The Week in Fact-Checking: 5 tips for reporting on health

The latest news in fact-checking and accountability journalism.

Health News Review publishes (sometimes scathing) reviews on press releases and news stories about developments in the health sector. While their work goes beyond fact-checking, it has lots of lessons for fact-checkers. Check whether the study was conducted on humans or mice and ignore the press release are two of the five tips founder Gary Schwitzer shares. Read the full list on Poynter.org.

Here’s more from the world of fact-checking this week:

Fact-checking in the U.S.

Quote of the week
“The purpose of journalism used to be to question facts, determine truths and debunk false claims. In the new world, a postmodern mistrust of central authority means we’re more interested in hosting perspectives.” Comedian Alice Rebekah Fraser, not being funny in an article for SBS.com

Misquote of the week
It seems Gandhi, Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin get credit for all the pithy things said by anyone ever in the history of the world. These days, politicians have been among the worst misquotation offenders. Read more on Gizmodo’s “Factually’ blog.

Tips for better fact-checking
Who’s responsible for the most negative — and typically not-so-true — political advertisements so far in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign?  Downloadable data from the TV Political Ad Archive makes it easy to assess. Read it.

Fact-checking fun
Only “Funny or Die” could make us laugh at the embarrassing middle-school-cafeteria behavior of some U.S. presidential candidates.  See their truth-rating scale of insults.

Fact-checking around the world

Fact-checker of the week: Hoaxmap
No, a group of refugees didn’t fill up their shopping cart and tell a shocked cashier that Angela Merkel was paying. This is one of almost 300 fake stories collected byHoaxmap, a crowdsourced effort led as a side project by two young professionals in Leipzig.

Fact-checking infographic of the week
From Full Fact on how much the UK contributes to the EU and why different numbers are bandied about.

Quick fact-checking news
(1) El Confidencial in Spain launches a weekly fact-checking column called “La Chistera” — with a unicorn in its ratings (2) Africa Check founder Peter Cunliffe-Jones is named a Shuttleworth Fellow (3) Automated fact-checking through APIs? Possible albeit not imminent, say two experts (4) PolitiFact is raising funds for a fact-checker to cover immigration (5) Also crowdfunding: Vérité Politique in France, a new fact-checking aggregator.

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