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Type of site | fact-checking website |
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Owner | Tampa Bay Times (2007–2018) Poynter Institute (2018–present) |
URL | politifact.com |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | August 2007 |
Current status | Active |
PolitiFact.com is an American nonprofit project operated by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, with offices there and in Washington, D.C. It began in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times), with reporters and editors from the newspaper and its affiliated news media partners reporting on the accuracy of statements made by elected officials, candidates, their staffs, lobbyists, interest groups and others involved in U.S. politics.[1] Its journalists select original statements to evaluate and then publish their findings on the PolitiFact.com website, where each statement receives a "Truth-O-Meter" rating. The ratings range from "True" for statements the journalists deem as accurate to "Pants on Fire" (from the taunt "Liar, liar, pants on fire") for claims the journalists deem as "not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim".
PunditFact, a related site that was also created by the Times' editors, is devoted to fact-checking claims made by political pundits.[2] Both PolitiFact and PunditFact were funded primarily by the Tampa Bay Times and ad revenues generated on the website until 2018, and the Times continues to sell ads for the site now that it is part of Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a non-profit organization that also owns the newspaper. PolitiFact increasingly relies on grants from several nonpartisan organizations, and in 2017 launched a membership campaign and began accepting donations from readers.[3]
In addition to political claims, the site monitors the progress elected officials make on their campaign promises, including a "Trump-O-Meter" for President Donald Trump, an "Obameter" for President Barack Obama, and a Biden Promise Tracker for President Joe Biden. PolitiFact.com's local affiliates review promises by elected officials of regional relevance, as evidenced by PolitiFact Tennessee's "Haslam-O-Meter" which tracked former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam's rhetoric[4] and Wisconsin's "Walk-O-Meter" which tracked former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's efforts.[5]
PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its reporting during the 2008 United States presidential election,[6] and has been praised and criticized by independent observers, conservatives and liberals alike. Both liberal and conservative bias have been alleged at different points, and criticisms have been made that PolitiFact attempts to fact-check statements that cannot be truly "fact-checked".[7][8] A survey of 511 stories from 2010 to 2011 found that statements made by Republicans were almost three times as likely to be labeled as false as those of Democrats.[9] A larger 2016 analysis by the American Press Institute found that PolitiFact was statistically more likely to be critical of Republicans,[10] while a text analysis by the University of Washington in 2018 was "not able to detect any systematic differences in the treatment of Democrats and Republicans in articles by PolitiFact", but noted that the analysis "cannot determine whether there are partisan biases in Politifact's judgments about truthfulness nor selection of which statements to examine."[11][12]
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