tips
If you only see Twitter as a source of fantastical statements and outright lies, try to remember that it can sometimes be a source of truth. Hard truths like: Chick-fil-a is not going to open on Sundays no matter how much you want it to.  A Texas A&M professor shares her fact-checking tips for using Twitter as an original source. Read it. 

Tips for fact-checking
The logo for HealthNewsReview.org is a bulldog clutching a newspaper in its substantial jaws — a not-very-subtle way of pointing out that journalists + science occasionally = danger. So before you type a sentence saying that some new drug reduces deaths by 30 percent, check out the site’s explanation about what that really means. Read it.

Fact-checking: Not just for politics
“One thing I find whenever some wrong science factoid goes viral is that it’s usually exactly wrong; it states the opposite of what’s actually going on,” writes Phil Plait in Slate’s “Bad Astronomy” blog. Here’s what he had to say about a viral photo that allegedly showed what Earth would look like without water. Read it.

Fact-checking Hollywood
If you’re a fan of the new Netflix series “Narcos,” there’s some good news — if you consider it good news that plane crashes, car bombings and assassinations are real. Writing for Bustle, Caroline Gerdes fact-checks the popular show and finds that it sticks to the real life of cocaine king Pablo Escobar. Read it.

Fact-checking around the world 
The Poynter Institute has named Alexios Mantzarlis director of the new IFCN — the International Fact-Checking Network, a group of 64 fact-checking associations located on six continents. Mantzarlis is stepping down as managing editor of Pagella Politica, an Italian fact-checking project. Co-founder of  FactCheckEU.org, Mantzarlis also oversaw the creation of a new animated fact-checking project.  IFCN is based at Poynter in St. Petersburg, Fla. Read it.

Some fact-checking fun
The New Yorker satire writer Andy Borowitz fact-checks the recent GOP presidential debate and finds that only 4 percent of the three-hour show was factual. (It would have been higher if he had counted the candidates’ factual recitation of their names.) Read it. 

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